In this special issue, we focus on entrepreneurship as collective action undergone by entrepreneurial groups, which can be broadly defined as a small number of people investing time, resources and effort to pursue an entrepreneurial project. With positioning entrepreneurial groups as distinct social entities that collectively function as entrepreneurial actors, we respond to recent trends in the field. Lately, entrepreneurship research is rethinking its unit of analysis – a debate so fundamental in its impact that it may ring in a paradigm shift. The realization is growing that entrepreneurship is most often undertaken collectively no matter how entrepreneurship is defined: by some researchers as the continuous process that revolves around identifying, evaluating and exploiting business opportunities (Ács and Audretsch, 2010; Gartner, 2004; Shane, 2008) and by others as a process in which opportunities are created and worked upon (Alvarez and Barney, 2010). With the focus on the activity vs on the actor, however, such a process approach has not been able to grasp the interactions of a collective approach in entrepreneurship (Gartner, 2010; Davidsson, 2016). Focusing on the collective calls to revisit the one key question that Gartner (1988), at the inception of the field, famously had discredited as the wrong question: Who were and are the entrepreneurs?
Submission Deadline is November 15, 2017.
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