Steyaert, C. (2007). 'entrepreneuring' as a conceptual attractor? A review of process theories in 20 years of entrepreneurship studies. Entrepreneurship and Regional Development, 19(6), 453-477. https://doi.org/10.1080/08985620701671759

• Steyaert, C. (2007). 'entrepreneuring' as a conceptual attractor? A review of process theories in 20 years of entrepreneurship studies. Entrepreneurship and Regional Development, 19(6), 453-477. https://doi.org/10.1080/08985620701671759

Theory paper. Review of literature in entrepreneurship studies? I assume that's a thing. But this review has an argument, which is that the concept of entrepreneuring can unify all of these disparate approaches--that is, the understanding of entrepreneur as a verb rather than a noun. 

The paper is broken up into six major sections, each of which represents a different kind of process theory. The author, Steyaert, who looks like has been theorizing entrepreneurship for some time now, advocates for the "creative process view," which is far as I can tell is every view except for the equilibrium based (or, in my view, Piagetian). Steyaert understandings this theory/review paper as a kind of toolbox that people studying entrepreneurship can turn to in order to turn away from entrepreneurship as understood through the lens of methodological individualism--a reified, linear-causal understanding of how entrepreneurs effect change. 

The primary value of the paper is not in its reading of theory but rather in its assembling a lot of entrepreneurship literature in one place. But even then, I don't like how he reads it, so the most valuable piece might just be the work cited instead. 

I started to try and pull out all of the examples from the sections but I ran out of time, and I'm not super concerned about their worth, so I might just drop it. You can see what I started though.

"equilibrium-based understandings of the entrepreneurial process"

• developmental, linear

"complexity and chaos theory"

• 
  

"interpretive and phenomenological attempts"

• 
  

"social constructionist approaches"

• Fletcher (2006) also turns to relational constructionism, which looks at the relatedness between the objects, ideas, images, discourses and practices that constitute social reality. The focus on relatedness makes it possible to illustrate how the emergence of a business idea can be construed as a relational activity where multiple actions are continuously supplemented in a dialogical wave that forms from pieces of previous conversations, experiences and events. 

• those studying female entrepreneurship have pointed out that rendering the entrepreneur as a male sets up the norm for the way that female entrepreneurs are constructed (Ahl 2004, Bruni et al. 2004, Petterson 2004). This latter view invites us not to see entrepreneurs as the masters of their own creation, but rather to emphasize that entrepreneurial identities are formed in the web of actualized discourses and their inherent power struggles that prioritize certain realities above others.

• Bruni et al. (2004) set out to apply this Foucauldian theory of governmentality, undertaking a discursive analysis of entrepreneurship research on women entrepreneurs. They speak of an ‘entrepreneur mentality’ to capture the way that entrepreneurial discourse forms a system of acting and thinking that normalizes certain forms of being an entrepreneur and excludes other forms. They conclude that even studies of female entrepreneurship tend to implicitly reproduce the male experience as a preferred norm. 

"the pragmatist and practice-based perspectives"

• Sarasvathy's theory of effectuation           
• de la Ville (2003) and Hjorth and Steyaert (2003), who draw upon de Certeau’s understanding of practices and tactics to point at practices of resistance and poaching that are elements of the entrepreneurial process (de Certeau 1984).  

"Relational materialist conceptualizations"

• An example of an ANT study in the field of entrepreneurship studies is that of Gherardi and Nicolini (2005) who distinguish between a focused and a dispersive form of actor-networking. While the former rests on the role of powerful actors and their capacity to mobilize relevant resources and to engender focus by prioritizing the protagonists, the latter pays greater attention to those who dispute or disregard the propositions of enrolling actants and form dissidents within the emerging actor-network. Gherardi and Nicolini consider the focused version as featuring the typical characteristics of an entrepreneurial undertaking as it is based on a restricted number of actants and a conception of action as direct doing.  

• This idea of representation, which anticipates Cooper’s (2005) later logic of relationality, is described by Orge (2007), who studied an e-commerce start-up company. He describes entrepreneurship as a relational process that involves bringing together various, not yet connected, elements into a network of relations through material transformation. Thus he conceives of entrepreneurship as a representational process that consists of an active intervention into the flow of events, and that forms an attempt at creative world-making. Orge also theorizes about the dimensions of time and space as an unfolding complex and points at the self-referential dimension of entrepreneuring as it acts on the very centre that undertakes it. 

• Weiskopf (2007) reiterates the richness of Foucault’s work to envision the concept of entrepreneurial becoming as an ethico-aesthetic practice; meanwhile Steyaert and Dey (2006) have explored Derrida’s (1989) concept of invention to reconstruct entrepreneurship as a form of deconstructive creativity. 

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