S P E C I A L I S S U E A R T I C L E

Context, time, and change: Historical approachesto entrepreneurship research

R. Daniel Wadhwani1,2 | David Kirsch3 | Friederike Welter4,5 |

William B. Gartner6,7 | Geoffrey G. Jones8

1Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies,

Marshall School of Business,University of

Southern California, Los Angeles, California

2Center for Business History, Department of

Management, Politics, and Philosophy,

Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen,

Denmark

3Department of Management and

Organization, Robert H. Smith School of

Business, University of Maryland, College

Park, Maryland

4School of Economic Disciplines, University of

Siegen, Siegen, Germany

5Institut für Mittelstandsforschung Bonn,

Bonn, Germany

6Division of Entrepreneurship, Babson

College, Babson Park, Massachusetts

7Department of Organisation and

Entrepreneurship, Linnaeus University, Vaxjo,

Sweden

8Business History Initiative, Harvard Business

School, Boston, Massachusetts

Correspondence

R. Daniel Wadhwani, University of Southern

California and Copenhagen Business School,

Stockton, CA.

Email: dwadhwani@marshall.usc.edu

Abstract

Research Summary: We articulate the value of historical

methods and reasoning in strategic entrepreneurship research

and theory. We begin by introducing the papers in the special

issue, contextualizing each within one of five broader methodo-

logical approaches, and elaborating on the applicability of each

to other topics in entrepreneurship research. Next, we use the

papers to induce a framework for integrating history into entre-

preneurship theory. The framework demonstrates how histori-

cal assumptions play a formative role in operationalizing time

and context in entrepreneurship research. We then show how

variations in these treatments of time and context shape theo-

retical claims about entrepreneurial opportunities, actions, and

processes of change. We conclude by discussing why this may

be a particularly opportune time for strategic entrepreneurship

research to develop a deeper historical sensibility.

Managerial Summary: History can serve as an especially

important guide to understanding entrepreneurship during

moments of change. We draw on articles from the special

issue on “Historical Approaches to Entrepreneurship

Research” to illustrate different forms of historical reason-

ing and research about entrepreneurship. Moreover, we use

the articles to develop a framework for understanding how

historical context and time shape entrepreneurial opportu-

nities, actions, and processes of change. We emphasize, in

particular, the value of history in understanding variations in

entrepreneurial practices.

Received: 22 January 2020 Accepted: 22 January 2020

DOI: 10.1002/sej.1346

© 2020 Strategic Management Society

Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal. 2020;14:3–19. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/sej 3

K E YWORD S

change, context, historical methods, opportunity, time

Personally, I believe that there is an incessant give and take between historical and theoretical analysis

and that, though for the investigation of individual questions it may be necessary to sail for a time on one

tack only, yet on principle the two should never lose sight of each other.

—Schumpeter (1949), p. 75, “Economic Theory and Economic History”

1 | INTRODUCTION

This article—and the special issue on “Historical Approaches to Entrepreneurship Research” that it introduces—is

about the past. But it is also about the present and the future.

Today, scholars are embracing a broader and more contextualized understanding of strategic entrepreneur-

ship (Autio, Kenney, Mustar, Siegel, & Wright, 2014; Baker & Welter, 2018). This work situates the pursuit of

entrepreneurial opportunities not only within its institutional, spatial, social, and cultural contexts (Lounsbury &

Glynn, 2019; Zahra, Wright, & Abdelgawad, 2014) but also considers the relationship of entrepreneurship to

time (Dimov, 2011; Lippmann & Aldrich, 2016b; McMullen & Dimov, 2013; Wood, Bakker, & Fisher, 2020) and

change (Aldrich & Ruef, 2006; Alvarez, Barney, & Anderson, 2013; Bodroži�c & Adler, 2018) in markets and

societies.

The articles in this special issue demonstrate that historical reasoning, data sources, and methods of interpreta-

tion represent a significant opportunity to advance this research agenda. History offers entrepreneurship scholars

access to unique forms of theorizing (Maclean, Harvey, & Clegg, 2016; Suddaby & Foster, 2017; Wadhwani & Jones,

2014); to valuable and underused data sources (Forbes & Kirsch, 2011); and to a variety of methods (Rowlinson,

Hassard, & Decker, 2014) for incorporating context, time, and change more explicitly into entrepreneurship research

and theory. Historical approaches have gained considerable attention across the “human sciences” (McDonald, 1996)

and more recently in management and organizational research in particular (Argyres et al., 2020; Godfrey, Hassard,

O'Connor, Rowlinson, & Ruef, 2016; Ingram, Rao, & Silverman, 2012). This special issue seeks to cultivate a deeper

“historical consciousness” (Suddaby, 2016) about strategic entrepreneurship by explicating the range of historical

methods that are useful for research on the topic and synthesizing these approaches to demonstrate how historical

reasoning can be incorporated into entrepreneurship theory.

Our discussion takes its departure from Schumpeter's (1947, 1949) claim that historical research is essential

to both the empirical study of entrepreneurship and to the advancement of entrepreneurship theory. We begin by

introducing the articles in the special issue and discussing the variety of approaches to historical research they rep-

resent. We highlight the intellectual contribution of each article and demonstrate how each article provides an

exemplar for a particular method for studying entrepreneurship historically. Next, we synthesize these contribu-

tions into a broader framework for integrating history in entrepreneurship theory. We define history as the inter-

pretation of the past in the present. The framework demonstrates how assumptions about the relationship

between the past and present shape our understandings of context and time in entrepreneurship theory, and how

these, in turn, shape theoretical claims about the nature of opportunities and the extent of entrepreneurial agency.

We also show how varying combinations of the conceptualization of historical context and historical time shape

theoretical claims about entrepreneurial action and mechanisms change. We conclude by discussing the broader

implications of this historical framework for the study of strategic entrepreneurship as an essential driver of the

dynamics of capitalism.

4 WADHWANI ET AL.

2 | HISTORICAL APPROACHES TO ENTREPRENEURSHIP RESEARCH

In “The Creative Response in Economic History” (1947) and in other works published near the end of his life,

Schumpeter (1947) made his case for studying entrepreneurship historically. Because entrepreneurship involved

uncertainty, he explained, “it cannot be predicted by applying the ordinary rules of inference from the pre-existing

facts” (p. 150). This posed a methodological challenge for social scientists because it made creative response difficult

to observe contemporaneously as “it can practically never be understood ex ante.” In contrast, historical research

was useful because “from the standpoint of the observer who is in full possession of all the facts, it can always be

understood ex post.” Historical approaches were essential, Schumpeter (1949) concluded, in conducting research on

“the details of [entrepreneurship's] modus operandi, into the mechanisms through which it acts” (p. 147).

Schumpeter's plea for historical research on entrepreneurship played an important role in the establishment of the

first journal devoted to entrepreneurship—Explorations in Entrepreneurial History—and in the subsequent wave of

multidisciplinary scholarship that it generated in the 1950s and 1960s. Scholars who explicitly affiliated themselves

with this work on entrepreneurial history, like Alfred Chandler and Douglass North, used it to develop lines of

research that would fundamentally shape the fields of strategy and institutional theory (Wadhwani &

Lubinski, 2017).

Although history played a marginal role, at best, in shaping the current wave of entrepreneurship scholarship

that began in the 1980s and 1990s, the development of a “historic turn” in management and organizational research

over the last decade provides an opportunity to once again consider its role in entrepreneurship (Landström &

Lohrke, 2012). Scholars across a range of management disciplines—including organization theory (Godfrey et al.,

2016); strategy, (Argyres et al., 2020; Ingram et al., 2012), and international business (Jones & Khanna, 2006)—have

recently turned their attention to historical reasoning and research, and special issues devoted to the subject have

appeared in Academy of Management Review (2016), Organization Studies (2018), and Strategic Management Journal

(2020), and a number of other journals.

A central theme of this growing wave of historical work in management is the distinction between “the past,” as

the raw chronology or timeline of events that occurred before the present, and “history,” as the interpretation of the

past in the present. When defined in this way, history can be better understood as encompassing a variety of differ-

ent forms of knowledge, each produced by varying sets of assumptions, types of evidence, and interpretive tech-

niques. The papers in this special issue provide a sense of the range of methodologies available in studying

entrepreneurship historically. Whereas other scholars have categorized historical approaches based on theoretical or

epistemological criteria (Maclean et al., 2016; Rowlinson et al., 2014; Vaara & Lamberg, 2016), we take a practice-

based perspective in introducing the papers and highlighting their contributions. We do so to explain how historical

methods evolved in response to particular debates and research goals, and we explain how each method can be used

in entrepreneurship research. Table 1 provides a summary.

2.1 | Socio-economic history

Martin Ruef's “The Household as a Source of Labor for Entrepreneurs: Evidence from New York City during Industri-

alization” is an example of the use of socio-economic historical methods. Social and economic history developed over

the 20th century as a critique of traditional political histories focused on “great men and events” (Iggers, 2005). In

contrast, social and economic historians sought to identify deeper structural reasons for the patterns that governed

the behavior of individuals, both ordinary and elite. Social historians pioneered research that spanned long periods of

time and revealed social relationships and geographical patterns that were unobservable when focusing on events

and short durations of study. New economic historians integrated economic theory into this sensibility. Because

structural patterns were not revealed by traditional textual sources, social and economic history developed creative

ways to use quantitative sources and analysis to reconstruct behavior and test assertions (Iggers, 2005). In doing so,

WADHWANI ET AL. 5

TABLE1

Historicalapp

roache

sto

entrep

rene

urship

research

App

roach

Socio-eco

nomic

history

Cultural

history

Microhistory

Compa

rative

history

Historicalcasestudies

Exe

mplar

Rue

fDem

ilHollo

wGodleyan

dHam

ilton

Toms,W

ilson,andW

righ

t

Sources

Cen

susda

taIndu

stry/firm

reco

rds

Persona

lletters

Data;

Oralh

istories

Published

sources

Interpretation

Variable-ba

sed

Processua

lEmerge

ntProcessual

Variable-based

Assum

ption@

Sensem

aking

Unive

rsal

Situated

Situated

Situated

,universal

Universal

Cau

sation

Test

Narrative

Narrative

Comparison

Comparison

Mainco

ntribu

tion

Househ

old

andlabo

rmarke

tinstitutions

determ

inethe

prope

nsityto

ownfirm

sbe

causethey

shap

een

trep

rene

urs'ab

ility

toco

ntrolthe

work

ofothers.

Adm

inistrativecatego

ries

demonstratetherole

ofthe

statein

shap

ing

entrep

rene

urial

opp

ortun

ities,in

particular

bymakingco

unting

possible.

Evo

lvingsocio-m

ateriality

ofen

trep

rene

urial

netw

orks;co

-evo

lution

ofsocialmove

men

tsan

den

trep

rene

urial

netw

orks;dialogical

construc

tionofco

ntex

tswithinne

tworks.

Collectivemem

ories

shap

een

trep

reneu

rial

perceptionsof

uncertainty

andplaya

role

intheirpropen

sity

toen

gage

instrategic

alliance

form

ation.

Product

marke

tinnovation

interactswiththequality

offinan

cialinterm

ediation

todeterminethescopeof

entrep

reneu

rial

opportunitiesin

ahistoricalsetting.

Other

research

applications

Variations

ove

rtimein

the

relationshipbe

twee

nen

trep

rene

urialactivityan

d(1)socialstructures

and

affiliations.(2)T

heresource

environm

ent.(3)L

egalform

soforgan

ization.

(4)P

atterns

ofagglomeration.

(1)S

tudies

ofco

mplex

multileve

lsocialprocesses.

(2)A

nteced

ents,contex

ts,

andco

nseq

uenc

esof

culturalen

trep

rene

urship.

(3)C

onc

eptualan

dcritical

histories

ofen

trep

rene

urial

construc

ts.

(1)S

tudies

ofsensem

aking

andeffectua

tion.

(2)R

esea

rchonthe

emerge

nceofroutines.

(3)Studies

of

entrep

rene

urialp

ractices

andartifacts.

entrep

rene

urialu

sesof

history.

(1)S

tudiesofco

mplex

multileve

lsocial

processes,(2)S

tudiesof

how

entrep

reneu

rsperceivean

dgrap

ple

withuncertainty.

(1)S

tudiesofthecausesof

opportunities.(2)Theo

rydev

elopmen

tofnew

or

emergingphen

omen

on.

6 WADHWANI ET AL.

they relied on universal rather than situated assumptions about the motivations and sensemaking of the actors they

studied.

Ruef's study of the decline of bonded labor (i.e., slavery, indenture, long apprenticeships) and its effects on busi-

ness proprietorship in New York City between 1790 and 1850 provides an excellent example of the value of socio-

economic history in entrepreneurship research. Whereas other scholars have emphasized the role of technology,

finance, culture, and intellectual property rights as drivers of industrialization, Ruef is focused on the historical trans-

formation of the household and its implications for small entrepreneurs' access to labor. Surveying the secondary lit-

erature, he points out the importance of the household as an entrepreneurial unit during the earliest phases of

industrialization. Households relied on labor not only from kin, but also from slaves, indentured servants, and appren-

tices who were considered part of the unit by custom and under law of master and servant. Drawing on datasets

from matched samples of New York City households in three cross-sections (1790, 1810, and 1850), Ruef shows

that “slave ownership was a potent predictor of business proprietorship and the pursuit of entrepreneurial occupa-

tions before 1820, when the emancipation of bondsmen and women in the city was completed.” Moreover, rates of

small proprietorship declined sharply by 1850, during the height of industrialization, as both the scope of households

shrunk due to the exclusion of non-kin and the legal authority of household heads to coerce other members was

tempered. By mid-century, women and girls had replaced slaves, apprentices, and young men as the most important

source of labor for business owners.

Ruef draws out the implications of the finding for contemporary entrepreneurship research by pointing out that

“parallel institutional mechanisms operate in modern economies.” Contemporary “entrepreneurship scholars should

supplement their emphasis on technological and market innovations with an account that considers the evolution of

household labor pools.” Changing labor laws, expectations about paid and unpaid work, and transformations in

employment relationships, he suggests, continue to shape entrepreneurial activity today.

Socio-economic history can be applied to a number of other research topics in strategic entrepreneurship.

Scholars could use historical census and other demographic data to examine the relationship between entrepreneur-

ship and a variety of other kinds of social relationships, including class, ethnicity, religion, inequality, education, occu-

pation, wealth, and social affiliation (Godley, 2001; Welter, Baker, Audretsch, & Gartner, 2016), as well as to explore

the evolution of various “entrepreneurial groups” over time (Ruef, 2010; Stamm, Discua Cruz, & Cailluet, 2019). Such

approaches could be of particular value for examining long-term patterns of strategic entrepreneurship in family

business (Lumpkin, Steier, & Wright, 2011). Second, socio-economic history could be used to examine entrepreneur-

ial activity in relationship to the evolution of resources within an environment (Aldrich & Wiedenmayer, 1993),

including to specialized skilled labor (Haveman, Habinek, & Goodman, 2012), to financing (Lamoreaux, Levenstein, &

Sokoloff, 2006), and to technology (Nicholas, 2010). Third, researchers interested in entrepreneurs' choice of organi-

zational form could use socio-economic history to study changes and national variations in the law of association

and how these have shaped both entrepreneurial activity and risk bearing over time (Lamoreaux, 2004). Finally, stra-

tegic entrepreneurship researchers interested in geographical clustering could capitalize on the availability of consid-

erable historical data on the location of firms over time to consider the long-term causes and consequences of

entrepreneurial agglomeration (Autio, Nambisan, Thomas, & Wright, 2018).

2.2 | Cultural history

Benoît Demil's “Reintroducing Public Actors in Entrepreneurial Dynamics: A Co-Evolutionary Approach to Categori-

zation” provides an example of the use of cultural history. Cultural history is not new, but its use, sophistication, and

variety has grown tremendously over the last 50 years in response to the limits of social and economic history's abil-

ity to analyze the evolution of meanings, language, and actors' sensemaking (Burke, 2008; Hunt, 1989). Cultural his-

tory of various stripes share a focus on how socially constructed meanings and ideas arise and change over time and

their historical role in maintaining continuity or driving change. Whereas socio-economic history typically treats the

WADHWANI ET AL. 7

process of human sensemaking as universal, given, and outside the scope of historical analysis, cultural history treats

meaning, and sensemaking as historically situated and as an essential aspect of historical explanation. Cultural histo-

ries typically use textual sources and often establish causation through the production of historical narratives that

explains the evidence and the outcome of interest more robustly or insightfully than competing narratives.

Demil, for example, examines the process by which “mail order” became a distinct category of firms within

French industrial classification systems, which were first established by the state in the 1960s and 1970s. As he

explains, the scholarship on category emergence is at the “forefront of research on new industries” and part of the

broader entrepreneurship literature on “collective activity as the main driver of industry creation.” Demil contributes

to this research by incorporating the role of public actors. Drawing on company, industry, and regulatory records,

Demil's interpretive method is attentive to when and how mail order attained a distinct categorical meaning in “the

worldview and narratives of actors.” He does this by tracing “the empirical evolution of catalog sales” as a retailing

practice and an organizational form to study when and how the category emerges and then produces a historical narra-

tive that “connects the dots in causal terms.” Mail order, he points out, had been a business practice in France for

decades before the 1960s and 1970s. However, it was only when the post-war French state implemented an industrial

classification system as an administrative technique to modernize and manage the retail sector in the 1960s that cate-

gorization within this system became an issue for mail order companies. The MO companies, which were not treated as

a distinct category within the first iterations of the classification system, successfully mobilized through their association

to work collectively on common concerns and were officially identified as a distinct category by 1973.

The article makes a set of broader contributions to strategic entrepreneurship. Demil draws attention to the pol-

itics of public classification as it “performs reality by providing legality to a new population and by producing endur-

ing social boundaries.” Moreover, while entrepreneurship research on public actors has focused on the

establishment of innovation policies (Woolley & Rottener, 2008) and the funding private innovation, Demil demon-

strates what McGahan, Zelner, and Barney (2013) described as “the complex interplay between private and public

actors” in the strategic entrepreneurship process (Klein, Mahoney, McGahan, & Pitelis, 2013). The state's action in

classifying and quantifying entrepreneurial activity to pursue policy goals sparked collective entrepreneurial

responses in a “co-evolutionary process.” Finally, Demil points out that historical narrative allow researchers to study

dynamic and multilevel processes between entrepreneurs and their contexts in a way that has long been identified

as a need in entrepreneurship research.

Demil's approach could be applied to a variety of other research topics. First, it could be useful by researchers

examining complex multilevel entrepreneurial processes that unfold over longer periods of time, such as processes

related to knowledge spillovers (Agarwal, Audretsch, & Sarkar, 2007, 2010), to incubation and evolution of industries

(Agarwal, Moeen, & Shah, 2017; Moeen & Agarwal, 2017; Tripsas, 1997), to the dynamics of entrepreneurial bubbles

(Goldfarb & Kirsch, 2019), to the process of "entrepreneuring," (Rindova, Barry, and Ketchen, 2009) and to how new

product categories attain meanings (Anthony, Nelson, & Tripsas, 2016). Second, cultural histories could allow

scholars to study more fully the antecedents, contexts, and consequences of “cultural entrepreneurship” as multilevel

processes over time (Lounsbury & Glynn, 2019). Finally, adapted versions of cultural history that focus on the evolu-

tion of concepts (Koselleck, 2002) or analyze the power relations embedded in meanings and knowledge (Smith &

Kaminishi, 2019) can be applied to trace the emergence of constructs like entrepreneurial ecosystem, open innova-

tion, platforms, and international entrepreneurship in entrepreneurial practice and to evaluate the implications of

their adoption as constructs in entrepreneurship research.

2.3 | Microhistory

Matthew Hollow's “Historicizing Entrepreneurial Networks” provides insights into the use of microhistory. Micro-

history emerged in the late 20th century as a methodological response to the limits of social, economic, and cultural

history and their focus on broad social, economic, and cultural patterns (Iggers, 2005). Microhistorians argued that

8 WADHWANI ET AL.

such work had lost sight of the actual people and events that constituted “lived experience” and failed to account for

the emergent processes and mechanisms through which individuals interacted with and reconfigured their con-

texts (Lubinski, 2018). Their response was not to focus on studying specific historical actors and events uncritically,

but to use the chance to focus in a detective-like way on clues that might be contextualized to generate new general

insights (Decker, 2015; Hargadon, 2015). To gain such insights from studying lived experience, microhistories use

ego documents, such as diaries, letters, and journals, and treat actors' sensemaking as historically situated. They

establish causation through the production of historical narratives that focus on the lived experiences of actors or

events (Popp & Holt, 2013; Selden & Fletcher, 2010).

Hollow's microhistory uses the letters of 19th-century British entrepreneur Sir Isaac Holden to examine the evo-

lution of Holden's entrepreneurial network. After demonstrating the limits of coding the letters, Hollow delves into a

closer examination of the letters by contextualizing the practices that would have accompanied their use and their

content in relation to Holden's business, religious, and personal life. This combination of close examination and con-

textualization allows Hollow to derive three broader claims about entrepreneurial networks. First, he demonstrates

how the socio-materiality of the networking platform (the postal letter) and the particular practices that accompanied

it shaped how it was used in entrepreneurial activity. He points out that current networking technologies—such as

LinkedIn or messaging apps—develop their own sets of unique practices that shape entrepreneurial activity. Second,

the patterns of resource flows within Holden's network were shaped by the dynamics of the Wesleyan social move-

ment to which Holden belonged, hence suggesting opportunities for cross-fertilization between researchers using

social movement perspectives (Hiatt, Sine, & Tolbert, 2009) and those using a networks perspective (Jack &

Anderson, 2002) to study resource flows. Finally, Hollow shows how Holden's perceptions of the technical, political,

and social context of his venture and its growth were shaped by the dialogical exchange with his interlocutors. In

short, he concludes that contexts are neither fixed environmental constrains nor fully constructed by the entrepre-

neur's imagination but rather emerge through the back-and-forth of conversations within a network.

Microhistorical methodologies such as this can be applied to several other topics of research that require close

examination of particular entrepreneurial actions over time. Such methods would lend themselves well to studies of

entrepreneurial sensemaking, and processes of enactment and effectuation in particular (Sarasvathy, 2001). Cole and

Chandler (2019), for example, implicitly employ a microhistorical approach to analyze how Thomas Edison and

George Westinghouse used “impression management” to shape “the perceptions of a competing firm or its offerings

in the eyes of a common audience.” Second, research that considers the emergence of routines and capabilities in

new organizations would benefit from the adoption of microhistorical sources and methods (Raff & Scranton, 2016).

Third, researchers interested in ethnographic methods focused on entrepreneurial practices and the socio-material

aspects of entrepreneurial action could benefit from the use microhistory, as Hargadon and Douglas (2001) do in

their classical study on the role of design in entrepreneurial innovation. Finally, microhistorical sources and methods

can be very useful to scholars interested in the application of “uses of history,” such as rhetorical history and memory

studies, in strategic entrepreneurship research (Suddaby, Foster, & Quinn Trank, 2010; Wadhwani, Suddaby,

Mordhorst & Popp, 2018).

2.4 | Comparative history

Andrew Godley and Shane Hamilton's “Different Expectations: A Comparative History of Structure, Experience, and

Strategic Alliances in the U.S. and U.K. Poultry Sectors, 1920-1990” demonstrates the application of comparative

history to strategic entrepreneurship. Mahoney and Rueschemeyer (2003) identify three distinguishing qualities of

comparative history: the use of “systematic and contextualized comparisons of similar and contrasting cases;” “the

identification of causal configurations that produce major outcomes of interest;” and explicit attention to “historical

sequences [that] take seriously the unfolding of processes over time” (Mahoney & Rueschemeyer, 2003, pp. 10–13).

Comparative histories may employ varying combinations of sources, causal explanations, and assumptions but are

WADHWANI ET AL. 9

distinguished by the effort to use historical comparison to identify combinations of causal factors and processes to

explain patterns of convergence or divergence in outcomes of interest.

Godley and Hamilton compare the evolution of the United States and United Kingdom poultry industry between

1920 and 1990, and examine why British entrepreneurs were much more willing to engage in strategic alliances with

supermarkets over time than their American counterparts. Their study is designed as an historical approach to ana-

lyzing the determinants of entrepreneurial collaboration and alliance formation. The creativity of their research

design lies in their use of two different forms of comparisons: they contrast not only the strategic alliance activity of

poultry entrepreneurs between two countries but also compare between two different forms of historical explana-

tion. Their first interpretation, employing the socio-economic historical assumptions and types of sources described

above, demonstrate fundamental similarities in the industry lifecycle dynamics in the two countries but cannot

account for differences in the propensity to collaborate. It is only by turning to the second approach, grounded in

the methods of cultural history and capitalizing on oral history sources, that Godley and Hamilton identify differ-

ences in collective memory as a reason for differences in the propensity to collaborate. The memories of American

entrepreneurs were based in “cultural understanding, forged during the interwar farm crisis, that poultry production

entailed extreme market uncertainty and unavoidably combative, hyper-competitive relationships with the mass

retailers” while those of British entrepreneurs “remembered the compulsory cooperation of wartime” had worked

effectively to navigate that crisis.

The article makes two important contributions. First, it establishes the role of collective memory in how entre-

preneurs deal with entrepreneurial uncertainty generally, and as a basis for entrepreneurial alliance formation specifi-

cally. While the future remains ontologically uncertain, collective memory serves as a basis for entrepreneurial

expectations about what might happen and shapes how entrepreneurial actors draw on the past in making judgmen-

tal decisions in the present about those possible futures. Second, Godley and Hamilton use their two interpretations

to reflect methodologically on how each operationalizes time. The first, “time as structural,” treats time as linear and

unalterable in nature while the second treats time as “the space of experience,” allowing for the malleable role of

memories of the past to play a role in entrepreneurial decision making in the present and shaping expectations of

the future. We will return to this insight on variations in the treatment of time later, when we synthesize the articles.

Comparative histories can be used for research focused on the study of entrepreneurial processes (McMullen &

Dimov, 2013). For instance, work that examines the relationship between academic entrepreneurship and commer-

cial entrepreneurship over time could effectively be examined using a comparative-historical approach (e.g., Wright,

2018). Moreover, as Godley and Hamilton show, such an approach can be especially effective in studying how entre-

preneurs grapple with uncertainty (McMullen & Shepherd, 2006). Because it allows researchers to examine both

imagined futures and interpreted pasts as an integral part of studying how processes unfold, comparative history

allows scholars to consider the causes of divergent entrepreneurial responses to uncertainty (McMullen & Shepherd,

2006) and the consequences for the evolution of firms and industries.

2.5 | Historical case studies

Steven Toms, Nick Wilson, and Mike Wright's “Innovation, Intermediation, and the Nature of Entrepreneurship: A

Historical Perspective” adopts an approach that can be classified as historical cases studies. Entrepreneurship

scholars are already familiar with the use of contemporary cases to build, compare, and extend theories

(Eisenhardt & Graebner, 2007). Historical case studies can be particularly valuable in examining theoretical relation-

ships that require observation over long periods of time or that are based on theorizing regarding fundamental varia-

tions in context (Baumol, 1990). Toms et al.'s use of comparison between cases can be distinguished from the

comparative history approach used by Godley and Hamilton. First, they develop their basic theoretical contentions

deductively at the beginning of the article and then identify historical cases as a test of plausibility for the constructs

and relationships that have been theorized. The authors describe the cases as “illustrations” of the theory and use

10 WADHWANI ET AL.

them to elaborate on variations, contingencies, and boundary conditions for their claims. Second, the use of historical

cases as illustrations is less focused on the need for historical contextualization than comparative history. Their cases

are delineated using widely varying spans of time and historical circumstances. Finally, they treat each case as a dis-

tinct observation with an attributable variable of interest, whereas Godley and Hamilton are focused on a compari-

son of processes and sequences.

Toms et al. use the approach to theorize about the broader relationship between product market innovation and

financial intermediation to identify “systematic underlying factors that cause significant differences in the opportu-

nity set.” Financial intermediation plays an essential role in determining the scope and size of available opportunities

in an environment, they contend, because it might “incentivize innovation and investors for handling risk” or alterna-

tively promote “rent seeking through monopoly or excessive intermediation,” hence making the character of financial

innovation an important indirect determinant of the set of available product market opportunities and of overall eco-

nomic performance. The cases use published secondary sources to illustrate the argument, with the British Industrial

Revolution providing an example of “the politicization of financial intermediation” during a period of extensive tech-

nical/product innovation; the 1980s buyout wave in Britain an example of the “positive coincidence of technical

innovation and financial intermediation;” and the leadup to the 2008 financial crisis as characterized by financial

innovations that “increased transaction costs, while potentially constraining entrepreneurs” ability to exploit innova-

tions in product markets.'

The article makes important contributions. First, it provides a theoretical account of entrepreneurial opportunity

sets as contextually contingent and time based by conceptualizing entrepreneurial opportunities “as determined by

the relationship between innovation and the intermediation process.” Such an approach fundamentally integrates

entrepreneurship theory and finance theory (Klein, 2008). Second, it broadens our account of the role of entrepre-

neurial finance within entrepreneurship theory, pushing this beyond a focus on venture capital and angel investing

to consider the functional role of financial intermediation as a whole in determining opportunities within economic

systems. Such an approach allows us to compare the functional role of entrepreneurial finance over time and

between very different types of economies without narrowly defining it in terms of the particular organizational

forms.

The historical case studies approach can be used by entrepreneurship scholars for several other research pur-

poses. Strategic entrepreneurship researchers have become increasingly interested in ways to incorporate “external

contexts” into entrepreneurship theory itself (Autio et al., 2014). Toms et al.'s approach may provide a way to not

only use historical cases as plausibility tests for these efforts but also to consider how other institutions (e.g. political

and cultural ones) may be theoretically integrated into entrepreneurship. Second, Toms et al. demonstrate how his-

torical cases may be used to develop systems-level entrepreneurship theories. Strategic entrepreneurship research is

by its charter a field that engages with practice and hence with novel trends (e.g., big data, artificial intelligence),

taken-for-granted structural forms (e.g., startups, venture capital), and constructs (e.g., entrepreneurial ecosystems,

rapid prototyping) that constitute contemporary practice (Autio et al., 2018; Dushnitsky & Matusik, 2019; Nambisan,

Siegel, & Kenney, 2018). Historical cases that illustrate variations in these practices can help researchers generalize

about the theoretical categories by which to understand emerging practices.

3 | HISTORY AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP THEORY: CONNECTING TIME,CONTEXT, AND CHANGE

Given the diversity of approaches to historical research on entrepreneurship on display in the previous section, how

do we understand the role of history in entrepreneurship theory? To synthesize the articles in the special issue, we

develop a framework that once again takes Schumpeter (1947) as our point of departure.

As the epigraph that begins this article indicates, Schumpeter believed that history was crucial to advancing

entrepreneurship theory. Indeed, his own extensive historical research and writing in Business Cycles (1939) played a

WADHWANI ET AL. 11

crucial role in forging the theoretical claims he subsequently articulated in Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy (1942)

and in other works. Schumpeter's (1947) main contention was that history could not only allow scholars to study a

range of entrepreneurial actions (i.e., the “mechanisms” of “creative response”) but also to theorize about “the sadly

neglected area of economic change.” History was necessary in theorizing about how entrepreneurship “shapes the

whole course of subsequent events and their 'long-run' outcomes” (p. 49).

The question of how entrepreneurial action shapes change remains an understudied topic in entrepreneurship

research and theory today. Despite its stated importance—it was identified as one of the 10 main themes to which

Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal was founded to address—change is rarely examined explicitly as an outcome of

entrepreneurial action. In their retrospective on SEJ, Wright and Hitt (2017) found that only 0.6% of articles

addressed the theme in the Journal's first 5 years and only 2.6% did so in the subsequent 5-year period. Likewise, in

their survey of the main dependent variables in entrepreneurship research, Shepherd, Wennberg, Suddaby, and

Wiklund (2019) found that the field was focused on “the (a) initiation, (b) engagement, and (c) performance of entre-

preneurial endeavors embedded in (d) environmental conditions,” confirming the relative neglect of research and the-

ory on change as an outcome of entrepreneurial actions.

Historical research, including the papers in the special issue, hence offer possibilities to elaborate on the theoretical

relationship among the origins of entrepreneurial opportunities, the character of entrepreneurial action, and the pro-

cesses of change. Given our definition of history as the interpretation of the past in the present, we begin by consider-

ing how the papers in the special issue operationalize this relationship. Godley and Hamilton's comparative history

provides a good starting point because of its production of two distinct interpretations based on different relationships

between the past and the present. As the authors point out, the first interpretation treats the past–present relationship

as structural, rendering a linear and fixed manifestation of time. The second interpretation treats the past–present rela-

tionship as organized by the “space of experience,” rendering time more malleable and making room for the role of col-

lective memories of the past to shape entrepreneurial expectations about the future. But these two versions of

historical relationship between past and present shape not only how the operationalization of time but also render very

different treatments of context. The structural assumption produces an interpretation in which the context of entrepre-

neurship is synonymous with the objective external environment while the space of experience takes context as at least

partly a matter of perception. Thus, we posit that often-unstated historical assumptions about the past–present rela-

tionship shape both the treatment of time and of context in entrepreneurship theory. The next two subsections exam-

ine how the papers in the special issue employ historical assumptions and how variations in these assumptions produce

different treatments of context, time, and opportunity. We subsequently examine how different pairings in the treat-

ment of context and time point to variations in the character of entrepreneurial action and the process of change.

3.1 | Context

Entrepreneurship scholars have, over the last decade, emphasized the need to contextualize entrepreneurship theory

(Welter, 2011; Zahra & Wright, 2011). However, the conceptualization of context, and in turn its implications for

entrepreneurship theory, have varied widely. As Table 2 summarizes, we contend that these variations arise because

of differences in assumptions used about the historical relationship between past and present.

One approach to context, used in the papers by Ruef and by Toms et al. and in Godley and Hamilton's first inter-

pretation, treats context as an environmental constraint on entrepreneurial action. History in this view is treated as

the set of antecedent facts and decisions that establish these constraints and channel entrepreneurial action. In the

case of Ruef's study, the legal abolition of slavery and the decline of indenture produced the antecedent historical

conditions that constrained proprietors' access to labor and explains the decline of business proprietorship between

1820 and 1850. Entrepreneurship scholarship based on such assumptions often use historical examples to theorize

variations in the ways in which contexts “regulate” entrepreneurial behavior (Autio et al., 2014). Context, based on

these historical assumptions, acts, fundamentally, to limit the range of entrepreneurial action and opportunities that

12 WADHWANI ET AL.

are presumed to be determined by context because context shapes the availability of resources and the returns to

particular forms of entrepreneurial action.

A second approach, illustrated by Demil, treats context as embedding entrepreneurial action. History, in this

approach, is characterized by the institutions, movements, generations, and group affiliations that organize social

relationships over time by tying current social affiliations to previous developments. Entrepreneurship scholars draw-

ing on sociological traditions, like Hiatt et al. (2009), Haveman et al. (2012), Schneiberg, King, and Smith (2008), and

Lippmann and Aldrich (2016a), have often used historical assumptions and evidence to theorize entrepreneurial con-

texts as “socially embedding” in this way (Jack & Anderson, 2002). Demil, for instance, demonstrates how the catego-

rization of mail order companies in France was embedded within the evolution of the state's classification systems.

Context, in this case, is premised on the notion that entrepreneurship is embedded in the lived, collective experience

of people in particular historical times and places (Jack & Anderson, 2002). Entrepreneurial action is theorized as

bounded rather than constrained by context, and opportunities are understood to be conditioned rather than con-

strained. Entrepreneurial agency takes place through contexts rather than because of changes in context.

A third approach takes context to be culturally constructed by actors' sensemaking and communicative prac-

tices; in this view, as Baker and Welter (2018) put it, actors “do” context. Such an approach is premised on the histor-

ical assumption that interpretations of the past are highly malleable and that contexts are actively constructed, for

example, through imagination and language. Hollow's article, for instance, demonstrates how context can be seen as

a construct created by entrepreneurial actors in the process of evaluating opportunities and through communicative

practices. Such a conceptualization of context infers that entrepreneurial actors have extensive agency and suggests

that opportunities are created as entrepreneurs act upon contexts.

3.2 | Time

Variations in historical assumptions also underlie differences in the treatment of time in entrepreneurship research.

Until recently, time played little analytical role in entrepreneurship theory; at its most abstract, the theorized relation-

ship between individuals and opportunities was timeless and very few empirical studies paid any attention to tempo-

rality. As McMullen and Dimov (2013) pointed out, “calls for greater attention to time and temporality in

entrepreneurship research have become a hallmark of our field largely because they have gone unheeded.” To the

extent that time was accounted for in entrepreneurship research, it was associated with “ecological approaches” that

focused on the study of firm founding rates over time (Aldrich & Wiedenmayer, 1993). Time as operationalized in

such studies is a clock variable; it is linear, exogenous, and demarcated by consistent measures of duration that

account for the “distance” into the past and into the future. Entrepreneurial actions are marked “over time.” In

demarcating his samples into the years 1790, 1810, and 1850, and testing how the end of slavery by 1820 affected

changes in small proprietorship in 1850, Ruef illustrates this assumption well.

More recently, entrepreneurship scholars have employed other ways of theorizing time, based implicitly on alter-

native assumptions about the relationship between past and present. In their article advocating for the conceptuali-

zation of time as a process or journey through which entrepreneurship happens, McMullen and Dimov (2013) point

out that studies “using historical methods and a variety of data sources” can play “a vital role in building a vibrant

research ecosystem around entrepreneurial journeys.” Such an approach to time depends not on the premise that

the present is connected to the past by evenly measured units of duration, but by the subjective experience of time

as a constantly unfolding present in which the past and future exist in the memories and projections of entrepreneur-

ial actors (Selden & Fletcher, 2010). Hollow and Demil provide examples of research that looks at time as a process,

that is, defined not by a clock but by a sequence of unfolding actions or experiences. Opportunities are seen as a

process, that is, pursued within time rather than an event that occurs as a demarcated moment over time.

Finally, research that conceptualizes time as a resource treats the past–present relationship as malleable and

interpretable (Bansal, Reinecke, Suddaby, & Langley, 2019; Kaplan & Orlikowski, 2013). Time, in this approach to

WADHWANI ET AL. 13

history, is nonlinear. Entrepreneurial actions are inferred to have considerable agency to act upon time, and the past

is theorized as a crucial resource for and guide to entrepreneurial opportunities. Godley and Hamilton's second inter-

pretation, for instance, illustrates this understanding of time in showing how historical memories were active in shap-

ing how entrepreneurial actors saw the poultry market and the prospects for alliances.

3.3 | Entrepreneurial actions and mechanisms of change

Next, we consider combinations of the varying treatments of context and time discussed above and infer what each

pairing implies about the character of entrepreneurial ideas/actions and the mechanisms of change. Table 3 summa-

rizes our reasoning, with the X-axis displaying the three types of time discussed above and the Y-axis displaying the

three approaches to context. We interpret the array of nine entrepreneurial actions that we infer as ideal types that

are consistent with the associated treatments of time and context. Likewise, we infer a set of ideal-type mechanisms

of change that are consistent with the associated treatment of time, context, and action. The mechanisms of change

are denoted in parentheses.

Space constraints prevent us from discussing each of the ideal types in Table 3 systematically, so we limit our

discussion to making some preliminary suggestions about the implications of our historical framework for theory and

research. First, we suggest that history allows us one way to reframe the debate on entrepreneurial opportunities by

drawing attention to variations in entrepreneurial epistemology instead of differences in ontology. Rather than

focusing on the innate nature of opportunities as discovered or created (Alvarez & Barney, 2007; Klein, 2008), it

shifts attention to how entrepreneurial actors themselves understood their context and time in the present and the

opportunities these presented for future-directed action. An approach to opportunities based on historical

epistemology—in which entrepreneurial actors' interpretations of the past shape their knowledge of the present and

their expectations of desirable and plausible futures—has several potential benefits. Entrepreneurial knowledge is

already widely understood as a precursor to entrepreneurial action (McMullen & Shepherd, 2006), and Table 3 sug-

gests how an actor's historical understanding of context and time may shape their perceptions of agency and their

form of action in patterned ways. Such a perspective also allows scholars to take a “substantive approach” to study-

ing entrepreneurial opportunities by allowing us to consider the broad variety of types of entrepreneurial actions

that make up the “actual experience of real life entrepreneurs” (Dimov, 2011, p. 62) and the historical conditions and

contingencies under which each form of action prevails.

Second, the table provides a way of locating a variety of different approaches to entrepreneurship research vis-

à-vis their implicit historical assumptions and treatments of context, time, and action. Discovery-based approaches

to opportunities (Shane & Venkataraman, 2000) and ecological approaches to entrepreneurship (Aldrich &

Wiedenmayer, 1993) seem to cluster toward the top left of the table. Scholarship based on effectuation (Sarasvathy,

TABLE 2 Historical assumptions and entrepreneurship theory

Relationship of past to present Locus of opportunity Entrepreneurial agency

Context

…as constraining Past is fixed Despite context Restricted

…as embedding Past is present In context Bounded

…as constructed Past is malleable On context Extensive

Time

…as clock-like Objective, linear Over time Restricted

…as process Subjective, unfolding Within time Bounded

…as resource Subjective, malleable Upon time Extensive

14 WADHWANI ET AL.

2001) and bricolage (Baker & Nelson, 2005) seem grouped toward the top right. Cultural entrepreneurship

(Lounsbury & Glynn, 2019) and rhetorical history (Suddaby et al., 2010) approaches that are based on narrative forms

of entrepreneurial action (Garud & Giuliani, 2013; Hjorth & Steyaert, 2004) gravitate to the bottom right. Recent

research on entrepreneurial action as temporal work could be categorized toward the bottom left (Granqvist &

Gustaffson, 2016; Wood et al., 2020). And, entrepreneurship research based in social movements (Hiatt et al., 2009)

and institutional change (Hargadon & Douglas, 2001) would cluster in the center.

Grappling with the historical assumptions implicit within each of these approaches to entrepreneurship could

allow scholars to more explicitly articulate or revise their treatment of context and time and compare them to those

of other approaches. The framework also allows scholars to compare the kind and extent of entrepreneurial agency

at work within various school of thought on entrepreneurship. Approaches that cluster to the bottom right of

Table 3 claim a very high degree of agency for entrepreneurial actors while those at the top left assume agency to

be highly circumscribed. Moreover, the table allows us to differentiate between agency exercised over context and

agency exercised over time. And, historicizing entrepreneurship would allow scholars to consider the conditions

under which the various types of entrepreneurial action operate, as well as if, when and how various types of entre-

preneurial actions can be combined to serve particular entrepreneurial purposes.

Third, our framework suggests that integrating history into entrepreneurship theory may allow us to broaden

our understanding of entrepreneurial judgment and uncertainty. Casson (1982, p. 21) characterized entrepreneurial

judgment as based in unique “access to information, or different interpretations of it.” Our approach has drawn

attention to how different interpretations of historical context and time may be important in the exercise of judg-

ments about the type of entrepreneurial action that is appropriate for the situation and extent of the agency an

entrepreneur may have at hand. The tables also imply a need to think more broadly about the sources of and

responses to entrepreneurial uncertainty. Whereas entrepreneurship theory has widely embraced the contention

that “because the future is unknowable, action is inherently uncertain” (McMullen & Shepherd, 2006, pp. 132–133)

the historical framework we present suggests that because the past is interpretable it too may be considered as a

potential source of uncertainty; unpredictable changes in the interpretation of the past may create changes in the

way in which actors perceive the present and future. At the same time, the framework also offers an opportunity to

consider how entrepreneurial actions aimed at reinterpreting the past may shape perceptions of uncertainty in the

future.

Finally, as Table 3 indicates, historicizing entrepreneurship would allow scholars to engage more extensively with

the theoretical and empirical study of change. Building theory and research on change from an entrepreneurial per-

spective based in opportunities and actions could provide unique insights into the dynamics of markets, industries,

and societies that are distinct from approaches that theorize change and agency by beginning with macrocontexts

and structures. As Table 3 indicates, historical reasoning may provide a useful way to theorize change from a strate-

gic entrepreneurship perspective because it can allow attention to both the assumptions underlying the micro-

foundations of entrepreneurial actions and the broad contexts and longer timespans required to study the

mechanisms of change. Engaging more fully with theories and studies of change would bring entrepreneurship

researchers back to addressing one of the central questions that the intellectual construct of entrepreneurship was

devised to explain: how does capitalism evolve?

TABLE 3 Varieties of entrepreneurial action with implied models of change in parentheses

Context

Time Constraining Embedding Constructed

Clock Identifying (ecological) Legitimizing (institutional) Imagining (cognitive)

Process Sequencing (path dependent) Mobilizing(movements) Reinterpreting (hermeneutic)

Resource Pacing (kairotic) Remembering (mneumonic) Narrating (rhetorical)

WADHWANI ET AL. 15

4 | LOOKING BACK TO LOOK FORWARD

History offers scholars opportunities to deepen theorizing and diversify empirical research on strategic entrepreneur-

ship in new ways, and to connect the field to broader multidisciplinary studies of the dynamics of capitalism. This

article and special issue provide scholars a sense of the range of historical sources and methods available for studying

entrepreneurship as well as the kinds of research questions each approach can address. The articles demonstrate the

creative and methodologically reflexive ways one can build entrepreneurship theory and generate conceptual

insights from historical research. We have also shown how explicitly examining the often-unstated historical assump-

tions underlying entrepreneurship theory can contribute to both richer theorizing and to extending the reach of

entrepreneurship scholarship to the study of change.

Historical research on entrepreneurship originated over a century ago in order to grapple with explaining the

dynamic and seemingly unprecedented ways in which new technologies, new forms of organizing, new markets, new

social arrangements, and new business models were transforming the world (Hebert & Link, 2006). The business

practices, technologies, and seemingly intractable problems entrepreneurs encounter today seem equally unprece-

dented (Dushnitsky & Matusik, 2019). The study of the past has often gained more urgency during such moments of

transition and acceleration. History cannot, of course, eliminate the uncertainty that marks such moments, but it can

allow us the vantage point to better understand such moments of change (Bodroži�c & Adler, 2018).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are grateful for the support we received from the SEJ editors, from Copenhagen Business School's “Rethinking

History Initiative” and from University of Southern California's “Historical Entrepreneurship Initiative.” We received

helpful guidance and feedback from Chris Zott, Christina Lubinski, Rob Mitchell, and participants at workshops in

Copenhagen, Miami, Portland, and Los Angeles.

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How to cite this article: Wadhwani RD, Kirsch D, Welter F, Gartner WB, Jones GG. Context, time, and

change: Historical approaches to entrepreneurship research. Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal. 2020;14:

3–19. https://doi.org/10.1002/sej.1346

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