entrepreneurship – a suitable case for sociological treatment

Entrepreneurship – A Suitable Case for SociologicalTreatment

Tony J. Watson*Nottingham University Business School

Abstract

Entrepreneurs are of great interest inside and outside the academic world. But there are consider-able ambiguities and confusions about the nature of entrepreneurship among members of the pub-lic and entrepreneurship scholars alike, with the latter typically failing to locate entrepreneurialactivities fully in their historical and societal contexts. Even work in the sociology of entrepre-neurship is achieving less than might be expected in this respect. To overcome these problems itis helpful to return to basic sociological principles associated with Durkheim, Weber and WrightMills and work with two newer sociological concepts; those of ‘institutional logics’ and ‘situatedcreativity’. Working in this way encourages us to drop entirely the analytical concept of ‘entrepre-neur’ and to study, instead, ‘entrepreneurial action’ – a concept which enables us to appreciate therelationship between the making of adventurous, creative or innovative exchanges in societies andboth the organisational and the societal ⁄ institutional ⁄ historical settings in which these comes about– for better or worse.

Introduction

Entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs have been topics of growing interest to both aca-demic researchers and the broader public. Pro-market politicians regularly celebrate thedesirability of enterprise and entrepreneurship as antidotes to the State. And journalistsand media operators daily bring to the news pages and the screen colourful figures fromthe business world whom they label ‘entrepreneurs’ and add to their dramatis personae of‘celebrity’ footballers, models and actors. The popular perception of entrepreneurship, sayThornton et al. (2011, 113) ‘is of a heroic individual or an economically successful firm’.Given what these authors characterise as a ‘fundamental attribution error’ – the attributingof business success to outstanding individuals – and given the diversity of parties takingan interest in entrepreneurship, there are inevitably ambiguities of meaning and worriesfor researchers about the possibility of serious analysis of entrepreneurship, whatever thatmight be. We might even say that there is a danger of ‘contaminating’ scholarly study ofentrepreneurial activity with assumptions and ambiguities from popular and political cul-ture. In spite of these issues, however, the academic study of entrepreneurship has flour-ished with the bulk of the research being produced by psychologists, with their particularinterest in the personality ‘traits’ and other characteristics of ‘entrepreneurs’, and by econ-omists, who have focused, not surprisingly, on the role of these people in the economyand in economic change. The dominant methodological position of contemporary entre-preneurship studies is a scientistic one based on the positivistic assumption that social issuescan be studied and dealt with by the application of ‘hard’ physics-like science which fol-lows a process of hypothesis formation, operationalisation and statistical testing towards aneventual full understanding of social phenomena (Watson forthcoming a). Contemporary

Sociology Compass 6/4 (2012): 306–315, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2011.00455.x

ª 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

research and writing has been criticised for a failure to locate entrepreneurial activitiessufficiently in their social, cultural and historical context (Hjorth et al. 2008). Powerful asthese criticisms are, there has nevertheless been a growing literature in the sociology ofentrepreneurship and its recognition that entrepreneurship is embedded in its social con-text (Aldrich and Zimmer 1986).

I shall first look at what is being called ‘the sociology of entrepreneurship’ and arguethat, valuable as it is, it needs to be significantly developed and conceptually ‘opened up’to provide the kind of analysis that can move attention to entrepreneurial action in socie-ties out of a sociological sub-discipline into what we might call the sociological main-stream. A key move that I argue is necessary for this to happen is that of abandoning forscholarly purposes the concept of ‘the entrepreneur’ and replacing it with the much lessambiguous and much more analytically sensitive concept of entrepreneurial action. I shallsuggest that the concept of entrepreneurial action, combined with the concept of institu-tional logics, can enable sociologists studying broad issues of ‘how the social world works’(Watson 2011a) to pay attention to an important aspects of creative and innovative (notnecessarily all ‘good’) action both in history and the contemporary world. I shall rootthese arguments in the notion of the ‘sociological imagination’, a style of sociology withstrong roots in pragmatist philosophy (Watson 2009, 2012). This is a philosophy whichalso provides us with a concept which is invaluable for the study of entrepreneurialaction: that of situated creativity. For the moment, let us consider the several overviews ofthe ‘sociology of entrepreneurship’ which are available to us.

The sociology of entrepreneurship

There are three areas where the sociology of entrepreneurship has gone beyond the con-cerns of the psychologists and economists according to Ruef and Lounsbury (2007, 2).First, it targets levels of analysis above the individual entrepreneur: looking at ‘interper-sonal networks, organisational structure, population, and field-level processes, as well asthe broader institutional environment’. Second, it balances conventional concerns withmarket conditions and financing by paying attention to ‘the symbolic and cultural dimen-sion of entrepreneurial activity’. And third, it goes into areas ‘that tend to elude simplemarket-based accounts... such as science, health care, and the fine arts’. All of this is verywelcome and appropriate. However, Ruef and Lounsbury (2007, 2) say that there is no‘intellectual cohesion’ among sociologists of entrepreneurship with little agreement on ‘acommon sociological conception of entrepreneurship’. These commentators not onlycriticise the ‘subfield’ as ‘parochial’ (2007, 13) and ‘adrift’ (2007, 3), they also call it nar-row and mention in this respect its focus on the creation of ‘new formal organisations’and ‘durable innovations in routines, technologies, organizations forms, or social institu-tions’(2007, 1).

An interest in the founding of new organisations has been a central interest of the fore-most sociologist who has studied entrepreneurship. In his overview and recommendationsfor the sociology of entrepreneurship, Aldrich (2005, 452) takes as the most helpful wayof handling the problem of conceptualising entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs a defini-tion of entrepreneurship as ‘the creation of new organisations’ (2005, 452) and entrepre-neurs as ‘the people who create new organisations’. Very significantly, Aldrich says thatthis approach is ‘in keeping with the way sociological research on entrepreneurship ischaracteristically framed’. And, if we look back to an earlier major overview and set ofproposals for the sociology of entrepreneurship we see Reynolds (1991, 55) writing aboutthe socioeconomic system providing ‘the context in which entrepreneurs will found new

Entrepreneurship and Sociology 307

ª 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Sociology Compass 6/4 (2012): 306–315, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2011.00455.x

firms’. It would seem, then, that we have a basic approach in the sociology of entrepre-neurship in which, on the one hand, there are individuals founding businesses and, onthe other hand, there is a social ‘context’ within which this happens. Researchers then setout to examine relationships between these two entities. The distinction between ‘theentrepreneur’ and the ‘social context’ is perhaps seen most clearly in Thornton’s overviewand recommendations for the sociology of entrepreneurship and her attempt to synthesisewhat she sees as two existing perspectives or approaches. On the one hand, she says,there is the supply-side perspective which focuses on ‘the individual traits of entrepre-neurs’. On the other hand, there is newer work from a ‘demand-side perspective’. This‘focuses on... the context in which entrepreneurship occurs’ (my emphasis).

Thornton (1999: 41) concludes her review and recommendations with an observationthat ‘advances’ in theoretical and empirical work in sociology are providing avenues forbringing the study of entrepreneurship ‘back... into sociological research’. Indeed, as Ishall say later, some of Thornton’s more recent work on institutional logics may be pre-cisely one of these advances. However, for the moment, serious doubts have to be raisedabout the recurring theme, which Thornton helped to propagate, of individuals operatingin a context. There is a crude dualism in frameworks with ‘supply and demand’ sides. Aswith the dualism of ‘micro’ and ‘macro’, this distinction may work within economics.But in sociology, it suggests a reluctance fully to come to terms with the fundamentalDurkheimian recognition that human beings are social animals, not creatures which havean essential existence and are then are located in a social context. To analyse individualsfirst, ‘in their own terms’ so to speak, and then to set them in their context is rather likestudying an individual cricketer (qua cricketer, that is) and then going on to set them intheir context – the game of cricket. Surely there is no such thing as an individualcricket-player who could be understood separately from an understanding of the game ofcricket – anymore than there could be an understanding of the game of cricket (animpossibility, anyway, some may say!) without paying attention to the individuals whowield the bats and the balls. Thornton identifies Max Weber’s ‘theory on the origin ofthe entrepreneurial spirit’ as providing the ‘metatheory underlying the dominant supply-side’ perspective in entrepreneurship research. I would suggest that Weber does indeedprovide us with the starting point for studying entrepreneurship. But we should see himneither as a ‘supply side’ theorist nor as a demand-side analyst, but as the instigator of amore appropriate way to proceed in sociological analysis generally: by studying meaningfulsocial action. I therefore propose that the most helpful way to give entrepreneurship a‘sociological treatment’ is to completely drop any notion of ‘the entrepreneur’ as ananalytical concept and to replace it with the study of entrepreneurial action; creative mar-ket-related exchange activities. I will develop this concept more formally shortly, afterarguing that it is consistent with the basic principles of ‘the sociological imagination’advocated by Mills (1970) and can perhaps most helpfully be used in combination withthe concept of institutional logics.

The sociological imagination, institutions and entrepreneurship

For reasons I have laid out elsewhere (Watson forthcoming c), a close relationship can beseen between Weberian sociology and the classical pragmatist philosophy of Peirce, Jamesand Dewey (Bernstein 2010; Mills 1966; Mounce 1997); an affinity which was broughtinto a clear realisation with Wright Mills’ notion of the sociological imagination (Mills 1959).Mills (1956, 321) does not want sociology to neglect human individuals and theirpersonal circumstances but calls for the analysis of what occurs in the individual’s ‘per-

308 Entrepreneurship and Sociology


sonal milieu’ always to be related to the social structure of which it is a part. He proposesthat all social scientists develop a capacity to ‘shift from one perspective to another, andin the process to build up an adequate view of a total society and its components’ (1970, 232,my emphasis). This ‘shifting of perspective’ requires the researcher to bring together whatthey see in their examination of the minutiae of the lives and activities of, in the presentcase, the individual entrepreneurial actor and the researcher’s understanding of the socialstructures and historical trends in which they are embedded.

To bring together the notion of a ‘total society’ with the concept of types of humanaction, the notion of institutional logic is invaluable. Societies are made up of institutionsand, argue Friedland and Alford (1991), each of these has its own distinct logic. Buildingon the work of these authors, institutional logics can be defined as the sets of values, rules,assumptions and practices associated with the key institutions of a society (such as the family, com-petitive markets, politics, religion, bureaucratic administration) which have been socially constructedover time and through which patterns of social organisation and human activity are shaped and givenmeaning (Watson 2012, 64). And these various logics within which social action occursconstantly come into conflict and tension with each other with the working out of thesetensions providing the ‘motor’ of social change (Friedland and Alford 1991).

The most obvious example, in the present context, of the relationship between insti-tutional tensions and social change would be Weber’s analysis of the way a church-dominated religious ‘logic’ was in tension with tendencies towards entrepreneurial actionand modern capitalistic market activity – a tension which, in a particular set of Euro-pean circumstances, led to the growth of the modern capitalist ethic and the institutionsassociated with this. But, as Weber’s classic analysis emphasises, there was a central roleplayed in these changes by human ‘agents’ – individuals whose ‘personal milieux’, toborrow Mills’ term, were the social institutions and institutional logics of their time.Their activities were thus embedded in their institutional settings. And the socialchanges which came about resulted from an interplay between institutional structuresand human agency. As Thornton and Ocasio put it, ‘[w]hile individual and organiza-tional actors may seek power, status, and economic advantage, the means and ends oftheir interests and agency are both enabled and constrained by prevailing institution log-ics’ (2008, 103, cf. Giddens 1984). If we look at social actors who have played signifi-cant roles in social change (through entrepreneurial or any other kind of action) wewill see tensions in their lives and activities which reflect those of their institutionallocation.

An especially striking case of the interpenetration of institutional tensions, personalstresses and organisational dilemmas, at a later stage in the growth of modern capitalism,is in the way a tension between a personal Christian welfare ethic and a strong capitalistmarket orientation was at the heart of the business activities and pioneering personneland marketing strategies of the founder of Boots the Chemist, Jessie Boot. I examined thisin detail in a study of the origins of a welfare movement in the UK and in which Iquoted Boots’ biographer on ‘strange ambivalence’ of this ‘typical Victorian Entrepre-neur[s]’:

On the one side we see the single-minded and tireless entrepreneur, impatient if not ruthlesswith any person or organisation that stood in his way; on the other side [is] the idealist Non-conformist and Liberal, eager to search for practical means of realising the Liberal-Christianideas of industrial harmony, profit-sharing and co-ownership... (Chapman 1970: 159 quoted inWatson 2011c).



This quotation is very helpful. At first it appears to be dealing with Boot as ‘an entrepre-neur’. But we soon see that he could also be identified as a churchman, a politician or anindustrial reformer. We can add to this Boot’s activities as a significant philanthropist(especially with regard to the founding of my own university). And within his fast-grow-ing business we could readily identify him as a marketer, a proto-personnel manager or abusiness strategist. One could theorise the life and activities of Boot as a ‘multiple roleplayer’ or an individual with ‘multiple identities’. There is, however, little sociological‘purchase’ in such conceptualisations. It is far more helpful to understand Boot as a personwho, in his historically and structurally embedded agency, moved across and between dif-ferent kinds of social action, each type of social action being related to one or anothersocietal institution – this often entailing confrontation with tensions and contradictionsinherent in a fast-changing political economy. In an especially effective and innovatoryway, historically prominent figures like Jesse Boot tackle the circumstances in which theyfind themselves to fulfil their personal projects and influence the world around them. Indoing this and in the light of the particular sphere of society in which they move, theywill sometimes engage in entrepreneurial action, sometimes in political action, sometimesin bureaucratic administrative action – and so on. In the organisational aspect of societymore generally, this would suggest abandoning the study of people conceptualised as‘entrepreneurs’, as ‘managers’ or as ‘strategists’ and look, instead, at the ways in whichpeople involved in creating and running organisations engage in different times and cir-cumstances in different types of action, sometimes acting entrepreneurially, sometimesadministratively and so on. To do this we need to develop more fully the concept ofentrepreneurial action.

Situated creativity, entrepreneurial action and organisations

I used the case of a ‘big historical business figure’ above to argue for a switch of attentionfrom ‘the entrepreneur’ to ‘entrepreneurial action’, suggesting that prominent figures likeBoot creatively tackle the circumstances in which they find themselves in their time andsocial location through engagement in a variety of types of social action. But might notthis, in much more modest terms, be the case with all social actors at ‘the intersectionbetween of biography and history within society’ (Mills 1970, 14)? This is precisely thedirection in which pragmatist philosophy points us, as Joas (1996, 144) demonstrates withthe concept of situated creativity, something to be found across ‘the full spectrum of humanaction’. Joas places creativity to the centre of our understanding of all human activitieswhich go beyond the habitual: as people move through life they continually face newcircumstances and must therefore continually create solutions to the problems presentedby those circumstances. This applies to the ‘big figures’ of history, handling the opportu-nities and constraints of major social changes. And it applies to the ordinary shopkeeperfinding ways to deal with the opportunities and constraints of the changing demands oftheir customers. The application of this notion of creativity to entrepreneurial actionencourages us to see it, in Johannisson’s (2011, 147) terms, as ‘a fundamental humanactivity, central in man’s ongoing quest of identity and meaning of life’; we should associ-ate it with ‘everyday life and not with heroic achievements’.

The pragmatist writing of Joas is valuable to sociological thinking because it provides away of considering the defining characteristics of human beings without resorting toreductionist notions of ‘human nature’. It does this by building on ideas developed in thepragmatist-influenced Chicago school of sociology and its insistence that people’s selves(Cooley 1902; Mead 1934), ‘definitions of the situation’ (Thomas 1923) and actions must



always be situated within their interactions with other human beings (Blumer 1969), theirinstitutional locations (Hughes 1942) and the ‘social worlds’ (Strauss 1978) through whichthey move in their life careers (Becker et al. 1961). Within this ‘situatedness’, Joas identi-fies three basic human characteristics: creativity, corporeality and sociality. And I wouldadd a fourth characteristic: a propensity to exchange or trade. This is a characteristic at theheart of human sociality and is especially clearly related to the social (situated) circum-stances of the human condition.

It is now possible to formalise the concept of entrepreneurial action (‘entrepreneuring’or even ‘entrepreneurship’) in a way which brings together two of the human characteris-tic identified above: those of creativity and exchange ⁄ trading. Entrepreneurial action isthe making of adventurous, creative or innovative exchanges, trades or ‘deals’ between entrepreneurialactors’ home ‘enterprises’ and other parties with which those enterprises trade. This conceptualisa-tion, with its incorporation of the notion of an enterprise, has a strong sociology of organi-sations element. Organisations – from small businesses, charities and voluntary bodiesthrough to large business and State corporations – are central to the functioning of mod-ern societies and they are essentially resource-dependent bodies (Watson 2011b; Hillmanet al. 2009; Pfeffer and Salancik 1978). They could not survive without trading in variousways with resource-dependent constituencies ranging from customers, employees andsuppliers to investors, newspaper reporters and state agencies. Generally, we are enrichingthe study of entrepreneurial activity here by bringing in the organisational dimension ofsocial life (and thereby reinforcing the notion of entrepreneurial action as a social ratherthan an individualistic phenomenon). More specifically, especially through the notion ofentrepreneurial actors’ ‘home enterprises’, we are decoupling ‘entrepreneurial actors’ frombusiness owners or business founders. The creative deal-making in an enterprise may wellbe done by that organisation’s founder or its owner. But it is not necessarily the case.There are important research questions to be answered about the relationship betweenorganisational foundation or organisational ownership and the engagement in creativedeal-making. It is important therefore to avoid conceptual closure – a move in whichone’s definition of terms limits the number of research questions which can be asked.

If, as often happens in the sociology of entrepreneurship as well as in entrepreneurshipstudies more broadly, ‘entrepreneurship’ is conceptually ‘closed’ and treated as a matter offounding businesses, we are diverted from looking an innovative or creative organisationalexchanges in already-existing businesses, in social enterprises, in voluntary organisationsand in public bodies. And if we focus on ‘entrepreneurs’ as business founders, then weare distracting attention from the fact that, for example, human resource specialists maymake creative or innovative deals with potential recruits or with their workforce as awhole. We might find marketing, financial, technological and strategy specialists involv-ing themselves in equivalent types of entrepreneurial action. Indeed we might find anyone of these specialists, or business owners and other corporate ‘leaders’ for that matter,at different stages of their careers or even at different points in their working week,switching between entrepreneurial actions and administrative-managerial actions. Myown field research, in which I have interacted closely with so-called ‘entrepreneurs’ indi-cates precisely this (Watson forthcoming b).

Even if researchers make the very reasonable decision to confine their interests to pro-cesses of organisational creation or business ‘start-up’, a relatively closed notion of entre-preneurship as a matter of organisational or business initiation is inhibiting. It closes off,for example, the opportunity to recognise the extent to which organisations may beestablished in a fairly routine, as opposed to ‘creative’, manner. I have in mind here acase which I came across in my ethnographic research of the son of a butcher who



opened his own butchery business in an adjacent village, partly to get away from workingwith his father and partly because suitable premises became available in the next village.He ran the business along the traditional (‘habitual’) lines his father had followed. Myinformant contrasted this business with another in which an established butcher con-fronted the issue of competition from local supermarkets by expanding the range of prod-ucts which he made available, thus offering a creative ‘new deal’ to customers. This waspossible as the result of a series of rather innovative deals with local farmers, food produc-ers, an abattoir and a transport business. The relatively ‘open’ concept of entrepreneurialaction is much more helpful in dealing with the significance issues for small businesses inperiods of social change than the more closed concept of ‘the entrepreneur’ or of entre-preneurship as business founding.

Entrepreneurial action and history

I have utilised a small piece of local and contemporary history to illustrate the sociologicalvalue of the concept of entrepreneurial action and its potential for ‘opening up’ researchquestions about creativity, exchange and social change. But we should also recognise thatentrepreneurial action, as I have conceptualised it here, has played a significant part inhuman history more broadly. Its study can bring valuable insights into our study of mod-ern forms of entrepreneurial action. There have, for example, been significant shifts inour understanding of European patterns of trade and migration in the period 9000BC-AD1000 as demonstrated by Cunliffe’s (2008) magisterial account of the sea-going ‘entre-preneurs’ who played a key role in shaping the societies of the ‘land between the oceans’.This account considers what we might call the embedded agency of these traders and thiscould be analysed in terms of the institutional logics that operated in the spheres of reli-gion, technology, early politics and the like. Similar patterns of people coming to termswith their situations, material and social, can be seen in studies of the Vikings (Forteet al. 2005). If one wishes to concentrate on the importance of the successful bringingtogether of entrepreneurial and administrative logics (and, indeed, the tensions betweenthem) one could do no better than to look closely at the history of the English (and,later, British) Navy and its role in empire-building and wealth creation (Brewer 1988) orthe history of the Scottish tobacco lords and how their combination of entrepreneurialaction and ruthless efficiency not only made themselves immensely rich but transformedsocial and economic life within and beyond the city of Glasgow (Devine 1975). The lat-ter case powerfully illustrates the effectiveness of the successful combining of entrepre-neurial action with organisational efficiency (Devine 2003). This amounts to a judiciouscombining of principles from two different institutional logics – the logic of competitivemarket exchange and the logic of bureaucratic administration. Understanding the variousways in which these two potentially contradictory logics have been handled in differenthistorical contexts relates closely to key questions about contemporary organisations, inthe private, the public and the ‘third’ sectors of modern societies. And it relates to glob-ally important issues about the general relationship between markets and State administra-tion.

In conclusion

It could well be argued that sociologists should leave the whole matter of entrepreneur-ship alone. Ruef and Lounsbury (2007, 17) see ‘the argument for ideological opposition’to research on entrepreneurship as hinging on the assumption that such work validates ‘a



paradigm of self-sufficient individualism...to the neglect of structural constraint or herita-ble skills and resources’. Sociological research is nevertheless beginning to show the inad-equacies of the dominant individualist position by demonstrating empirically theconsiderable extent to which entrepreneurial action is a group phenomenon (Ruef 2010).If this development is to be built upon and more sociologists enter this field of research,it is important to recognise and overcome the problem that sociologists may wish to keeptheir distance from a notion – entrepreneurship – that plays such a central role in theindividualistic and market-focused rhetoric of neo-liberalism.

One attractive way of dealing with what we might term the ideological problem’ is topay attention to the emancipatory potential of certain types of entrepreneurial action.Such a focus enables a connection to be made between an interest in entrepreneurshipand sociologists’ traditional concern with organising processes and how they relate toshifting patterns of power and inequality (Fleming and Spicer 2007). Following up workby Calas et al. (2009) which attends to entrepreneurship and gender issues and researchby Rindova et al. (2009) on ethnicity and ‘entrepreneuring’, Goss et al. (2011: 212) takeup the notion of ‘entrepreneuring as emancipation’. Recognising the emphasis on theprocess and practice dimension of this way of thinking, Goss et al. present a micro-socio-logical analysis of a set of power rituals occurring in an entrepreneurial context whichbrought about emancipatory changes in a particular area of UK law.

This new emphasis within the sociology of entrepreneurship is wholly compatible withwhat is being advocated in the present article. There is a shared concern with socialaction and with giving full recognition to the interplay between agency and structure.But, above all, there is a shared determination to open up the conceptualisation of entre-preneurship. I have attempted to do this in the broadest way possible: bringing togetherconsideration of two key characteristics of members of the human species – situated crea-tivity and a propensity to exchange – with the concept of multiple institutional logics. Ibelieve that the study of entrepreneurship can do a lot for sociology and that sociologycan do a lot for the study of entrepreneurship. And for the full potential of this kind ofinteraction to occur, particular attention needs to be paid to what is being achieved inthe sociology of organisations. I have done this here with attention to the ‘enterprise’ as aresource-dependent exchanging body within which entrepreneurial action occurs along-side what I have called bureaucratic administrative action. It is vital to note that this latterconcept is a totally non-pejorative notion which, following du Gay’s (2000, 2005) criti-cally important Weberian analysis of bureaucracy, recognises the essential role played by abureaucratic institutional logic or ‘ethic’ within contemporary industrial-capitalist socie-ties. Entrepreneurial action would achieve little in the world without bureaucratic pro-cesses of imperative co-ordination.

The work of existing entrepreneurship specialists can be considerably enriched andexpanded in scope by recognising that entrepreneurship is not just something that ‘hap-pens in a social context’ but is, from the start to the finish, a social phenomenon and thatthe activities of entrepreneurial actors can only be understood as matters of embeddedagency. Entrepreneurship is, as the entrepreneurship scholar Davidsson (2008) puts it, ‘asocietal phenomenon’. And the sociological discipline itself, with its central concern withunderstanding the social world through the examination of the interplay of agency andstructure, can be similarly enriched by studying the role of creativity and innovativeexchange in individual lives, in organisational dynamics and in historical, societal and glo-bal change – never forgetting, as a critical discipline, that entrepreneurship has a destruc-tive, unproductive and criminal ‘dark side’ as well as an economically and sociallybeneficial one (Baumol 1990; Schumpeter 1942; Wright and Zahra 2011).



Short Biography

Tony Watson is Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Work and Organisation at the Notting-ham University Business School, The University of Nottingham, UK. His research andwriting looks at the sociology of work, organisations, management, ethnography andentrepreneurship. Current activities are focused on research supervision and researchtraining, fulfilling Watson’s keen interest in developing new and emerging researchers.His best known research monograph is In Search of Management (Revised edition 2001)and his best known texts are Managing and Organising Work (2nd edition, 2006) and Sociol-ogy, Work and Organisation (6th edition 2012). His first research monograph, The PersonnelManagers: a study in the sociology of work and employment is being reissued in 2011 (havingfirst appeared in 1977).

Note

* Correspondence address: Prof. Tony Watson, 44 Fellows Road, BeestonNottingham, Nottingham, NG9 1AQ,United Kingdom. E-mail: [email protected]

References

Aldrich, H.E. 2005. ‘Entrepreneurship.’ Pp. 450–68 in The Handbook of Economic Sociology, 2nd edn, edited by N. J.Smelser and R. Swedburg J. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Aldrich, H.E. and C. Zimmer 1986. ‘Entrepreneurship Through Social Networks.’ Pp. 3–23 in The Art and Scienceof Entrepreneurship, edited by D. Sexton and R. Smilor. New York: Ballinger.

Baumol, W.J. 1990. ‘Entrepreneurship: Productive, Unproductive and Destructive.’ Journal of Political Economy 98:893–921.

Becker, H.S., B. Geer, E.C. Hughes and A.L. Strauss 1961. Boys in White. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Bernstein, R.J. 2010. The Pragmatic Turn. Cambridge: Polity.Blumer, H. 1969. Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Brewer, J. 1988. The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1784. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.Calas, M., L. Smircich and K. A Courne. 2009. ‘Extending the Boundaries: Reframing ‘‘Entrepreneurship as Social

Change’’ Through Feminist Perspectives.’ Academy of Management Review 34: 552–69.Chapman, S.D. 1970. Jesse Boot of Boots the Chemist. London: Hodder and Stoughton.Cooley, C.H. 1902. Human Nature and the Social Order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Cunliffe, B. 2008. Europe Between the Oceans 9000BC-AD1000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Davidsson, P. 2008The Entrepreneurship Research Challenge, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.Devine, T.M. 1975. The Tobacco Lords: A Study of the Tobacco Merchants of Glasgow and their Trading Activity Edin-

burgh: John Donald.Devine, T.M. 2003. Scotland’s Empire and the Shaping of the Americas 1600–1815. Washington: Smithsonian Books.Fleming, P. and A. Spicer 2007. Contesting the Corporation: Struggle, Power and Resistance in Organizations, Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.Forte, A., R. Oram and F. Pedersen 2005. Viking Empires. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Friedland, R. and R. Alford 1991. ‘Bringing Society Back in: Symbols, Practices, and Institutional Contradictions.’

Pp. 232–63 in The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, edited by W.W. Powell and P.J. DiMaggio,Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

du Gay, P. 2000 In Praise of Bureaucracy: Weber, Organization, Ethics, London: Sage.du Gay, P. (ed.) 2005 The Values of Bureaucracy, Oxford: Oxford University Press.Giddens, A. 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Cambridge: Polity.Goss, D., R. Jones, M. Betta and J. Latham. 2011. ‘Power as Practice: A Micro-sociological Analysis of the

Dynamics of Emancipatory Entrepreneurship.’ Organization Studies 32(2). 211–29.Hillman, A.J., M.C. Withers and B.J. Collins 2009. ‘Resource Dependence: Theory: A Review.’ Journal of Manage-

ment 35: 1404–27.Hjorth, D., C. Jones and W. Gartner 2008. ‘Introduction to ‘Recreating ⁄ Recontextualising Entrepreneurship.’

Scandinavian Journal of Management 24: 81–4.Hughes, E.C. 1942. ‘The Study of Institutions.’ Social Forces 20: 307–10.Joas, H. 1996. The Creativity of Action. Cambridge: Polity Press.



Johannisson, B. 2011. ‘Towards a Practice Theory of Entrepreneuring.’ Small Business Economics 36: 135–50.Mead, G.H. 1934. Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Mills, C.W. 1956. The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press.Mills, C.W. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press.Mills, C.W. 1966. Sociology and Pragmatism. New York: Oxford University Press.Mills, C.W. 1970. The Sociological Imagination. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Mounce, H.O. 1997. The Two Pragmatisms. London: Routledge.Pfeffer, J. and G.R. Salancik. 1978. The External Control of Organizations: A Resource Dependence Perspective. Stanford,

CA: Stanford University Press.Reynolds, P.D. 1991. ‘Sociology and Entrepreneurship: Concepts and Contributions.’ Entrepreneurship, Theory and

Practice 16: 47–70.Rindova, V., D. Barry and D. Ketchen 2009. ‘Entrepreneuring as Emancipation.’ Academy of Management Review

34: 477–91.Ruef, M. 2010. The Entrepreneurially Group: Social Identities, Relations and Collective Action, Princeton: Princeton Uni-

versity Press.Ruef, M. and M. Lounsbury. 2007. ‘Introduction: The sociology of Entrepreneurship.’ Pp. 1–29 in The Sociology of

Entrepreneurship (Research in the Sociology of Organizations Vol. 25) edited by M. Ruef and M. Lounsbury.Greenwich, Conn: JAI Press.

Schumpeter, J. 1942. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. New York: Norton.Strauss, A.L. 1978. Negotiations: Varieties, Processes, Context and Social Order. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.Thomas, W.I. 1923. The Unadjusted Girl. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Thornton, P. and W. Ocasio 2008. ‘Institutional Logics.’ Pp. 99–129 in The Sage Handbook of Organizational Institu-

tionalism, edited by R. Greenwood, C. Oliver, K. Sahlin and R. Suddaby. London: Sage.Thornton, P.H. 1999. ‘The Sociology of Entrepreneurship.’ Annual Review of Sociology 25: 19–46.Thornton, P.H., D. Ribeiro-Soriano and D. Urbano 2011. ‘Socio-Cultural Factors and Entrepreneurial Activity an

Overview.’ International Small Business Journal 29: 105–18.Watson, T.J. 2009. ‘Work and the Sociological Imagi-nation: The Need for Continuity and Change in the Study of Continuity and Change.’ Sociology 43: 861–77.

Watson, T.J. 2009. ‘Work and the Sociological Imagination: The Need for Continuity and Change in the Study ofContinuity and Change.’ Sociology 43: 861–77.

Watson, T.J. 2011a. ‘Ethnography, Reality and Truth: The Vital Need for Studies of ‘How Things Work’ inOrganisations and Management.’ Journal of Management Studies 48: 202–17.

Watson, T.J. 2011b. ‘Pragmatism, Reality and Entrepreneurship: Entrepreneurial Action and Effectuation Perspec-tives.’ Pp. 161–74 in Perspectives in Entrepreneurship, edited by K. Mole and M. Ram. Basingstoke: Palgrave Mac-millan.

Watson, T.J. 2011c. The Personnel Managers: A Study in the Sociology of Work and Employment. London: Routledge(originally 1977).

Watson, T.J. 2012. Sociology, Work and Organisation. London: Routledge.Watson, T.J. forthcoming a. ‘Entrepreneurial Action and the Euro-American Social Science Tradition: Pragmatism,

Realism and Looking Beyond ‘the Entrepreneur’.’ Entrepreneurship and Regional Development.Watson, T.J. forthcoming b. ‘Entrepreneurship in Action: Studying Entrepreneurial Action in its Individual, Organ-

isational and Institutional Context’.’ Entrepreneurship and Regional Development.Watson, T.J. forthcoming c. ‘Pragmatism, Organisations and Getting to Grips with Reality.’ in American Pragmatism

and Organisations: New directions in theory and practice, edited by M. Keleman and N. Rumens. London: Gower.Wright, M. and S. Zahra 2011. ‘The Other Side of Paradise: Examining the dark side of entrepreneurship.’ Entre-

preneurship Research Journal 1: 1–5.



entrepreneurship – a suitable case for sociological treatment

Documents