Entrepreneurship and process studies

Abstract

Process studies put movement, change and flow first; to study processually is to consider the world as restless, something underway, becoming and perishing, without end. To understand firms processually is to accept but also – and this is harder perhaps – to absorb this fluidity, to treat a variable as just that, a variable. The resonance with entrepreneurship studies is obvious. If any field is alive to, and fully resonant with, a processual understanding of, for example, the creation of firms, it is entrepreneurship studies. This special issue is an attempt to consider the promise and potential of processual approaches to studying, researching and practising entrepreneurship. The articles in the issue attest to an increasing sensitivity to processual thinking. We argue that appreciating entrepreneurial phenomena processually opens up the field to an understanding of entrepreneurship as organizational creation – not simply the creation of new organizations but also experiments in new organizational form.