Developing a Framework for Understanding How Media Entrepreneurs Act: An Actor-Network Perspective

Abstract

Despite the importance of entrepreneurs as the change agents of the societies as well as the rich history of entrepreneurship as a scholarly field of research, just a few scholars put emphasize on the agent-based views, especially after proposing the individual-opportunity nexus by Shane and Venkataraman (2001). One of the relevant approaches is the Actor-network theory (ANT) which is rarely used in the extant literature of entrepreneurship until Korsgaard (2011) highlighted this approach in his exceptional manuscript. Nevertheless, media entrepreneurs, such as Mark Zuckerberg who are the global change agents, are not studied using such an approach, i.e., ANT. These media entrepreneurs use numerous digital media platforms and technologies to explore, analyze, and exploit entrepreneurial opportunities in media markets. In this chapter, the authors review the existing literature, including opportunity discovery (the Kirznerian) and creation (the Schumpeterian) views, and then propose some propositions based on ANT. Finally, we suggest some directions for future research.