Nordic entrepreneurship research.

The above presented patterns we believe reflect a history and sociality in the Nordic countries of a state-governed welfare system that has attempted to take on a large responsibility when it comes to providing "equal opportunities" for all. As a consequence, it has for long been generally agreed that the state's possibilities to design the incentive structure or provide structural coordinates for action for people are fairly good. It follows that the level of entrepreneurial activity (intimately associated with business start-ups and thus job creation in most official discourses) also has become a target for state design. Thus, lots of efforts and money have been assigned to this task: to increase the level of entrepreneurial activity. Generally, the belief in the state's possibilities in stimulating peoples' behaviors in various directions is relatively high in the Nordic countries. We may speculate whether this is one reason why entrepreneurship research is such a relatively large field of research in the Nordic countries. What is more interesting, though, is, of course, that if the large responsibility of the state, the fairly generous support to secure "equal opportunities" in the social security system as a whole, is reflected also in the support for stimulating entrepreneurship, we should perhaps expect to see a much higher entrepreneurial activity in the Nordic countries generally than we do (see Table 5). On the other hand, we could well argue that the Nordic countries have not had a tradition of state-provided incentives for increasing the entrepreneurial activity. As Kanniainen and Vesala (2005) shows, unemployment compensation (negatively related) and union bargaining power (negatively related) do affect the entrepreneurial activity, which means that welfare systems, such as in the Nordic countries, with relatively high unemployment compensation and high union bargaining powers would expect lower entrepreneurial activity. Also, Henrekson (2005, p. 437) concludes that "an entrepreneurial culture and a welfare state are very remotely related," implying that even state-initiated strengthening of entrepreneurial incentives may not have that much effect in the shorter run. The concept of "the welfare state" has apparently not made possible an inclusion of entrepreneurship into the frame of a general concern.

Entrepreneurship in the Nordic Countries

Background

Indeed, if we are GEM-report (4) readers, "Nordic" might indicate the group of countries composed by Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden that typically score low-medium on entrepreneurship indexes. Historically, they group differently, depending on what is measured: Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth--Iceland on top and Denmark at the bottom, early stage entrepreneurial activity--Iceland on top and Sweden at the bottom, venture capital investments (per GDP)--Sweden on top and Finland at the bottom, and informal investments--Iceland on top and Sweden at the bottom (Acs, Arenius, Hay, & Minniti, 2004).

GEM-statistics provide examples of how cultural homogeneity, to the extent we can say there is, does not simply produce corresponding entrepreneurial activity. Historical, geographical, and social (including linguistic) "similarities" does not necessarily translate into similarities in culture and everyday practices. When the GEM-research team (2003) compares "entrepreneurial activity," we typically arrive at a pattern that could form the basis for both stressing the similarities and stressing the differences amongst the Nordic countries (see Table 7).

And if we look at the development of entrepreneurial activity in the Nordic countries (Acs et al., 2004; Acs, Arenius, Hay, & Minniti, 2005), Norway and Iceland typically form their own group, whereas Denmark, Finland, and Sweden form theirs (see Table 6).

An important additional part of the context of the recent entrepreneurship research history is reported in Landstrom, Franck, and Veciana (1997), where we learn about an indicator of the academic infrastructure in entrepreneurship up to that date--the presence of chairs in entrepreneurship in the Nordic countries: Denmark (0), Finland (11), Norway (3), Sweden (4), and Iceland (no figure). This indicator is still important as it has descriptive value at the present, indicating the relative activity when it comes to raising funds for entrepreneurship research in the early and mid-1990s. Today, this picture has changed, and all countries have moved ahead so that, e.g., Denmark now has chair(s) in entrepreneurship, and Sweden about 10 (some limited in time). However, Finland did move earlier (particularly in education, EC-report, 2002; Lundstrom, 2005), more strongly and faster into developing an academic infrastructure in entrepreneurship. Sweden and Norway followed, whereas Denmark has been rather slow.

With this historical and sociocuitural background, we can now draw the image of NER. This is indeed a silhouette as the full portrait is impossible to put together. Portraits or silhouettes are only still-life versions of an ongoing motion picture. The visual language is used here to point out, in a typically nominalist Nordic business administration research tradition, that the language, concepts, and forms of expression in use are actively part of the result, as is the paint in shaping the portrait.

Disciplinary Context

Discussing entrepreneurship research in the Nordic countries can be done in several ways. We have decided to approach this more performatively, though. This means that we want to exemplify with my writing what we find characteristic for NER. We can summarize this as follows (Landstrom & Johannisson, 2001; Spilling, 1998):

1. Entrepreneurship research is mainly housed by the discipline of business administration;

2. Business administration in the Nordic countries is dominated by organization studies (new institutionalism being a dominant line with influences from DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Powell & DiMaggio, 1991, and Selznick, 1949/1984, organizational sociology being another with Luhmann, 1995 as central, and decision-making theory with the so-called Carnegie Tech School of Herbert Simon, 1945 and followers like Brunsson, 1985; Cyert & March, 1992 [1963]; March & Olsen, 1976; March & Simon, 1958; Thompson, 1967).

3. Nordic business administration research is predominantly idiographic, nominalist, nonpositivist, and qualitative in terms of methodological camp (cf. Arbnor & Bjerke, 1977 for an early contribution to this methodology in business administration). This has meant that the linguistic and cultural turns in social sciences and humanities have influenced business administration research in the Nordic countries quite "heavily." One may observe this in a number of characteristics of Nordic business administration research (Czarniawska & Sevon, 2003):

* Knowledge sociological influences--Berger and Luckmann (1967)--referred to as constructivism/constructionism, was early on a characteristic element in Nordic business administration research (e.g., exemplified in the SIAR [Swedish Institute for Administrative Research] school, founded in the mid-1960s at Lund University, associated with a process approach in Argyris and Schon, 1978).

* Longitudinal field study designs and focus on "cases" for generating material have been widely used. Anthropological influences have thereby been distinct with ethnographic methods as consequently in use. Czarniawska (1990, 1992) is a central example of this anthropological influence in Nordic organization studies.

* The 1990s in particular meant that the poststructuralist development in philosophy during the 1970s and 1980s influenced Nordic business administration research with subsequent problematizations of the status of the author, the formation of subjectivities, the production of science and scientific facts/truths (for which Bruno Latour's work, e.g., Latour, 1993; Latour & Woolgar, 1986, has been central), and of writing (styles, tropes [Skoldberg, 1990] and forms of knowledge [Czarniawska, 1997]).

What does the relationship between business administration and entrepreneurship research look like then? Although entrepreneurship as the subject of research is generally traced back to economics as its disciplinary cradle, business administration is the discipline in which the renaissance of entrepreneurship studies takes place during the 1980s and 1990s. This is certainly the case in Nordic business administration research. We cannot disregard the positive relationship between qualitative methodology and entrepreneurship research. The early developments of qualitative approaches made business administration researchers in the Nordic countries interested in anthropologically inspired fieldwork, longitudinal studies, and in-depth material on particular subjects. This meant small business research due to closeness and relatively generous access. The step from there to entrepreneurship research was (and is) not far. Indeed, the focus on studying small businesses "on sight" was formulated early on as a "barefoot approach" in research by Dick Ramstrom (1971) at Umea University, Sweden. Being "in the field" has meant being among SMEs in this respect. If the start represented an empirical focus on small companies, the development since have taken research more into a theoretical focus on entrepreneurship.

Nordic Entrepreneurship Research--Recent History

Studying the development of the "Nordic Conference on Small Business Research" provides a good basis for describing the intra-Nordic differences in entrepreneurship research. Looking at participation at this conference, we find the following pattern (see Table 7).