Nordic entrepreneurship research.

What we find is that Sweden and Finland dominate in terms of participation. When it comes to topics for presentations, we can summarize this development as: small business focus goes down, entrepreneurship focus goes up--regional development goes up if we count in cluster, industrial districts and innovation systems studies. In the study of what theoretical basis that was in use in papers in-between 1980 and 1992, we find that organization studies dominate, followed by marketing, economics, and finance (Andersson, 1992, p. 13). (5) The strong position of organization studies in business administration generally is thus reflected in entrepreneurship research. Sweden in particular display a strong emphasis on organization theoretical frameworks, which therefore (due to the large proportion of participants being Swedes) influences the general picture. Swedish contributions have also predominantly used cases as empirical material, whereas Norway and Finland primarily use survey data (p. 21).

This rather crude image of NER obviously needs to be taken as merely an indicator. We have chosen to focus more carefully on publications between 2001 and 2006 in order to make possible focus, i.e., to bring NER into the high-resolution area--to get a sense of the curves and lines of this silhouette.

A Note on Tracing

The database searches include ELIN databases (Electronic Library Information Navigator, Swedish University system database for article search, see Appendix 2 for a list of the databases ELIN covers), on the word "entrepreneur." Whenever there was a "hit," we checked for authors of Nordic origin, i.e., Nordic authors whether based in a Nordic or non-Nordic position, which resulted in "hits" in 53 journals (see listed in Appendix 3.)

This does not exhaust the number of journals where Nordic countries' researchers have published on entrepreneurship, but it covers the greater part of it. Two ways of locating Nordic contributions have been used:

* General search on "entrepreneur" (thus including "entrepreneurship") as part of the title, abstract, or keywords in any of the journals included in ELIN (Appendix 2 shows the databases covered by ELIN) from 2001 until first quarter of 2006.

* Cross-checking with journals listed by eweb (maintained by Jerome Katz, St Louis University), so as to include those journals that ELIN might have missed. The total number of identified articles was 203. The purpose of this search--this needs to be stressed--has not been to generate a complete coverage of entrepreneurship publications, but to assist in this ambition to discuss NER.

Nordic Entrepreneurship Research--What Do They Write About?

The 203 hits are spread out over 53 different journals. This per se signals that entrepreneurship has matured as a discipline and is now spread over many journals, and that entrepreneurship is now also discussed as part of several social science journals' topics: the greater part of the 53 journals cannot be said to focus on entrepreneurship. Seventy-two of the 203 publications were Swedish (35%), 28 were Finish (14%), 21 were Norwegian (10%), and 10 were Danish (5%). There were no solely Icelandic publications, but 73 mixed, i.e., including mixes of Nordic authors (including Icelandic) or groups or pairs with at least one Nordic, and one or several non-Nordic authors (36%). The most common reason for a mixed authorship is when Nordic author(s) write(s) together with U.S. author(s). This publication pattern matches quite well the Nordic Conference participation historically. Only the Finns break the pattern in having a higher participation at the conference compared to publication. The other countries more or less stick to the pattern: Sweden 35%, Norway 10-14%, and Denmark 5% (1990 conference, when in Copenhagen, there were 25% Danish).

Small Business Economics has 29 articles (15%, roughly half of them published by business administration researchers), Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development 23 (12%), followed by Entrepreneurship and Regional Development with 17 articles (9%), Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice with 14, which is the same number as the Journal of Business Venturing (7% each). Journal of Enterprising Culture (12 articles), Journal of International Entrepreneurship (11 articles), and Family Business Review (10 articles) are the other journals with 10 or more articles. Thirty-four journals--64% of the journals represented--are single-hit journals. This means that 16.7% of all publications are single-hits in their journal. Strong themes in these 203 articles are: growth, network(ing) and interorganizational cooperation, government policy on entrepreneurship (incentives), entrepreneurship research (direction and development of), financing/venture capital, entrepreneurial orientation/firm performance, internationalization, and regional/ local development. One cannot find clear divisions of labor between the countries when it comes to research topics. Growth and financing are strong topics in Finish research, whereas financing and state intervention/stimulus is big in Norwegian research. The Swedish picture also includes growth and state intervention/stimulus as big themes. However, the status and development of entrepreneurship research is the most common theme. Network and network approaches and family businesses are also big themes in Swedish research. Taking into account that all journals are not equally quick at getting their publications into searchable databases, and that 2006 is an incomplete year (search stopped by end of May 2006, when 20 publications were registered), the spread per year (2001-2005) looks like this (Figure 2).

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

An estimation for 2006 based upon the number of articles registered during the first quarter of that year (20) would suggest that the increase is at least as high as indicated by the difference between 2004 and 2005. One can thus conclude that the trend is clearly pointing at a strong increase of output. Why is this? The current study allows us only to speculate about the reasons for this. We believe, however, that it is fair to say that among the driving forces that an extended study would find behind this development, the following ones are probable:

* The expansion of "the field" during the years 1995-2005 has led to a critical mass of entrepreneurship scholars and PhD students within the area that, by sheer number, push the volume of published papers up. If the concept of a critical mass indicates something important, it would be that such a mass increases the quality of research, which in turn would increase the number of publications;

* The Nordic countries, during the past 5 years, have all experienced political processes that have put a number of policies in place which support entrepreneurship in society. Part of the consequences of this is that research funds directed to entrepreneurship have increased along with the competition for them. One could argue also that this would have positive effects on the quality of research.

* So far the supply side. On the demand side, we can note with Jerome Katz (2003, p. 292) that the number of academic journals have doubled every 3 years on average. There have been some signs of this tempo slowing down since Katz's study. Indeed, the expansion of the demand side makes Katz's reflection that the journal supply probably outgrows the researcher supply accurate: "For example, the Entrepreneurship Division of the Academy of Management grew from 600 to 800 members in a 10-year period (1987-1996), while the number of journals grew from three to 26 during the same time" (p. 292). Even though NER is not perfectly shadowing the development in the U.S., it indicates that the demand for publications in the area is by now rather high.

* Finally, as indicated by the list of journals above, entrepreneurship is now an accepted topic in most, if not all, of the mainstream and A-journals in the field of business administration. This in turn extends the publication possibilities in addition to the presence of new journals.

Discussing Tendencies of Nordic Entrepreneurship Research

Strong Qualitative Research Tradition

Research oriented towards studying the world by creating qualitative data realizes that it is "... precisely by general extension that laws miss the really-felt intensity (vivacity) of events" (Massumi, 2002, p. 247, emphasis in the original). That is, generalization misses the eventness of the studied, something particularly important in "making new," i.e., in studies of entrepreneurship. In line with the emic approach, we therefore seek to avoid that "... close analysis go up in a puff of abstraction" (as put by Gallagher & Greenblatt, 2000, p. 19). There is therefore a resistance from within Nordic research to contribute to a general theory of entrepreneurship, to stabilizing paradigms, or to the much-embraced agenda of Low and MacMillan (1988; cf. Davidsson, Low, & Wright, 2001). The tendency is instead to ask from our research endeavors: "Is it interesting, relevant, and beautiful?" (Czarniawska, 2004).