Nordic entrepreneurship research.

In the context of Nordic business administration research and its predominantly qualitative, idiographic, and nominalist forms, it is important to remember that the perspective in use (nonessentialist, building on the so-called linguistic turn) will become part of research discussed. That is, language is actively part of constructing what is presented. It does not represent an external reality, but provides a program for generating it. It is significant for Nordic business administration research, not that this is performed as a cultural practice, for this is of course characteristic for all research, but that this Nordic culture reduces the relative number of "real researchers afraid of collecting soft data," as it once was put (Gherardi & Turner, 1987; the title was "Real Men Don't Collect Soft Data"). By this we mean to say that the element of natural science envy that has pushed younger disciplines to prioritize the language of mathematics/statistics as a route to gain legitimacy as a field of research is less present in Nordic business administrative research. This has spilled over (probably through methodology courses in PhD programs) into NER. There is, however, no simple way to explain this tendency, which seems to grow stronger in the younger generation of researchers (Landstrom & Johannisson, 2001). Landstrom and Johannisson (2001) identified 35 doctoral theses (presented between 1970 and 1995) in their quest for a theoretical foundation in Swedish entrepreneurship and small business research. Thirty of the 35 are case-based studies, and they conclude that Swedish entrepreneurship and small business research follow the strong general trend in management: "... a strong qualitative research tradition" (Landstrom & Johannisson, 2001, p. 231). PhD theses in entrepreneurship from 2006 are, in the case of Sweden, dominated by qualitative research (e.g., Berglund, 2007; Bill, 2006; Gawell, 2007). It is also quite possible that entrepreneurship as a field in total is moving in another direction or slower into the Nordic one. Wiklund, Dimov, Katz, and Shepherd (2006, p. 1), as well as Chiles et al. (2007), both provide support for the tendency reported here.

Regardless of direction, the emergence of entrepreneurship research has resulted in an independent field of study, which, to the extent that it is affected by organization studies, also will become more qualitatively oriented. And to the extent that it will operate as a specifically mesolevel-oriented analysis (where macroincentives from politicians meet actions of entrepreneurs), it is more likely that quantitative methods will dominate. On the other hand, as commented above, a young discipline's anxious self-scrutiny always tends to drive and push the quantitative side so as to gain legitimacy and pass as "mature" (cf. Cornelius, Landstrom, & Persson, 2006). In this sense, mainstream/past business administration research has understood quantitative as "normal" and the "safer route" to becoming a science proper. However, the so-called "Science Wars" of the 1990s, relevant to entrepreneurship research primarily (as its reverberations have not been so much felt yet in our field), have made it less evident that the distinction natural-social is as clarifying as historically assumed (Latour, 1987, 2000). Latour (2000) turns the argument on its head, pointing out that:

Contrary to microbes and electrons who never abandon their capacity

to object since they are not easily influenced by the interest of

experiments, too remote from their own conatus (not to say

interest), humans are so easily subjected to influence that they

play the role of an idiotic object perfectly well, as soon as white

coats ask them to sacrifice their recalcitrance in the name of

higher scientific goals (this is what happened in Milgram's lab

whose experiment proves nothing more than that a psychologist can

indeed be the torturer of his students!) (p. 116, emphasis in

original).

As the "childhood years" of entrepreneurship research now seems to be over (the great number of academic journals, chairs, conferences, monographs, special issues, etc. all indicate this; cf. Katz, 2003; Steyaert & Hjorth, 2003), the anxiousness about not being mature enough might also pass, opening up for a different proportion of qualitative-quantitative, corresponding to business administration generally in the Nordic countries. In addition, this anxiousness could well be stilled by the large impact that reflexive critical sociology (e.g., Latour and Science and Technology Studies, and Luhman and new systems theory) and poststructuralist/new pragmatist philosophy (Foucault, Deleuze, and Rorty) have on Nordic business administration research, and the consequent effect that we reflexively recognize how we operate as researchers and how we increasingly become aware that all science is situated knowledge (Roberts & Mackenzie, 2006).

A Future of a Third Generation Nordic Entrepreneurship Research

The renaissance of NER (second generation) started out in the 1980s as this topic that historically had found no real home in any discipline (i.e., interdisciplinary by birth?). For sure, already in 1946, there was an American (Harvard)-Austrian (Schumpeter) research initiative in place: a research center focusing on entrepreneurship (Katz, 2003) as part of history-oriented economics. But entrepreneurship research grew only as part of the business school world, and, following a number of preparatory research initiatives in the mid- and late 1970s, it was ready for the 1980s' take off. In the case of the Nordic countries, this take off is dated to the 1990s, with early exceptions in economics by Erik Dahmen (1950), and in family business studies by Bengt Johannisson (1978). This is when the political, social, cultural, and conjunctural forces needed for entrepreneurship to become a productive discourse were all in place (Hjorth, 2003). In addition, management literature had boiled dry on concepts of quality management, human resource management, and various systems for back office automation. One could not face the immediate future of speed, flexibility, and innovativeness without getting the enterprising employee in place--something that needed a new governmental rationality to maneuver into operation: managerial entrepreneurship. Management was once invented to deal with the age-old problem of getting people to get things done, as Hoskin (1998, 2006) has well described. As both Schumpeter and now Hoskin have pointed out, management and business administration are historically not about creation, but rather about execution. Nothing to be ashamed of, well needed, and central to the wealth of people, organizations, and nations. We remind you of this short history for the purpose of emphasizing that there is no historically grounded reasons as to why entrepreneurship research should necessarily be part of management. It rather answers to the fact that management needed a means by which it could claim to be reaching for a new goal that matched the requirements of a new economy: the entrepreneurial, innovative, and creative organization. To our minds, the unfortunate effect of this was rather that entrepreneurship was transformed into a managerial tool. What we have yet to see is the coming of an entrepreneurial entrepreneurship. An emerging third generation of Nordic entrepreneurship research(ers) seems to move in this direction.

This historical reflection (see also Hjorth, Johannisson, & Steyaert, 2003) is important as it makes it possible to point out a decisive difference between Anglo-American entrepreneurship research and Nordic: the latter is certainly part of management research, but to a much lesser extent than the former. NER is better described as part of the broader business administration and its characteristically pluralistic and heterogeneous research tradition. It leans more against organization studies than on management, something that was noted already in Andersson's comment on the history of the Nordic Conference in 1992, where organization and marketing/organization as "main subjects" together account for 65% of all the presented papers. Also Landstrom and Johannisson (2001) attest that organization studies and decision theory are fields in which entrepreneurship and small business research (in Sweden) are deeply conceptually rooted. What we can expect from this distinction between the Nordic and the Anglo-American is more of what we see already today:

* Entrepreneurship research is establishing itself as a discipline alongside rather than inside management.

* Entrepreneurship is now exporting to neighbor disciplines rather than only importing from, as was characteristic for the inaugural years.

* The recent search for clear definitions and stable identities for unifying paradigms and broader theoretical consensus is now followed by an affirmation of the sublime (Jones & Spicer, 2005), multiple (Hjorth & Steyaert, 2003; Steyaert, 2005), and contextually varying "object"/practice of entrepreneurship (Chiles et al., 2007). This development will become stronger as the research school infrastructure in entrepreneurship, which has been in place since the early 1990s in the Nordic countries, will continue to foster researchers for which entrepreneurship research is their academic home.