Nordic entrepreneurship research.

Business administration is itself a young discipline and has moved (since the mid-1980s) into a more explorative and humanities-oriented discipline, affected by how the so-called linguistic and cultural turns have changed the humanities and social sciences (Gagliardi & Czarniawska, 2006). We welcome this development as it has recreated a creative adolescence for organization studies that has then turned into a promising conversational partner for entrepreneurship studies. NER in particular shows this tendency to keep the adolescence (cf. the New Movements in Entrepreneurship books: 2003, 2004, 2006, and 2008) and fascination of the first generation alive:

... students of entrepreneurship are like the alchemists, trying to

explain complex phenomena with four blunt variables: fire, water,

earth, and air (Peterson & Horvath, 1982, p. 374).

This, as Steyaert (2005) rightfully has pointed out, bear witness of the enthusiasm that characterized the inaugural years of entrepreneurship research, attracting people from "more boring fields" as Howard Aldrich put this (1992, p. 191). Agreeing with Schumpeter's distinction between an administrative/managerial and an entrepreneurial function by focusing on "what it means to act outside the pale of routine," (Schumpeter, 1949, in Swedberg, 1991, p. 258; see also Drucker, 1969) we took on the challenge to emphasize entrepreneurship research as entrepreneurial. As von Hayek was keen to point out (Gray, 1998, p. 81), we cannot hope to control the developments of social practices, here including research. What we tried instead was to cultivate "the general conditions in which beneficial results may be expected to emerge" (Gray, 1998, p. 81). These general conditions, as we have hinted above, are creativity/imagination, experimental and playful approaches, and a passionate curiosity (Hjorth & Steyaert, 2008; Chiles et al., 2007; Hjorth, 2005; Sarasvathy, 2001). Such catching curiosity is clearly oozing out from Johannisson's work on networks and regional development, as well as from Davidsson, Delmar, and Wiklund's (2006) on growth.

What should be added to the incomplete list of conditions in which we might expect results to emerge is primarily an openness to other fields, resulting in multidisciplinary research. We believe that entrepreneurship--as a creative effort, operating outside the pale of routine, of creating organization that summons the resources needed for actualizing the virtually real--is unusually well suited for the crossing of several disciplines. In this sense, it is typical of those young fields of research that will change the way science is understood and practiced simply by establishing a new order (conceptual, intellectual, and social), demanding new forms for organizing research, knowledge creation, and society (Steyaert & Hjorth, 2006; cf. Stengers, 1997). Science is no longer confined in its modern version where "dying to know" (Levine, 2002) was the principle of putting everything to rest in order to discover the laws that ruled its being. Instead, science has become part of a re-enchantment of the world, a joyous becoming, and "... great discoveries are not revealed on a deathbed like that of Copernicus, but offered, like Kepler's, on the road of living dreams and passion" (Moscovici, 1974, in Stengers, 1997, p. 40). We see entrepreneurship research flourishing when conducted in the spirit of those hot-wiring thinkers like Gilles Deleuze, Michel Serres, Bruno Latour, and Michel Foucault (here limited to the French) who have become entrepreneurial researchers through curiously grasping (-prendre) those topics that belonged to no one. In such in-betweens (entre-), they have invented (with) concepts that enhances possibilities for thinking, living, and creating.

Conclusion

As the third generation of entrepreneurship researchers--those who have taken PhD programs focused on entrepreneurship and written their theses focused on entrepreneurship research problems--now populate the field and chairs, and the second generation of entrepreneurship researchers, presently dominating the field, who were predominately immigrants from other disciplines--economics, psychology, and sociology--or other fields of research within business administration, are simultaneously leaving us, this begs the question: what will he lost and what will be gained? Again we believe that NER can be described as either influenced by an American tradition of specialization, paradigm building, and led by quantitative methodology, or as more European in the sense of more open to humanities and social sciences (and philosophy), more explorative-experimental in terms of study designs, and predominately qualitative methodology, see, e.g., Hjorth & Steyaert, 2004. There is still a strong policy-orientated stream of research in the Nordic countries, and this will most probably push in the direction of the quantitative. State departments, ministries, and national agencies want broad pictures, generalized conclusions and recommendations that can be "managed" centrally. Primarily, as public choice theory has informed us, they want to stay in power, wherefore more general trends decide whether entrepreneurship issues will remain popular and thus demand input from research. In the wake of the triple helix discussion, and the so-called mode 2 (or modus 2) research (and knowledge creation; Gibbons, Limoges, Novotny, & Schwartzman, 1994; Nowotny, Scott, & Gibbons, 2001)--i.e., a strong stakeholder oriented, practitioner-directed research--we believe we have seen a tendency to emphasize entrepreneurship as one part in what policy makers and practitioners at the present consider to be the bigger game: innovation.

The purpose of this article was to provide the reader with a sense of what Nordic in Nordic entrepreneurship research is, and to describe and discuss a recent image of this research. This has shown that NER represents a very active field of research and a broad range of topics studied and published over a wide spread of journals. Relationships to business administration and management and organization studies have been discussed in order to clarify the characteristically qualitative approaches and theoretical sparring in decision and organization theory. After a period of increasing division of labor, where various branches of NER have chosen different conversational partners to build clarity of message (strategic management, organization studies, policy makers, economic geography, classics, the GEM-community, etc.), the self-confidence needed for a multiplying of entrepreneurship research is soon established. This promises a more entrepreneurial entrepreneurship research to come. Such a new phase in NER might well be coordinated by more intense cross-national collaborations. Indeed, Bodo and BI (Handelshoyskolen BI [Bedrifisokonomisk Institutt]) in Norway, IDEA (International Danish Entrepreneurship Academy) in Denmark and Oresund Entrepreneurship Academy in Sweden/ Denmark, Circle (Centre for Innovation, Research and Competence in the Learning Economy), FSF (Forum For Smaforetagsforskning), ESBRI (Entrepreneurship and Small Business Research Institute), Jonkoping and Vaxjo in Sweden, and, e.g., Turku in Finland of course represent an incomplete list of partners with interest in bringing about a new era of Nordic entrepreneurship research along with the third generation of entrepreneurship researchers. Entrepreneurial entrepreneurship research has thus barely arrived. Appendix 1 Development of the Nordic Countries as Nation States Century Nordic POLITICAL ENTITies 21st Denmark (EU) Faroe islands Iceland

Denmark (Denmark) 20th 19th Denmark 18th Denmark-Norway (1536-1814) 17th 16th 15th 14th The Kalmar Union (1397-1521) 13th Denmark Norway 12th Faroe islands Icelandic CW Nordic peoples Danes Faroese Icelanders Century Nordic POLITICAL ENTITies 21st Norway Sweden (EU) Finland

Sweden (EU) 20th

Finland 19th Sweden-Norway (1815-1905) Go of Finland 18th Sweden 17th 16th 15th 14th 13th Sweden 12th Norway Nordic peoples Norwegians Swedes Finns Source: The Nordic Council (http://www.norden.org); Swedish National Encyclopedia. GD, Grand Duchy; CW, Commonwealth. Appendix 2 Databases Covered by the ELIN Search Tool Bottom of Form

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