The nature and focus of entrepreneurship research in France over the last decade: a French touch?

This article gives an overview of the specificities of entrepreneurship research in France, paying attention to its emergence, nature, and focus. Reviewing 253 articles and conference papers from two journals and two conferences, considered main outlets for research outcomes from French scholars, our findings reveal a distinctive "French touch" of entrepreneurship research. The main facets we were able to identify with our data for the 1995 to 2005 period are as follows. There is a preference for qualitative methods, conceptual contributions, and the entrepreneurial process as privileged research theme. A particular strength of the French approach is also a strong focus of small and medium-sized organizations. The "French touch" of entrepreneurship research could make a distinctive contribution to the international research community and the mainstream debate. However, mainly French-speaking dissemination of knowledge and (still) insufficient international journal-oriented output strategies limit the diffusion of French entrepreneurship research. Implications for academic institutions and future research are discussed.

Introduction

The term "entrepreneur" was introduced by the "Irish-born-French" financier, Richard Cantillon, in his published essay The General Nature of Trade (Essai sur la nature du commerce en general; Hamilton & Harper, 1994, p. 3; Hebert & Link, 1988, p. 152). Cantillon (1756) described the entrepreneur as the one who takes the risk of being self-employed. Paradoxically, the word "entrepreneur" is French in its entirety, but France has generally not been regarded as an especially "entrepreneurial" country. On the contrary, while the English aristocracy invested in new ventures during the first and second industrial revolution, the climate for entrepreneurship was less supportive in France: "In the French social structure the businessman had always held an inferior place.... he was detested from the start by the nobility, which rightly saw in him a subversive element. ... Against the practical, materialistic values of the businessman, it [the aristocracy] set the consciously impractical, unmaterialistic values of the gentleman. Against the restless ambition of the parvenu, it placed the prestige of birth; against the mercurial efficacy of money, the solid stability of land; against the virtues of diligence and austerity, the dignity of leisure and the splendor of pomp and circumstance" (Landes, 1949, p. 55).

After World War II, during the economic period entitled les trente glorieuses in France (1946-1973), the entrepreneur in particular and small business entrepreneurship in general were either ignored or considered "obstacles to modernity" to cite Marchesnay (2007). Fayolle (2000), comparing the United States and France, explains the ambivalent attitude toward entrepreneurship in France with historical and cultural factors: the predominant role of the state, individual attitude toward money and capital, seeking of privileges, and a high risk aversion.

Torres (2001) complains that France lags considerably behind in terms of entrepreneurship. He argues that in French society entrepreneurial spirit and attitude is not enough encouraged or rewarded. Entrepreneurship and small businesses (SME) are often similar in the mindset of people to "traditional" activities like trade or crafts (metiers; Torres, 2001, p. 5). Comparing entrepreneurship and SME across different world regions, Torres identifies four types of entrepreneurs: (1) liberal, networking, informal, and corporatist entrepreneurs. The French "corporatist" entrepreneur is characterized as the one who seeks opportunities in activities with small measures of evolution, adopting a rather anti-competition attitude (Torres, 2001, p. 12). Not surprising then, the results of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) confirm a low level of French entrepreneurship activity. The entrepreneurial activity index measured for France between 1999 and 2006 is constantly below the average of the annual GEM country samples (Acs, Arenius, Hay, & Minniti, 2005; Bosma & Harding, 2007; Minniti, Bygrave, & Autio, 2006; Reynolds, Bygrave, & Autio, 2004; Reynolds, Bygrave, Autio, Cox, & Hay, 2002; Reynolds, Camp, Bygrave, Autio, & Hay, 2001; Reynolds, Hay, & Camp, 1999, p. 35; Reynolds, Hay, Bygrave, Camp, & Autio, 2000).

Entrepreneurship as a societal phenomenon suffers from lack of recognition. An example for the perception of entrepreneurship in France from an international and non-academic viewpoint, are the words of President G.W. Bush, who said in 2002 "the French have no word for entrepreneur" (remark made during a discussion of the French economy at the 2002 G8 Summit, as reported in The Times, London, 9 July 2002). The conclusion for academia reflects this situation: Research outcomes of French scholars are barely visible internationally. The French entrepreneurship research landscape is a rather "unknown" territory and its scholars rarely publish in top ranked entrepreneurship journals. A review of Journal of Business Venturing (JBV), Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice (ETP), and Entrepreneurship and Regional Development (ERD) reveals the hard truth that articles published by French scholars are more the exception than the rule: Slightly more than a dozen articles have been published in the last decade. Culture, language barriers for those located in non-English speaking countries, or the argument that entrepreneurship as a discipline is fragmented among specialists who make little use of each other's work (Ucbasaran, Westhead, & Wright, 2001, p. 57) cannot alone explain the fact that French entrepreneurship research rarely crosses national boundaries. Many European scholars encounter the same constraints.

European research in the field of entrepreneurship expands, but the contribution of French entrepreneurship research remains unclear for the international community. Epistemological and methodological choices of French scholars outline a certain distinctiveness of the way research is conducted in France, which is worthwhile to investigate and to discuss internationally. According to Saporta (2003), French entrepreneurship research is characterized by a strong focus on designing conceptual models of the entrepreneurial process (e.g., Bruyat, 1993, 2001; Deschamps, 2002; Deschamps & Paturel, 2001; Fayolle, 2001; Verstraete, 2001). From a methodological perspective, French scholars seem to have a preference for qualitative methods. Case studies are an important source of empirical data; they are conducted with a huge diversity of approaches (Saporta, 2003).

Against this background, it is interesting to ask for the specificity and focus of entrepreneurship research in France. Is there such a thing as a "French touch" in entrepreneurship research? Why are research outcomes rather French-centric than international? Addressing these questions, the objective of this article is to present an overview about French entrepreneurship research in the last decade.

In the next sections we describe the emergence of entrepreneurship research in France, present our methodology, analyze the nature and focus, discuss our findings, and offer future research directions and implications.

The Emergence of Entrepreneurship Research in France

A brief summary of the emergence of international discussion forums and journals dedicated to entrepreneurship research is necessary to ground the appearance of the field in France. In the early 1980s, the first exclusively entrepreneurship-focused conferences appeared and Babson College started its annual conference in 1981. However, while entrepreneurship research started to emerge in Europe since the mid-1980s, in the United States more than 50 departments and 52 full professors in universities already existed in this field (Katz, 1991). In 2002, 93 U.S. centers devoted to entrepreneurship were established, and the number of endowed chairs in entrepreneurship seemed to grow so quickly in the 1990s that some were vacant for several years (Aldrich, 2005). Today, major conferences in management science like the Academy of Management or the Strategic Management Society have well-established forums of discussion among entrepreneurship scholars in the form of divisions, interest groups, and presenter tracks.

The establishment of journals is another important indicator or milestone to outline the emergence of a research field or discipline. The lack of academic entrepreneurship journals was addressed in 1985 with the start of the JBV. Three years later, in 1988, the American Journal of Small Business was renamed Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice. In the same year the ERD was founded. Today, these three plus another two journals (Journal of Small Business Management and Small Business Economics) are generally recognized as the "big 5" of entrepreneurship research (Katz, 2005).

In France, entrepreneurship papers started to appear as a "niche phenomenon" in general management conferences like the Association Internationale de Management Strategique (2) (AIMS, established in 1992) in the early 1990s. In 1993, more than 10 years after the Babson Conference started, the Conference Internationale Francophone en entrepreneuriat et PME (3) (CIFEPME (4)) was founded as a forum for research on small business studies and entrepreneurship (Table 1). This combination illustrates the strong link between both fields, which is typical for the French context. In 1999, the Academie de l'Entrepreneuriat (AE) was organized as the first conference entirely devoted to entrepreneurship.