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

Journal articles on entrepreneurship topics began to multiply in the second half of the 1990s. The Revue Internationale PME (RIPME), a mainly Francophone journal dedicated to small business studies and edited in Quebec, Canada, became an important outlet for French scholars. While the first volume was published in 1988, articles in the field of entrepreneurship appear significantly from 1995 on in RIPME. In 2001, the first entrepreneurship journal based in France, Revue de l'Entrepreneuriat (RENT), was founded and three volumes have appeared since then. Articles in the field can also be found in other management journals like Revue Francaise de Gestion, Finance Controle Strategie, Revue Sciences de Gestion, Gestion 2000, Management International, etc.

In sum, from an international perspective, entrepreneurship is a relatively young research field in France, emerging with a certain time lag compared with the United States and several European countries like the United Kingdom, Germany, or Sweden (see the articles of Blackburn & Smallbone, Schmude, Welter, & Heumann, or Hjorth in this special issue). The 1985-1995 decade marks a growing interest for the field of entrepreneurship and is the emerging period of entrepreneurship research in France. In the following decade (1996-2005) the volume of research outcomes (conference papers, articles, books) related to entrepreneurship increased considerably and the field in itself became recognized by the research community (Marchesnay, 2007, p. 8). Consequently, we will focus on this "take-off" period to present the nature and focus of entrepreneurship research in France.

Methodology

We proceed in the following way to describe the nature and focus of entrepreneurship research in France. First, we concentrate on doctoral research as an indicator to describe the themes, methods, and specificities of research. Second, we review articles and conferences papers published or presented in what we consider important discussion forums for French entrepreneurship scholars. Third, we measure the visibility of French research outcomes in major international journals.

Observation Period and Data

As specified in the previous section, we concentrate on the take-off period of entrepreneurship research in France, the 1996-2005 decade. This observation period is comparable to other studies of French scholars that review the evolution or nature of entrepreneurship research in France (e.g., Kizaba & Betourne, 2007; Paturel, 2004).

In detail, the data (Table 2) cover two journals devoted to entrepreneurship research that publish research outcomes in French language and which the French-speaking research community considers as important outlets for their publication: The small business research journal RIPME and the journal entirely devoted to entrepreneurship, RENT. We complete these journal data with a systematic review of every paper presented at the two main French-speaking conferences dedicated to entrepreneurship has been reviewed: CIFEPME and AE.

To collect our data, we read and classified every article and conference paper of our sample. In order to cover also the period where French (speaking) research outcomes emerged significantly, we traced back the evolution of entrepreneurship articles in the RIPME journal between 1988 and 1995 (Table 2 and Figure IS).

For the period between 1996 and 2005, a total of 618 contributions that appeared in the above defined journals and conferences have been counted (170 articles and 448 papers; Table 2). Seventeen articles, published in the entrepreneurship journal RENT, and 30 articles in the small business journal RIPME are identified as entrepreneurship focused (123 are devoted to small business studies). Out of the 448 conference papers, 206 put their focus on entrepreneurship. Included in the definition of entrepreneurship research are contributions that focus clearly on new organizations, organizational change linked to entrepreneurship activities (transmission of family firms, intrapreneurship, etc.), and types of entrepreneurs (nascent, novice, serial, etc.).

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In sum, 253 entrepreneurship contributions (articles and conference papers) constitute the database for our analysis. As a point of reference, this number is equivalent to the number of entrepreneurship papers presented at Academy of Management meeting in 2005 (254 in 64 paper sessions; http://meetings.aomonline.org/2005/).

Classification and Data Coding

Entrepreneurship as a heterogeneous, interdisciplinary, academic field covers a wide range of research topics. Many attempts of classifying entrepreneurship into different themes have been undertaken that can serve as a framework in order to identify the focus of entrepreneurship research in France (e.g., Low & Macmillan, 1988; Westhead & Wright, 2000). Low and Macmillan (1988), for example, identify three main elements to understand the entrepreneurial phenomenon: process, context, and outcomes. Aldrich and Martinez (2001) advanced this framework and suggested an evolutionary approach. They argue that process and context interact in a recursive continuous process that determines entrepreneurial success. For our purpose we choose the framework of Ucbasaran et al. (2001), published in the same issue of ETP as Aldrich and Martinez cited above. Ucbasaran et al. (2001) undertake an extensive literature review and classify entrepreneurial research into six themes: theoretical antecedents, type of entrepreneur, entrepreneurial process, type of organization, outcome, and external environment (Table 3).

We first classified the articles and papers into themes following our framework. Moreover, we added a seventh category "Other," for the papers that did not correspond to any of the themes described in Table 3.

In the next step, we classified the papers according to their "nature" in four categories:

* Contributions to theory, theory discussions, or review of theories.

* Contributions to methodology and contributions to epistemology.

* Contributions using qualitative approaches (surveys, case studies, field studies, etc.).

* Contributions using quantitative approaches (secondary databases, empirical and statistical techniques, etc.).

For the classification of the articles and papers into those categories (themes, methods, etc.) we proceeded by title, abstract and, key word analysis. In the first step, the authors and research assistants independently classified each paper or article. After that, we compared the results of each individual coding and decided to which category a paper would belong. When there were discrepancies between the reviewers (<10% of the papers), further sections of the studies (methods, results, conclusion, etc.) were included to clarify the classification of a contribution.

Definitions

We measure the visibility of entrepreneurship research by considering three types of contributors:

* First, scholars and researchers who publish in the two French/Francophone entrepreneurship journals (RIPME, (6) RENT).

* Second, scholars and researchers who present papers in two French (speaking) entrepreneurship conferences (CIFEPME, AE).

* Third, French-based researchers who publish in international, top ranked journals. This category includes scholars and researchers in management sciences with an affiliation to French universities, business schools, and other research institutions. International visibility is measured through the publication of articles in the three following journals: JBV, ERD, and ETP.

These criteria enable us to capture as precisely as possible, regarding the scope of our analysis, the French academic and research landscape. This list of contributors also includes "incomers" to the French system, scholars of non-French origins with French-based affiliation or foreign scholars presenting papers in the French conferences, or publishing in the two French-speaking journals in our sample.

The Nature and Focus of Entrepreneurship Research in France

In the following sections, we analyze doctoral research and research outcomes, such as conference papers or journal articles, in order to clarify and to discuss such a French touch of entrepreneurship research.

Doctoral Research in Entrepreneurship

Emergence of Doctoral Research and University Clusters. Doctoral research is an important indicator to highlight specificities and to clarify the positioning of an academic field as it reflects academic traditions, theoretical or methodological preferences, and privileged topics. It reveals the transmission of knowledge and skills from the PhD supervisor to the generation of doctoral candidates as future actors and leaders of the research community. Doctoral research is also an indicator for the emergence and life cycle of specific themes, topics, and academic fields.