Navigating the growing field of entrepreneurship inquiry: successionist and relational modes of theory development

Reflecting the energy and enthusiasm of a growing multi-disciplinary field, entrepreneurship inquiry has generated a profusion of research practices associated with understanding and fostering entrepreneurial attitudes, behaviours, environments, processes, structures and discourses. The research output that has been generated poses both an opportunity and a challenge. The opportunity concerns the possibility of combining multiple perspectives in new and innovative ways (Pittaway, 2011). The challenge concerns the problem of navigating the navigating the complex landscape of entrepreneurship research output (Murphy, 2011). The problem of field navigation persists because the criteria that has been used to differentiate research output, such as ontological and epistemological positions, explanatory foci, levels of analysis and research methods, are elements in the theory development process, that are neither mutually exclusive nor directly comparable. We propose, therefore, that the challenge of field navigation can be addressed by grouping and comparing entrepreneurship perspectives in terms of modes of theory development. In this article, we discuss how actions, contexts and outcomes are universal units of theory building and that causal relationships between actions, contexts and outcomes are organized temporally in the sense that they are related either successively or contemporaneously.