Towards a Multi-modal Causation Framework of Entrepreneurship

Résumé 0

"Recent surveys on the state of the art in entrepreneurial research, fail to draw a coherent "big picture" out of the vast array of contributions to the fi eld. Neither the competence nor the knowledgability of the authors can be questioned as they are among the best specialists of the field. The roots of the problem are concealed in the unreliable epistemic and philosophical foundations of many of these contributions. This explains the resulting cacophony of fragmented approaches and unrelated empirical findings that instead of adding precision to the overall picture contributes to an ever increasing level of noise. The paper uses the Swiss data on enterprise demographics to show that the statistically recorded number of enterprises depends heavily on the definition used. The differences among definitions and their plurality suggest that the reality of the "enterprise" is a diverse one. As the enterprise is the normal outcome of an entrepreneurial process, there are good reasons to believe that the latter is as least as multi-dimensional as the former. The paper attempts at using the Aristotelian multi-causal explanatory pattern to provide the basis of a conceptual framework for the study of entrepreneurship. Even if the empirical base is not explicitly acknowledged here, the framework has been validated by in-depth interviews conducted with 37 young (younger than 5 years) enterprises between 2003-2005 in the region of Fribourg (Switzerland)."