Studying entrepreneurial agency: Progressing toward process-oriented and contextually informed approaches

In a context of successive or prolonged crises and the re-evaluation of our productive and democratic models in light of planetary challenges, we consider it more crucial than ever to develop the capacity to support today's and tomorrow's entrepreneurs in the processes of social transformation in which they participate. However, entrepreneurship research is fragmented into a diversity of research streams, whose history has been shaped by various, often outdated, borrowings from neighboring disciplines (sociology, psychology, economic geography, anthropology...), leading to significant conceptual proliferation and the mobilization of knowledge that is sometimes obsolete. These streams (institutional entrepreneurship, intrapreneurship, international entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship...), which represent sets of entrepreneurial situations that appear distinct but also reflect the concerns and beliefs prevalent at the times they emerged (Gabrielsson et al., 2023), have since developed their own trajectories. As a result, their evolution has sometimes taken divergent paths, making it increasingly difficult to transfer knowledge produced in one domain to another (McMullen et al., 2021; Baker and Welter, 2021). This further complicates the mobilization of these distinct academic corpora to support entrepreneurial processes, during which the situations encountered and the scope of opportunities extend beyond the boundaries delineated by the fields of literature. In this pivotal period presaging the restructuring of our economies and entrepreneurial models, the need for the discipline to consolidate around a comprehensive and parsimonious conceptual core, applicable to a multiplicity of specific situations, has become increasingly apparent (McMullen et al., 2021; Baker and Welter, 2021). This requires developing the capacity to empirically refute certain existing theoretical propositions, to challenge specific conceptual frameworks, to enhance the universality of the knowledge generated, and to specify actionable, non-essentialist categories of situations for practitioners. Such categories should refer to regimes of action - e.g., seeking partners, legitimizing - rather than identities attributed to their manifestations, such as social entrepreneurship, necessity entrepreneurship, or entrepreneurship in the Global South. This pursuit of parsimony – a form of "housekeeping" (Dimov, 2024) involving the sorting and refinement of its foundational elements – justifies turning to contributions from philosophy as a discipline, and more specifically to philosophies of action. Attention must therefore focus on understanding the entrepreneurial process itself, or rather the various forms of successive situations in which it is instantiated, to resist any temptation toward reification. It must also focus on how entrepreneurs perceive this open-ended process, how they project themselves into it, apprehend the situations they encounter, and act within them. Ultimately, interest lies in the interplay between cognition, action, and situation by which the entrepreneurial process is instantiated, as well as in the intersubjectivities that influence its trajectory (Le Pontois and Foliard, 2025). It is only by documenting these dimensions empirically that it will be possible to generate truly relevant knowledge (Thompson et al., 2023). Our fundamental research aims to actively contribute to this ambition of theoretical consolidation through the proposal of an original methodological approach for data collection and analysis, reproducible across various levels of analysis. We seek to demonstrate the value of this methodological approach, which is rarely employed in our discipline (and which we have tested on a small scale), by combining complementary approaches drawn from two distinct disciplinary domains—sociology and ergonomics.