Making Sense of the Elusive Paradigm of Entrepreneurship

The term “entrepreneurship” apparently means different things to different people including scholars and thought leaders. Because entrepreneurship is multifaceted, it is studied from many different perspectives, yet, that has fostered a multitude of definitions. Even the scholarly literature (where normally the deepest understanding would be found) is rife with disparities and even contradictions about what is and is not entrepreneurship. Some have suggested a narrower and more defined focus on entrepreneurship where only bona fide entrepreneurship research theories would explain entrepreneurial phenomena. We believe that constricting the field may the wrong approach. Our purpose then is to try and make sense of the disparate meanings and views of entrepreneurship prevalent in both the scholarly literature as well as among thought leaders in business and policy. We reconcile the seemingly chaotic and contradictory literature by proposing a coherent approach to structure the disparate ways that entrepreneurship is used and referred to in the scholarly literature. We examine three coherent strands of the entrepreneurship literature and identify an emerging eclectic view of entrepreneurship, which combines several of the views prevalent in the main approaches discussed.