W(h)ither entrepreneurship? Discipline, legitimacy and super-wicked problems on the road to nowhere

The discourse of the twenty first century is increasingly a discourse of crisis – global warming, climate change, environmental degradation, health pandemics, geopolitical instability, poverty, enforced migration and refugee movements, among others. Increasingly these ‘grand challenges’ pose complex environmental and social problems that present radical uncertainty regarding the consequences of current actions and encourage multiple conflicting evaluations. We argue in this paper that in response to this ‘new world’ of super-wicked problems and hyperobjects, there is a unique opportunity for entrepreneurship to take centre stage, given that the entrepreneurial context itself is extreme in terms of uncertainty, time pressures, cognitive load, emotional reactions, and social interactions. However, there is a danger that this opportunity may be compromised by ongoing debates over the status, coherence, identity and legitimacy of entrepreneurship as a discipline. Accordingly, we argue for more problem-oriented research in entrepreneurship, not as an additional focus of attention but as foundational to the nature of the discipline itself. This argument is based on a broader discussion of the nature of scientific disciplines as the increasingly specialised division of knowledge and challenges the drive to establish entrepreneurship as a theory-led scientific discipline in the traditional mode. Commitment to the social legitimation of disciplinary discourse advocating problem-oriented entrepreneurship avoids the danger that consensus in the discipline is established at the expense of intellectual development, practical relevance and real impact.