IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/scaman/v24y2008i2p94-102.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Accidental ventures--A materialist reading of opportunity and entrepreneurial potential

Author

Listed:
  • Görling, Stefan
  • Rehn, Alf

Abstract

Summary Arguably, one of the unspoken philosophical bases of entrepreneurship studies is an unreflected metaphysical idealism, which can be seen in the way in which concepts such as "entrepreneurial potential" have been used in the field. Here, we critique this idealism by presenting a materialist reading of three unlikely entrepreneurial successes, and discuss how theorizing these could be improved by working with notions of arbitrariness, accidents, and "dumb luck". The paper thus forms a philosophical critique of the field, and presents a recontextualization of how entrepreneurial potential, opportunity discovery, and success can be understood.

Suggested Citation

  • Görling, Stefan & Rehn, Alf, 2008. "Accidental ventures--A materialist reading of opportunity and entrepreneurial potential," Scandinavian Journal of Management, Elsevier, vol. 24(2), pages 94-102, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:scaman:v:24:y:2008:i:2:p:94-102
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0956522108000237
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Huarng, Kun-Huang, 2013. "A two-tier business model and its realization for entrepreneurship," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 66(10), pages 2102-2105.
    2. Peter Klein & Per Bylund, 2014. "The place of Austrian economics in contemporary entrepreneurship research," The Review of Austrian Economics, Springer;Society for the Development of Austrian Economics, vol. 27(3), pages 259-279, September.
    3. Nerine Mary George & Vinit Parida & Tom Lahti & Joakim Wincent, 2016. "A systematic literature review of entrepreneurial opportunity recognition: insights on influencing factors," International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal, Springer, vol. 12(2), pages 309-350, June.
    4. Dimo Dimov, 2011. "Grappling with the Unbearable Elusiveness of Entrepreneurial Opportunities," Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, , vol. 35(1), pages 57-81, January.
    5. Steffen Korsgaard & Henrik Berglund & Claus Thrane & Per Blenker, 2016. "A Tale of Two Kirzners: Time, Uncertainty, and the “Nature†of Opportunities," Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, , vol. 40(4), pages 867-889, July.
    6. Chandna, Vallari & Salimath, Manjula S., 2018. "Peer-to-peer selling in online platforms: A salient business model for virtual entrepreneurship," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 84(C), pages 162-174.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:scaman:v:24:y:2008:i:2:p:94-102. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/872/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.