Call for Papers

The purpose of this sub-theme is to introduce American Pragmatism as an intellectual foundation useful for making sense of the existing diverse research on entrepreneurial strategy and charting future research directions for the field. Entrepreneurial endeavors imply attempts at altering the market landscape, such as injecting it with novel products, ventures, or meanings. How these novel states of the world are enacted through creative entrepreneurial strategies has been an exciting research avenue since Schumpeter brought the generative power of recombination to scholarly attention (e.g., Alvarez & Barney, 2007; McMullen, et al., 2021; Pontikes & Rindova, 2020).

At the same time, recognition that the world resists entrepreneurs’ strategic efforts at shaping it has resulted in a fascinating body of research on how entrepreneurs adapt their ideas and try to anticipate the future (e.g., Grimes, 2018; Sergeeva et al., 2021; Zellweger & Zenger, 2023). As common in science, various research communities with their programs flourished within these two roughly demarcated streams, oftentimes developing in parallel with scarce cross-pollination. We maintain that American Pragmatism is particularly well-suited lens for bridging these research streams because of its focus on the fundamental unknowability of the future (Sergeeva et al., 2022), experiential inquiry as a mode of coping with it (Simpson & den Hond, 2022), and the creativity of action (Joas, 1996) that is both constrained and nurtured by the particularities of the situation one finds oneself in.
 
Several pillars of American Pragmatism create opportunities for scholarly alignment. First, the empirical adequacy of a belief is assessed not through its direct correspondence with reality, but by its practical implications (Haack, 1976) – does acting as if the belief were true brings about the desired difference to the world? Second, imagination is spurred when one faces an unsatisfactory state of the world (a problem) and searches for a strategy to transform it into a desired state (solution). Key to the problem formulation is explanation as to why the current state of the world has obtained, and thus imaginative effort begins with abductive reasoning (Bhardwaj et al., 2023). Third, people have free will (their actions are not fully pre-determined) and are capable of redefining who they are as they gain new experience. Consequently, their goals are not set in stone and the relation between means and ends is not fixed. This latter point implies that what matters is their ends-in-view (Dewey, 1939) that evolve as learning and meaning-making progress.
 
We invite submissions based on diverse theoretical, empirical, and methodological approaches that adopt these pillars as premises when examining the phenomenon of entrepreneurial strategy formation and ensuing action. For example, the first pillar encourages research on entrepreneurial learning and experimentation (Zellweger & Zenger, 2023), but also transcending the analogy of entrepreneurs as scientists pursuing inquiries (Felin & Zenger, 2009; Sergeeva et al., 2022). The second pillar invites research based on conceptualization of such inquiries as problem-solving activity (Baer et al., 2013; Bhardwaj et al., 2023; Sergeeva et al., 2021) and may incorporate insights from design sciences (Dimov, 2021; Rindova & Martins, 2021, 2022) and semiotics (Tavory & Timmermans, 2022). The third pillar emphasizes the importance of examining entrepreneurs’ rationalities, values, and identities that shape their ends-in-view (Rindova & Martins, 2018; Foy & Gruber, 2022; Zuzul & Tripsas, 2020).
 
Possible topics for submission include:

• What in particular characterizes pragmatism as an intellectual foundation for entrepreneurship, strategy, and organizational research?

• How does entrepreneurs’ and strategists’ experiential knowledge impact the formation of novel beliefs, and how do such beliefs evolve with respect to emerging reality?

• How do their cognition and action interact in their pursuits of shaping environment as well as in their responses directed at adaptation? How is this interaction impacted by the specific phase of the entrepreneurial or strategy formation process as well as type of intended outcomes and environments?

• How do entrepreneurs’ values and identities influence their choices related to shaping, and adapting to, the environment?

• What are the conditions that fit the distinct pragmatist ontologies (i.e., science-based and design-based) that currently inform our understanding of how entrepreneurs and strategists deliberately approach unknown future?

• How does a problem-solving perspective, which is inherent to pragmatism, advance research on entrepreneurial strategy? And how does it relate to the dominant perspective of entrepreneurial strategy as based on learning and experimentation?

• What are unique research settings or data sources that benefit a pragmatist approach to theorizing? How, if at all, does it require an adaptation of common empirical approaches of conducting entrepreneurial strategy research? What methods are most suitable or may gain more relevance when adopting an explicitly pragmatist stance?

• What novel opportunities for studying entrepreneurial processes and strategy formation does pragmatism open up? What specific organizational mechanisms underlying such processes does it allow theorizing about or help understanding better? What adjacent or broader current organizational phenomena, such as wicked problems or grand challenges, could be integrated in such a perspective?

 
We also welcome submissions that expand and question the proposed framework. To summarize, we seek to create a platform for research that portrays entrepreneurs as strategizing at the interface between their hopes and reality to bring about new worlds that end up being distinct from what was intended and different from what the world was before their creative intervention. We believe that a plethora of fascinating discoveries await researchers examining the mechanisms underpinning this process.
 

References

• Alvarez, S.A., & Barney, J.B. (2007): “Discovery and creation: Alternative theories of entrepreneurial action.” Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, 1 (1–2), 11–26.

• Baer, M., Dirks, K.T., & Nickerson, J.A. (2013): “Microfoundations of strategic problem formulation.” Strategic Management Journal, 34 (2), 197–214.
• Bhardwaj, A., Mahoney, J., & Nickerson, J. (2023): “Problem formulation for theorizing at the frontier: An Oliver Williamson inspired approach.” Strategic Management Review, forthcoming; https://strategicmanagementreview.net/assets/articles/Bhardwaj,%20Mahoney,%20and%20Nickerson.pdf.
• Dewey, J. (1939): Theory of Valuation. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.
• Dimov, D. (2021): “From ‘opportunity’ to opportunity: The design space for entrepreneurial action.” Journal of Business Venturing Design, 1 (1–2), 100002; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbvd.2021.100002.
• Felin, T., & Zenger, T.R. (2009): “Entrepreneurs as theorists: on the origins of collective beliefs and novel strategies.” Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, 3( 2), 127–146.
• Foy, S., & Gruber, M. (2022): “Identity–society (mis)alignment and the instrumentalization of firm creation: Creative destruction and creative reconstruction.” Academy of Management Journal, 6 5(2), 479–515.
• Grimes, M.G. (2018): “The pivot: How founders respond to feedback through idea and identity work.” Academy of Management Journal, 61 (5), 1692–1717.
• Haack, S. (1976): “The pragmatist theory of truth.” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 27 (3), 231–249.
• Joas, H. (1996): The Creativity of Action. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
• McMullen, J.S., Brownell, K.M., & Adams, J. (2021): “What makes an entrepreneurship study entrepreneurial? Toward a unified theory of entrepreneurial agency.” Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 45 (5), 1197–1238.
• Pontikes, E.G., & Rindova, V.P. (2020): “Shaping markets through temporal, constructive, and interactive agency.” Strategy Science, 5 (3), 149–159.
• Rindova, V.P., & Martins, L.L. (2018): “From values to value: Value rationality and the creation of great strategies.” Strategy Science, 3 (1), 323–334.
• Rindova, V.P., & Martins, L.L. (2021): “Shaping possibilities: A design science approach to developing novel strategies.” Academy of Management Review, 46 (4), 800–822.
• Rindova, V.P., & Martins, L.L. (2022): “Futurescapes: Imagination and temporal reorganization in the design of strategic narratives.” Strategic Organization, 20 (1), 200–224.
• Sergeeva, A., Bhardwaj, A., & Dimov, D. (2021): “In the heat of the game: Analogical abduction in a pragmatist account of entrepreneurial reasoning.” Journal of Business Venturing, 36 (6), 106158; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusvent.2021.106158.
• Sergeeva, A., Bhardwaj, A., & Dimov, D. (2022): “Mutable reality and unknowable future: Revealing the broader potential of pragmatism.” Academy of Management Review, 47 (4), 692–696.
• Simpson, B., & den Hond, F. (2022): “The contemporary resonances of classical pragmatism for studying organization and organizing.” Organization Studies, 43 (1), 127–146.
• Tavory, I., & Timmermans, S. (2022): “Problem-solving in action: A Peirceian account.” In: N. Gross, I.A. Reed & C. Winship (eds.): The New Pragmatist Sociology. Inquiry, Agency, and Democracy. New York: Columbia University Press, 169–185.
• Zellweger, T., & Zenger, T. (2023): “Entrepreneurs as scientists: A pragmatist approach to producing value out of uncertainty.” Academy of Management Review, 48 (3), 379–408.
• Zuzul, T., & Tripsas, M. (2020): “Start-up inertia versus flexibility: The role of founder identity in a nascent industry.” Administrative Science Quarterly, 65 (2), 395–433.
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