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Introduction
In 1988, Gartner criticized mainstream entrepreneurship studies for asking “Who is an entrepreneur?”, claiming that the question was loaded with erroneous presumptions (Gartner, 1988). Traditional trait-based research had assumed that entrepreneurs share a common set of characteristics, such as the propensity for “risk-taking” (Brockhaus, 1980) or a high degree of “self-reliance” (Sexton and Bowman, 1985), from which one could crystalize a generic entrepreneurial personality. Yet empirical studies have tended to argue that that “there is no ‘typical’ entrepreneur” (Bull and Willard, 1993, p. 187). According to Gartner (1988), the failure to pin down the essence of the entrepreneurial personality was due to a misguided theoretical approach. Instead of mapping the traits of entrepreneurs, Gartner (1988) suggested that scholars should pay attention to the entrepreneurial process, which he conceptualized as the “creation of organization” (p. 57; see also Hjorth et al., 2015; Katz and Gartner, 1988). Using various theoretical perspectives (Steyaert, 2007a), entrepreneurship scholars have shifted to investigating the sequence of activities associated with entrepreneurship. This line of research has “done everything to draw the attention away from the individual entrepreneur in order to make space for understanding the complexity of the entrepreneurial process” (Steyaert, 2007b, p. 734).
Despite his emphasis on the importance of focussing on the entrepreneurial process instead of the entrepreneurial personality, Gartner (1988) cautiously maintains that it “is difficult not to think” that entrepreneurs are “special people who achieve things that most of us do not achieve” and that their accomplishments are “based on some special inner quality” (p. 58, emphasis in original). The figure of the entrepreneur is frequently portrayed as that of a “heroic creator” (Steyaert, 2007a). Such heroic renderings are often criticized for being ethnocentric (Ogbor, 2000), gender biased (Calas et al., 2009) and westernized (de Costa and Saraiva, 2012). In effect, critical scholars have emphasized precisely those aspects of entrepreneurship that are overlooked by conventional conceptions (Ahl, 2006; Verduijn and Essers, 2013; Williams and Nadin, 2013). However, while considerable critical energy has been devoted to unmasking the figure of the heroic entrepreneur (Armstrong, 2005; Jones and Spicer, 2009; Ogbor, 2000), the idea that entrepreneurs are unique individuals with special abilities continues to be widespread in social media and popular culture (Drakopoulou Dodd and Anderson, 2007)....