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Introduction
This paper describes phenomenological approaches to studying the entrepreneurial life-world, and argues that these provide a useful complement to cognitive and discursive approaches. Individual entrepreneurs – both their identities and their actions – have always been of central interest to entrepreneurship researchers. Given that the majority of entrepreneurial ventures fail (Kirchhoff, 1997), early individual-focussed efforts often targeted general propensities for risk taking and achievement to explain the behaviors of the “optimistic martyrs” (Dosi and Lovallo, 1997) who defy poor odds and sacrifice themselves for the greater good of society. Today, such broad traits based efforts have largely been abandoned. Empirically, Brockhaus (1980) and others (cf. Herron and Robinson, 1993) found that entrepreneurs and managers do not differ much, for instance in terms of risk-taking propensity. Theoretically, the main argument has been that general character traits are causally too distant from actual entrepreneurial behavior (Gartner, 1988). The rejection of the traits tradition has led some researchers to compare entrepreneurs and others along more limited cognitive dimensions and in relation to more specific activities (Shaver and Scott, 1991; Mitchell et al., 2002). Others argue that the question “who is an entrepreneur” is indeed worth asking but that following recent developments in psychology and social theory, researchers should reconstruct entrepreneurial subjects and explain entrepreneurial action in terms of more or less public discourses (Cohen and Musson, 2000; Hjorth and Steyaert, 2004).
While there is great diversity and even ongoing disputes within both these approaches, much contemporary research can be broadly divided into these two, in many ways orthogonal, ways of conceiving of entrepreneurs and their actions[1]. Stated simply, the first stream, drawing on cognitive psychology, is based on a dualistic ontology where the goal is to uncover intra-individual cognitive schemas and scripts that interact with the environment to critically shape entrepreneurial decisions and behaviors (Mitchell et al., 2002). Studies in this tradition typically have nomothetic ambitions and the majority also use quantitative methods. Representative, albeit quite old, examples are Palich and Bagby (1995) and Busenitz and Barney (1997). The second stream, drawing on discourse analysis, is based on a social-constructionist ontology where the goal of research is to make sense of entrepreneurial talk and action in relation to extra-individual discursive resources. While nomothetic in that...