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1. Introduction
Business founders face resource constraints for many reasons. For example, they may operate in resource-poor environments, lack personal or family wealth, be unwilling to borrow, or be personally attracted to opportunities that are not attractive to lenders or investors. In fact, it has been suggested that “Resource-constrained founder-run firms are the most common form of business globally” (Powell and Baker, 2014a, p. 1406). An important theme in research attending to this is entrepreneurial resourcefulness, broadly constituting ways that entrepreneurs attempt “to deal with problems or opportunities despite ostensibly inadequate resources” (Powell and Baker, 2014b). Perhaps the most important current theme in this literature is the emerging theory of “entrepreneurial bricolage.”
Although the number of studies employing the “entrepreneurial bricolage” construct is growing, progress has been held back by the absence of validated operationalizations that can be applied in quantitative studies. One such measure – the Baker-Davidsson bricolage scale – has recently been used in multiple studies (including our own, see Senyard et al., 2014). However, the previously published studies focus on substantive relationships and provide only rudimentary description and evaluation of the scale. Therefore, in this paper we provide a thorough description of the development and contents of the Baker-Davidsson bricolage scale, as well as a comprehensive evaluation of its validity based on data from up to eight separate samples. By so doing, we offer the following contributions. First, we provide an instrument which holds promise of being a useful and broadly applicable tool for future research on the prevalence, antecedents, and consequences of entrepreneurial bricolage. Second, our provision of a theory driven, validated measure may help improve theoretical precision, thereby counteracting a tendency of the entrepreneurship literature to devolve back to the vague and abstract/metaphorical use of the bricolage concept that appears in many humanities and social science literatures. Third, our description of the development process as well as our evaluation of the measure provide guidance for possible further improvements as well as attempts at developing more precise, domain-specific measures of entrepreneurial bricolage. Fourth, our thorough illustration of the scale development process may be of help for researchers who set out to operationalize other theoretical constructs.
In the next section, we briefly describe the emerging theory of entrepreneurial bricolage and the...