Rethinking entrepreneurship

While most entrepreneurship scholars agree that opportunities can be created, it is not yet clear that the ‘made or found’ alternative needs to be tackled at the ontological level. By focusing on the finding-exploiting sequence much entrepreneurship traditional literature stands entrapped in the strategic management schema and its foundations on rationalism. Within this ontology the focus on opportunity finding and exploiting simply reproduces the definition-implementation logic, which essentially denies doing and creativity. Recent literature is addressing the creative side of entrepreneuring missing, however, to address field’s ontological assumptions. By overlooking ontology therefore theory either mixes incommensurable logics or uniforms it to strategic management. In both instances lack of ontological awareness makes fields’ distinctiveness impossible. We take the teleological view of rationalism to compare entrepreneurship and strategic management literature. This analysis ultimately shows how the boundaries’ debate impinges upon the principle of sufficient cause and the instrumentality of human body and action.