Relevance and Rigour with Qualitative Entrepreneurship Research: A Literature-Review Based Discussion

Abstract As qualitative empirical entrepreneurship research is increasingly gaining momentum, and newly emerging research streams are pushing commonly applied methods to their epistemological limits, such entrepreneurship studies often have issues regarding their rigour, because important onto-epistemological aspects, such as the positionality of the researcher in the research process, are not duly considered. At the same time, qualitative empirical entrepreneurship studies are highly popular, implying a high level of their relevance. This conceptual article discusses how scholars may perform relevant qualitative empirical entrepreneurship research rigorously by combining two methods. To this aim, the article discusses important methodological challenges and opportunities for qualitative empirical entrepreneurship research, in general, and, based upon both a discussion of the methods studied and a systematic literature review, compares the utility of the methods for the qualitative empirical toolbox, which widely applies the Gioia protocol. This comparison of methods, including the Gioia protocol, allows conclusions on increasing both the relevance and rigour of qualitative empirical entrepreneurship research.