Discourse analysis of entrepreneurship definitions and theories: implication for strengthening academic research

Entrepreneurship although old, is still an emerging field, which attracts attention from academics and practitioners across wide disciplinary boundaries. It finds relevance in the fields of economics, finance, management and sociology. This paper critiques entrepreneurship definitions and theories to aid theory identification, selection and adoption by researchers across multidisciplinary fields. The paper adopts a discourse analysis to do justice to the critique, relying on journal articles and online resources. At the end, three definitional perspectives of entrepreneurship emerged, while economic, human capital, sociological and psychological theories of entrepreneurship were identified as dominant theories with different strands. The paper concludes that the success of entrepreneurship research is strongly dependent on sound understanding of entrepreneurship definitions and theories. The implication of the paper is that understanding of entrepreneurship and its theories strengthen conceptual/theoretical framework of exploratory and empirical research. The paper is therefore a contribution to raging debates in the field of entrepreneurship.