Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines the idea of progress in entrepreneurship research by testing proposed theories. It also presents social constructionism as a meta-theory and defends its philosophical potential for entrepreneurship research. The book proposes critical realism as a philosophically superior approach to the major alternatives, viz., positivism, social constructionism and pragmatism. It explores entrepreneurial attachment to success ethics as generated by a cluster of promises of the enterprise culture. The book addresses some of the noted gaps in the established philosophical outlooks of entrepreneurship by incorporating perspectives from the social sciences. It outlines how the opposing camps are linked to different dimensions of social constructionist epistemology. The book explains that critical realism is a facilitating philosophy for entrepreneurship and small business research as it channels attention to the condition of possibility of particular business practices.