ABSTRACT

A challenge faced by management research has been the development of new fi elds. An example of such challenge, within business and management studies, is the relatively new fi eld of small business and entrepreneurship (SBE) (Cornelius et al. 2006; Kuratko 2006). However, there is widespread evidence that the fi eld has expanded rapidly in the past four decades and has achieved some maturity (e.g., Blackburn and Brush 2008; Katz 2003; Short et al. 2010; Welter and Lasch 2008). SBE studies are now found in most business and management schools’ curricula across the globe. For example, in 2010 the Universities and Colleges Application Service website had 285 courses in UK institutions of higher education with ‘entrepreneurship’ in the title. Most of these were joint courses, such as ‘entrepreneurship and geography,’ suggesting that some form of the concept was achieving recognition across the social sciences.