Schumpeter’s Plea: Historical Reasoning in Entrepreneurship Theory and Research

Despite recent admonitions that ‘history matters’ in entrepreneurship research, there have been few efforts to examine specifically why and how historical reasoning is important in entrepreneurship theory. Drawing on theories of history, this chapter elaborates on how historical constructs of context, time, and change are integral elements of theories of entrepreneurship. The chapter then goes on to describe how three theories of historical temporality—time as structuring, time as sequence/process, and time as constitutive of actors and actions—can help entrepreneurship theorists and researchers understand elements of the entrepreneurial process that conventional behavioral and cognitive approaches usually miss. The chapter identifies the value of these approaches to several specific streams of entrepreneurship research.