Power and entrepreneurship

• Published in: Small business economics 2023-04, Vol.60 (4), p.1573-1592
• Main Authors: Audretsch, David B., Fiedler, Antje
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Business and Management; Coercion; Cognition; Economic sociology; Entrepreneurs; Entrepreneurship; Industrial Organization; Management; Microeconomics; Power
• ISSN: 0921-898X; 1573-0913
• DOI: 10.1007/s11187-022-00660-3

Entrepreneurship research has benefited from embracing three economic sociology lenses—networks, cognition, and institutions—but has treated power mainly implicitly. This paper pioneers how the concept of power can advance research into entrepreneurship. We illustrate how state actors, legacy firms, and entrepreneurs variously exert coercive, persuasive, and authoritative forms of power over entrepreneurial opportunities or exercise power to pursue them as free actors. We explicitly link context and opportunity-development processes through a power lens and show how power’s interaction-focused and episodic nature that can transcend geographical and institutional boundaries might enrich entrepreneurship research. Plain English Summary We argue that the field of entrepreneurship will benefit from more explicitly adopting the concept of power. We illustrate how different actors, namely, governments, legacy firms, and entrepreneurs, use various forms of power to shape entrepreneurial opportunities. While we argue that the power perspective helps understand how powerful actors might suffocate entrepreneurial opportunities, we also show that entrepreneurs are not powerless actors but can break free from and even modify existing power structures. In short, actors use “power over” entrepreneurial opportunities and have “power to” pursue them as free actors.