Method issues in the study of venture start-up processes

It is increasingly agreed that the centre of gravity for entrepreneurship research should rest with the process of emergence. It is in particular three partly related strands, associated with three influential scholars that have led this development. First, Bill Gartner argued that entrepreneurship research ought to redirect interest from who the entrepreneur is to what he or she does in the process of firm emergence (Gartner, 1988; 1993; 2001). By so doing, entrepreneurship research would fill an important gap in organization theory, where the question of how organizations come into being has been a neglected issue. This perspective – that entrepreneurship is about the emergence of new organizations – has also been adopted by prominent sociologists (Aldrich, 1999; Thornton, 1999).