Entrepreneurial intentionsa process perspective

Résumé

Entrepreneurship research heavily populates many of the leading business and management journals of contemporary times. It´s expansive utility however is not bound by any one particular area, evidenced by the prominence of coverage in a wide-array of multi-disciplinary domains spanning from psychology and sociology to medicine and politics. Attention is fueled by a commonly held belief that multi-faceted complex issues such as, market, economic and social dynamism can all be addressed through individuals both thinking and acting entrepreneurially. It is by means of entrepreneurship that plausible and effective solutions can be uncovered towards economic necessities whilst concomitantly at a broader level developing societies, instigating social change and combating poverty. The entrepreneurship process is considered to begin upon the articulation of an intention. As such, entrepreneurial intentions (EI), as a cognitive construct imparting attention towards, and prediction of, engagement in future behaviours based upon individually held beliefs and desires, represent an important pre-condition that can act as a catalyst to the emergence, or lack thereof, of entrepreneurial behaviour. The area is one that is coming under increasing pressure to prove its worth beyond parsimonious causative models that can predict a portion of variance but concomitantly leave large amounts unaccounted for, largely due to its failure to take into consideration the true dynamism of open systems. To abridge this shortcoming, the aim of the current thesis is to increase and progress our understanding of EI embedded within a processual perspective taking time as a key variable. The key research question that follows is: How (and if) do EIs change over time? Answer to this is achieved through the presentation of three inter-related scientific research articles through a mixed-method approach, namely, a conceptual contribution systematically analysing the current state-of-art in EI scholarship (Paper 1), a qualitative case study investigating intentional transitions throughout the entrepreneurial process (Paper 2), and finally a quantitative investigation tracking changes in intentional stability longitudinally over time (Paper 3).