Emprendimiento

Psicothema 2011. Vol. 23, nº 3, pp. 427-432 www.psicothema.com

ISSN 0214 - 9915 CODEN PSOTEG Copyright © 2011 Psicothema

Entrepreneurship as a legitimate field of knowledge
José C. Sánchez
Universidad de Salamanca

Entrepreneurship as a research topic has been approached from disciplines such as economics, sociology or psychology. After justifying its study, we define the domain of thefield, highlighting what has currently become its dominant paradigm, the process of the discovery, assessment and exploitation of opportunities. We then describe the main perspectives and offer an integrated conceptual framework that will allow us to legitimize the study of entrepreneurship as a field of knowledge in its own right. We believe that this framework will help researchers to better recognizethe relations among the many factors forming part of the study of entrepreneurship. Lastly, we conclude with some brief reflections on the potential value of the framework presented. El emprendimiento como un campo legítimo del conocimiento. La investigación del emprendimiento se ha abordado desde disciplinas como la economía, la sociología o la psicología. Después de justificar su estudio,definimos el dominio del emprendimiento haciendo hincapié en lo que hoy se ha convertido en el paradigma dominante, el proceso de descubrimiento, evaluación y explotación de oportunidades. A continuación, describiremos las principales perspectivas con el objetivo de ofrecer un marco conceptual integrado que nos permitirá legitimar el estudio de la iniciativa empresarial como un campo de conocimiento en supropio derecho. Creemos que este marco ayudará a los investigadores a reconocer mejor las relaciones entre los muchos factores que forman parte del estudio de la iniciativa empresarial. Por último, se concluye con unas breves reflexiones sobre el valor potencial del marco que se presenta.

Many academics ask themselves, implicitly or explicitly, why we should study entrepreneurship? There are manyways to answer this question, but in synthesis, we can summarize it from three points of view: economic, social and academic. The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM; Reynolds, Bygrave, & Autio, 2004) describes entrepreneurship as a «world-wide phenomenon» that is on the increase. In the 1990s there was important activity in the creation of new businesses, mainly in transition economies, whereactivity in the private sector was relatively new. In Spain there was a resurgence of entrepreneurship at the end of the 90s, coinciding with the new millennium (Sánchez, 2010a). Nine out of every 100 individuals of working age around the world are involved in entrepreneurship, with approximately 300 million presently involved in the creation stage of a new business venture (Reynolds et al., 2004).In the particular case of Spain, according to the 2007 GEM report, the total rate of enterprising activity is 7.6%. The generation beginning the 21st century has been labeled Generation E, the most enterprising one since the Industrial Revolution (Kuratko, 2003). Entrepreneurship is also an important source of employment for women and there has been significant growth worldwide in women’sself-employment (Coughlin & Thomas, 2002). A dominant

Fecha recepción: 19-12-10 • Fecha aceptación: 1-3-11 Correspondencia: José C. Sánchez Facultad de Psicología Universidad de Salamanca 37005 Salamanca (Spain) e-mail: jsanchez@usal.es

trend in the 21st century is likely to be ethnic entrepreneurship, because of the free market, free circulation of persons and the development of infrastructures(Morris, Schindehutte, & Lesser, 2002). In short, entrepreneurship has come to be perceived as an engine of economic and social development throughout the World. As Lazear (2002) points out, «the entrepreneur is the single most important player in a modern economy» (p. 1). To this social and economic interest we must add the interest it arouses in the academic world. Since the first course in...