Entrepreneurship research in economics and management: Understanding the term and research trends

Abstract

Objective: The article aims to discuss the most important aspects and areas of entrepreneurship in the newest research and to identify research trends present in the literature.

Research Design & Methods: The article is a literature review of narrative type. The research method we employed is content analysis and synthesis by causal assessment. We used the newest publications, primarily articles from renowned journals indexed in the Web of Science and Scopus databases.

Findings: Entrepreneurship is a multi-thread, interdisciplinary, and multidisciplinary area of research. We may analyse entrepreneurship as a function of: personality, managerial activities, the individual entrepreneur, the market, the SME sector in the economy, self-employment, economic production factor. Many types and categories of entrepreneurship described in the literature have developed over the years, which resulted in a broad diversity of subjects in the field. The evolution of entrepreneurship studies highlights the changing conditions for entrepreneurship and provides new perspectives.

Implications & Recommendations: This article responds to the fragmentation and dispersion of research efforts, summarizing achievements in the field of entrepreneurship studies at the intersection of two disciplines: economics and management. We discuss the most important questions of entrepreneurship synthetically and exhaustively, which allows us to delineate up-to-date and more understandable themes for both researchers and practitioners.

Contribution & Value Added: The article’s added value consists in the updated and synthetic presentation of entrepreneurship’s most important aspects and areas. The overview presents the current state of the art on entrepreneurship, its functions, classifications, and research directions.

Keywords

Entrepreneurship, entrepreneur, production factors, small and medium-sized enterprises, self-employment

Author Biography

Krzysztof Wach

Full Prof. dr hab. (2020), Post-Doc Degree of Habilitated Doctor (2013), PhD, in Management (2006) at Cracow University of Economics, Poland. His research interests include entrepreneurship, international business, innovation, and family firms.

Agnieszka Głodowska

Associate Prof. dr hab (2020), PhD, in Economics (2009) at Cracow University of Economics, Poland. Her research interests include entrepreneurship, international business, international economics.

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