Description
Constructing the multifaceted, socially embedded, and relational nature of corporate entrepreneurship.
ENTREPRENEURSHIP TALK IN THE
ORGANIZATIONAL CONTEXT
Constructing the multifaceted, socially embedded,
and relational nature of corporate entrepreneurship
Soili Peltola
ACADEMIC DISSERTATION
To be presented, with the permission of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University
of Helsinki, for public examination in the lecture room XII, University main building,
on 5 April 2014, at 10 o’clock.
Helsinki 2014
Department of Social Research
University of Helsinki
Finland
Publications of the Department of Social Research 2014:2
Social Psychology
© Soili Peltola
Cover: Jere Kasanen
Photo: Satu Pennanen
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ISSN-L 1798-9140
ISSN 1798-9132 (Online)
ISSN 1798-9140 (Print)
ISBN 978-952-10- 9090-5 (Print)
ISBN 978-952-10- 9091-2 (Online)
Unigrafa, Helsinki 2014
3
Abstract
In today’s increasingly competitive and global economy, many claim that
entrepreneurial attitudes and behavior are paramount for established frms
to grow and survive. To deal with these demanding business environments,
academic discussions have emphasized the status of corporate entrepreneurship
(CE) as a legitimate and self-evident strategy that frms must adopt. In
underscoring the hegemony of frm-level CE strategies, however, the dominant
functionalist research paradigm of CE has neglected to explicate the evaluation
and implementation of CE and the position of individual organizational actors
as practitioners of CE within frms. The present dissertation therefore adopts a
fundamentally different research approach to corporate entrepreneurship. By
applying a micro social constructionist and interpretivist research paradigm, the
study explores what kind of versions and practical applications of CE individual
organizational actors as hired employees of their frms subjectively construct
in the social context of their daily activities, and how their versions relate to
theoretical conceptualizations of CE.
The research material is drawn from individual interviews and meeting
interaction recordings from three Finnish privately-owned business service
frms in the metropolitan areas of Helsinki and Tampere during 2008–2011.
The empirical designs make use of descriptive qualitative methods in generating
and analyzing the research material.
The present study highlights CE as a socially embedded phenomenon that
does not unproblematically become grafted into practical frm operations or self-
evidently ft into established organizational arrangements. The study indicates
that CE is a concrete, observable phenomenon in organizations, not merely an
abstract characteristic of frms or a behavioral concept that produces change and
growth in isolation. Instead, CE is a process that individual organizational actors
collectively bring about and shape in their everyday organizational interaction.
Organizational actors jointly negotiate contextually sensitive and target-specifc
practical applications of CE, and establish intra- and inter-frm relationships
that are necessary to sustain long-term economic behavior. However, not all
negotiations necessarily lead to a uniform commitment to these applications.
This dissertation further suggests that CE cannot be regarded as a permanent
characteristic of frms, but is instead a process that requires continuous
maintenance. The nature and practices of CE must be updated and renewed
regularly as contexts and target groups in the frm’s business environment change.
Organizations can support the position of individual actors in actualizing these
efforts through proactiveness that invites collaboration. However, institutional
4
problems in implementing CE may emerge if top management permits internal
competitive aggressiveness and the related short-term maximization of profts to
undermine the ability of organizational actors to fully realize their entrepreneurial
potential.
This study presents a new, alternative perspective of entrepreneurship in the
corporate setting by painting a context-specifc, relational, and socially embedded
picture of CE. Because CE is also a subtle communicative phenomenon between
organizational actors and those in the market, the long-term maintenance
of these relationships may critically contribute to how successfully frms are
eventually able to legitimize and institutionalize CE for their beneft.
5
Tiivistelmä
Organisaatioiden ja johtamisen tutkimuksen funktionalistisessa
tutkimusperinteessä yrittäjyyttä pidetään taloudellista kasvua ja toiminnan
uudistamista tukevana strategiana, joka organisaatioiden täytyy omaksua
selviytyäkseen kiristyvässä globaalissa kilpailussa. Yrittäjyys nähdään
yritysjohdon linjaamana, koko organisaatiota ohjaavana uutta luovana,
ennakoivana ja riskejä ottavana toimintana, joka valmiina mallina ongelmitta
solahtaa osaksi yrityksen arjen käytäntöjä. Väitöskirja haastaa tämän yksipuolisen,
yrittäjyystutkimusta edelleen hallitsevan käsitteellistämisen tavan ja soveltaa
sen sijaan mikrotason sosiaaliseen konstruktionismiin perustuvaa tulkinnallista
tutkimusotetta. Väitöskirjan neljässä osatutkimuksessa tarkastellaan sitä,
miten yksittäiset, organisaatioon palkkasuhteessa olevat työntekijät tulkitsevat
yrittäjyyden periaatteita ja millaisia käytännön toimintatapoja he niistä
rakentavat omista vastuualueistaan ja työtehtävistään käsin.
Tutkimusaineisto koostuu yritysjohtajien ja myyjien yksilöhaastatteluista
sekä johtoryhmän kokousäänityksistä, jotka on kerätty kolmesta
pääkaupunkiseudulla ja Tampereella toimivasta, yrityspalveluita tarjoavasta
yrityksestä vuosina 2008–2011. Tutkimusaineistojen analyysissä hyödynnetään
laadullisen asennetutkimuksen sekä diskursiivisen ja narratiivisen psykologian
tutkimusmenetelmiä.
Väitöskirjatutkimuksen mukaan yrittäjyys ei tuota kasvua tai uudistumista
irrallaan organisaation muusta toiminnasta, kuten funktionalistinen
tutkimusperinne yleensä olettaa. Sen sijaan yrittäjyys on yksittäisten, eri ryhmiä
edustavien organisaation jäsenten yhdessä aikaansaama prosessi. Yrittäjyys
johdon linjaamana valmiina mallina ei siis välttämättä toteudu organisaation
arjessa sellaisenaan, vaan organisaation jäsenten yhdessä tulkitsemana
ja ylläpitämänä prosessina. Koska yrittäjyys syntyy ja siitä neuvotellaan
organisaation vuorovaikutustilanteissa, neuvottelunvaraisuus voi myös estää
yrittäjyyden toteutumisen käytännössä. Vaikka jäsenet pitäisivätkin yrittäjyyden
toimintatapoja pätevinä ratkaisuina organisaationsa ongelmiin, neuvottelu ei
aina johda tilanteeseen, jossa he sitoutuisivat noudattamaan näitä käytäntöjä
päivittäisessä työssään.
Tutkimuksen perusteella yrittäjyys ei myöskään ole organisaation pysyvä,
kertaluonteisesti hankittava ominaisuus, vaan prosessi, joka vaatii jatkuvaa
päivittämistä. Päivittämisen tarkoituksena on uudistaa toimintatapoja
aina sen mukaan, miten tilanteet ja kohderyhmät muuttuvat organisaation
toimintaympäristössä.
6
Väitöskirjatutkimuksen valossa yrittäjyys organisaatioissa näyttäytyy
sosiaalisena, kontekstiinsa sidoksissa olevana sekä sisäisiin ja ulkoisiin
yhteistyösuhteisiin perustuvana prosessina, joka voi myös jäädä toteutumatta.
Organisaatio voi tukea yrittäjyyden toteutumista kannustamalla jäseniään
keskinäiseen yhteistyöhön. Yrittäjyyden hyötyjen saavuttaminen koko
organisaation tasolla kuitenkin hankaloituu merkittävästi, jos yritysjohto
sallii jäsentensä sisäisen kilpailun ja siihen liittyvän lyhytnäköisen voiton
maksimoinnin tai jopa kannustaa heitä siihen. Koska pysyvien taloudellisten
hyötyjen saavuttaminen perustuu toimiviin yhteistyösuhteisiin, näiden
suhteiden jatkuva vaaliminen ratkaisee sen, kuinka hyvin organisaatiot lopulta
onnistuvat sitouttamaan jäsenensä yrittäjyyden toimintatapojen käyttöön
pitkällä aikavälillä.
7
Acknowledgements
First, I want to express my sincerest gratitude to my supervisor and co-
author, Docent Kari Mikko Vesala. His thoughtful insights into theories of
entrepreneurship together with his profound expertise on qualitative research
proved invaluable in focusing my thinking and tackling the multifaceted
questions of academic research. His generous help in advising the planning
and execution of my empirical studies and in resolving questions about research
funding were also vastly important. And, most importantly, I warmly thank him
for suggesting to me that I begin my PhD journey in the frst place.
I am very grateful to the external pre-examiners, Professor Alistair R.
Anderson and Professor Katri Komulainen, for their valuable and encouraging
reviews of this dissertation. I express my special thanks to Professor Anderson
for agreeing to serve as my opponent. I am also indebted to the conference
participants, anonymous reviewers, and journal editors who have helped me
signifcantly improve my article manuscripts. My deepest gratitude also goes to
the three case frms and all the research participants of this study who, in the
end, made this dissertation possible.
My closest research environment at the Department of Social Research at
the University of Helsinki has been the Research Group on Social Psychology
of Entrepreneurship, headed by Kari Mikko Vesala. I warmly thank the other
members of our group, especially Miira Niska and Jarkko Pyysiäinen, for their
inspiring empirical work on entrepreneurship and practical insights into the
academic world. I also thank Professor Anna-Maija Pirttilä-Backman and
Professor Emeritus Klaus Helkama, who commented on my manuscripts in
post-graduate seminars and helped me sort out practical issues related to my
doctoral studies. I further thank Professor Pirttilä-Backman for asking me to join
the task group responsible for planning the 50
th
anniversary of Social Psychology
at the University of Helsinki in 2012. I also thank my fellow PhD students for
their helpful feedback on my research in our post-graduate seminars. I especially
acknowledge all those who, like me, labored on their PhD theses during the hot
summer months of 2013.
I am very thankful to Professor Anssi Peräkylä for inviting me to participate
in data sessions and seminars of conversation analysis during the 2010–2011
academic year. I truly appreciate the talent of his research group, whose remarks
proved signifcant in cultivating the empirical analysis of Study III. I am also
grateful to my fellow project researchers Heidi Korhonen, Markku Mikkola,
and Tapani Ryynänen from the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland,
and Assistant Professor Mika Westerlund from the Sprott School of Business
at Carleton University. It was indeed my great pleasure to work with you in our
8
collaborative TAPI research project and to learn from your extensive expertise
on service innovation research. I also express my sincere gratitude to Dr. Pekka
Killström for his constructive and always encouraging comments on my article
manuscripts.
The practical execution of this dissertation benefted greatly from the help
of Stephen Stalter, who revised my English throughout the process, and Maija
Bergström, who meticulously transcribed the interview material of Study II.
Any errors remain mine alone.
My sincere appreciation goes to the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation
(Tekes) and the Emil Aaltonen Foundation, whose funding made this thesis
possible. I am especially grateful to Jaana Auramo, who helped me to fnd
experienced research partners who shared similar interests on which to construct
a solid research project.
I am also immensily grateful to my employer SEK Loyal Oy for granting
me suffcient leave of absence to allow me to focus on my research on two
crucial occasions. I am especially indebted to Minna Lenander for her insightful
comments on the practical implications of this thesis and her support throughout
my PhD studies. I also warmly thank Satu Yrjänen for her enthusiasm for my
research fndings and her invaluable help with media relations, Satu Pennanen
for the beautiful photograph that appears on the front cover of this publication,
Tiina Uusitalo for attending to its technical details, and Pia Perola for our
inspiring discussions over lunch. A special acknowledgement is due to all my
colleagues who never fail to demonstrate how collaborative efforts produce
creative solutions in everyday practice.
I also wish to acknowledge the inspiration that Dr. Kauko Kaurola and Dr.
Olavi Hämäläinen have provided me over the years. Their PhD publications
on the bookshelves of my childhood home were a concrete reminder of the
possibility that someday, however remote the idea those days indeed seemed,
I might be able to celebrate the fnalization of my own PhD thesis.
Finally, I owe my warm, heartfelt thanks to my husband Vesa and our
daughters Silva and Eve for their understanding of and patience with my
academic endeavors. Their love and trust not only smoothed out the more
frustrating bumps in my research journey, but also reminded me to celebrate
even the smallest successes along the way. I also warmly thank my sister Outi
for her help in guiding us together through some challenging times during the
past few years.
I dedicate this dissertation to my late parents Martta and Tuomo Jaakkola.
Thank you for providing me with an appreciation for academic education and
giving me a peaceful, happy childhood.
Helsinki, February 2014
Soili Peltola
9
Contents
Abstract ........................................................................................................ 3
Tiivistelmä ................................................................................................... 5
Acknowledgements ...................................................................................... 7
Contents ....................................................................................................... 9
List of original publications........................................................................11
1. Introduction ......................................................................................... 13
2. Entrepreneurship in organizations ...................................................... 18
2.1 Corporate entrepreneurship ........................................................ 18
2.2 Entrepreneurial orientation .........................................................20
2.3 Strategic entrepreneurship .......................................................... 24
3. Aims of the study ..................................................................................26
4. Materials and methods .........................................................................29
4.1 Descriptive methodologies ........................................................... 29
4.2 The context of the study ............................................................... 31
4.3 Research material ......................................................................... 32
4.4 Procedures of analysis .................................................................. 34
4.4.1 Studies I and II: The qualitative attitude approach.......... 34
4.4.2 Study III: Discursive psychology and interaction
structures ........................................................................... 35
4.4.3 Study IV: Narrative psychology and prototypical
story forms ......................................................................... 35
5. Summary of the original studies .......................................................... 37
5.1 The reception of corporate entrepreneurship ............................. 37
10
5.2 The multifaceted interpretations of corporate
entrepreneurship .......................................................................... 39
5.3 Corporate entrepreneurship as processes of decision-making
and strategic renewal ................................................................... 41
6. Discussion .............................................................................................44
6.1 The socially embedded nature of corporate entrepreneurship ... 44
6.1.1 The interactional achievement of corporate
entrepreneurship ............................................................... 45
6.1.2 Institutional aspects of corporate entrepreneurship ........ 46
6.2 The relational nature of corporate entrepreneurship..................48
6.2.1 Jointly negotiating entrepreneurial decisions and
practices ............................................................................. 49
6.2.2 Targeting clients with entrepreneurial behavior .............. 50
6.3 Legitimizing and institutionalizing corporate
entrepreneurship .......................................................................... 52
6.4 Limitations of the study ............................................................... 54
6.5 Suggestions for future research ................................................... 55
6.6 Practical implications ................................................................... 56
6.7 Concluding remarks ..................................................................... 58
References ..................................................................................................60
Appendixes .................................................................................................71
Original publications ................................................................................ 75
11
List of original publications
This thesis is based on the following publications:
I Soili Peltola & Kari Mikko Vesala (2013). Constructing entrepreneurial
orientation in a selling context: The qualitative attitude approach. Pozna?
University of Economics Review, 13(1), 26–47.
II Soili Peltola (2013). The practical application of entrepreneurial
orientation: Proactiveness and competitive aggressiveness in the selling
context. (Unpublished manuscript currently under review).
III Soili Peltola (2013). The emergence of entrepreneurship in organizations:
Joint decision-making about new sales practices in management group
meeting interaction. Pozna? University of Economics Review, 13(1),
48–67.
IV Soili Peltola (2012). Can an old frm learn new tricks? A corporate
entrepreneurship approach to organizational renewal. Business Horizons,
55(1), 43–51. Copyright © Elsevier. All rights reserved.
The publications are referred to in the text by their roman numerals.
The original articles are reprinted here with the kind permission of the Pozna?
University of Economics Press (I, III) and Elsevier (IV).
Introduction 13
1. INTRODUCTION
In today’s increasingly competitive, fast-paced, global economy, many claim
that entrepreneurial attitudes and behavior are crucial for established frms to
grow and survive, and that a lack of entrepreneurial behavior even portends
a frm’s inevitable failure in the market (Kuratko, 2009) and the accelerated
downsizing of its personnel (Hornsby et al., 2013). In organizational contexts,
entrepreneurship aims to instigate new economic activity (Wiklund et al., 2011)
by improving economic performance and rejuvenating strategies and operations
(Rauch et al., 2009; Ireland et al., 2009). Entrepreneurship represents a growth
orientation which best suits hostile and dynamic business environments
characterized by high competitive intensity, unpredictability, and low customer
loyalty (Green et al., 2008; Lumpkin & Dess, 1996; Covin & Slevin, 1989). To
deal with these increasingly demanding environments, entrepreneurial frms
engage in product and service innovation, explore the unknown by embarking
on risky projects, and outperform their competitors by attaining leadership in
the market (Miller, 1983). One can also view entrepreneurship in organizations
within the framework of a wider discussion on how entrepreneurial actions
presumably resolve economic dilemmas (e.g., Perren & Jennings, 2005; Jack
& Anderson, 1999) and grand challenges (Sarasvathy & Venkataraman, 2011)
of contemporary societies.
Academic discussions have explicitly tailored entrepreneurship in the
organizational context to meet foregoing theoretical and practical ends. For
instance, strategic entrepreneurship has laid out theoretical models that defne
the antecedents, elements, and consequences of entrepreneurship for frms
that face declining business performance and turnaround situations (Kuratko
& Audretsch, 2013, 2009; Dess et al., 1999; Ireland et al., 2003; Ireland et al.,
2009). Entrepreneurial orientation, for its part, has been the most common
conceptualization of entrepreneurship that emphasizes growth as the outcome
of innovative, proactive, and risk-taking behavior (Lumpkin & Dess, 1996; Covin
& Slevin, 1989, 1991; Miller, 1983). To date, these theoretical and empirical
formulations have largely taken place within a functionalist research paradigm
(Covin & Wales, 2012; Tedmanson et al., 2012; Rauch et al., 2009; Grant &
Perren, 2002). Even though their theoretical and practical utility is widely
acclaimed, the idea of entrepreneurship in the organizational context as a
socially-constructed concept has begun to grow in importance (e.g., Anderson
et al., 2012; Lindgren & Packendorff, 2009). To date, however, empirical research
on entrepreneurship in the corporate setting has yet to provide major evidence
of such development.
14 Introduction
The social constructionist view of entrepreneurship focuses attention on
discourses that construct the social reality of entrepreneurship in contextually
and contingently different ways. Existing research demonstrates the wide variety
of entrepreneurship discourses that individual actors utilize to construct their
everyday reality. For example, previous studies have illustrated how government
discourses on entrepreneurship portray entrepreneurs and their role in society
(Perren & Jennings, 2005), how entrepreneurship policy implementers use
entrepreneurship discourse to maintain and defend their mission (Pyysiäinen
& Vesala, 2013), how social entrepreneurship balances social and economic
behaviour to create both types of value (Chell, 2007), how entrepreneurial
opportunities are relationally and communally formed and enacted (Fletcher,
2006), how narrative and dramatic processes construct entrepreneurial
identities (Downing, 2005), and how these identities are constructed of different
entrepreneurship discourses (Berglund, 2006).
As previous studies of entrepreneurship as a social construct demonstrate,
entrepreneurship discourses can defne and evaluate entrepreneurial phenomena
in more ways than one. For instance, the meaning of an entrepreneur can range
from the founder-creator of a frm to its owner-manager (e.g., Gartner, 1988).
According to a widely recognized distinction, founder-creators pursue proft
and growth, whereas owner-managers settle for making a primary living out
of their frms (Carland et al., 1984). In cultural representations, evaluative
meanings of the entrepreneur also include contrasting aspects, such as good–
bad, predator–victim, and hero –villain (e.g., Anderson et al., 2009; Nicholson
& Anderson, 2005). Further, entrepreneurship may serve as a case for the
individual as either a practicing entrepreneur or an entrepreneurial employee
in an organization, and even for the entire frm, as theoretical discussions
on corporate entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial orientation demonstrate
(Kuratko & Audretsch, 2013; Covin & Slevin, 1989, 1991; Miller, 1983; Lumpkin
& Dess, 1996). As a result of this variation in entrepreneurship discourses, what
a particular entrepreneurship phenomenon eventually comes to signify is neither
self-evident nor obvious. When theoretical concepts employ expressions related
to entrepreneurship, such as the word entrepreneurial, one can rightfully ask
what kind of version of entrepreneurship in organizations these discourses
construct. A multitude of contextual and contingent meanings can therefore
be attached to entrepreneurship in the organizational context also (see Anderson
et al., 2012).
Within the functionalist research paradigm, entrepreneurship in the
corporate setting is typically constructed as a frm-level phenomenon. These
frm-level concepts treat entrepreneurship not as an attitude or a characteristic of
individual employees, but as something connected with a frm’s strategy-making
process which thus encompasses the entire frm (Covin & Miller, 2013; Dess et
Introduction 15
al., 1997; Gawe?, 2012). These concepts emphasize the upper echelon’s leading
role in defning, encouraging, and evaluating their organization’s entrepreneurial
behavior (Kuratko et al., 2014; Ireland et al., 2006; Covin & Slevin, 1991), whereas
managers on different levels of the frm share the responsibility of implementing
the top management’s visions of entrepreneurship in the practical reality of
frm operations (Kuratko & Audretsch, 2013). However, the theoretical models
of entrepreneurship in the organizational context seldom explicitly explicate
the position and role of individual organizational actors as practitioners of
entrepreneurship within frms. Even though the top management typically sets
the scope and pace for their frm’s entrepreneurial strategy-making process,
employees on other organizational levels may react to and view these visions
differently and therefore act accordingly in ways not always aligned with the
intended formulations. As Stevenson and Jarillo (1990, 24) state, opportunity
for the frm has to be pursued by individuals within it, who may have
perceptions of personal opportunity more or less at variance with
opportunity for the frm.
Institutional entrepreneurship conceptualizes the potential variance
mentioned above in terms of agency, interests, and change (Garud et al., 2007).
According to these views, the key question for the emergence and maintenance of
entrepreneurship in the organizational context is to understand how individuals
within established organizational structures are able to instigate change, and get
other organizational actors to adopt and apply these new forms of acting. Stated
differently, entrepreneurship as a frm-level concept depends on individual
organizational actors and how they pursue entrepreneurship within the practical
everyday activities of their frm. Consequently, the individual’s position within
frms is not unambiguous or unproblematic for either the individuals themselves
or the entire frm, as the theoretical concepts of frm-level entrepreneurship
would seem to suggest.
More specifcally, the institutional challenge of entrepreneurship is two-
fold: frst, how to bring about new economic activity or organizational change
within existing structural arrangements, and, second, how to obtain legitimacy
for these emerging new activities (Garud et al., 2007). From the individual
actor’s viewpoint, the professionally-run frm can often be an inferior context for
entrepreneurship-oriented individuals to fully realize their potential compared to
their positions in frms run by these individuals themselves (Shane, 1995). The
paradox stems from the regulative and normative institutional arrangements
that emphasize stability and continuity, and aim to reduce uncertainty,
unfairness, and opportunistic behavior within organizations (Garud et al.,
2007; see also Shimizu, 2012). These arrangements restrict the actions of an
individual because the actions they instigate usually deviate from institutional
norms and encounter resistance from other organizational actors. Before new
16 Introduction
ideas gain wider legitimacy, they are likely to be considered an unusual and
competing activity within the organization (Hwang & Powell, 2005). In short,
the institutional perspective of entrepreneurship emphasizes the structural
restrictions of an organization that individuals must overcome in order to launch
and institutionalize new modes of acting.
In contrast, the micro social constructionist approach views individual actors
as principals serving their own interest (Burr, 2003), despite any restrictive
structures that might be present. Individual actors can also deliberate which
principals, besides themselves, they choose to serve or, alternatively, to reject
and resist (Vesala, 2013). Even though entrepreneurship discourses aim to
create and maintain a relationship between individual actors and the entire
organization (see Vesala, 2013; Lumpkin & Dess, 1996) however tight or loose it
may theoretically appear, individual actors may also reject such relationships and
formulations. Individual actors can therefore utilize discourses to construct their
own versions of any given issue, such as the phenomenon of entrepreneurship,
and reject other versions that other actors have explicated. For instance, they
can reject entrepreneuship discourses in general or established organizational
structures in particular to further their own ideas about change and newness.
Nevertheless, the central idea is to understand how individual organizational
actors make it happen (Sarasvathy, 2004) as hired employees of their frms
by choosing to serve the interests of the frm with efforts and ideas based on
corporate entrepreneurship.
Regarding the ambiguous position of individuals within the frm-level
phenomenon of entrepreneurship as a point of departure for the present
dissertation, this study sets out to explore entrepreneurship in the organizational
context from a micro social constructionist, interpretivist perspective (Vesala,
2013; Burr, 2003; Potter & Wetherell, 1987; Grant & Perren, 2002; Anderson &
Starnawska, 2008). The study explores what kind of versions of entrepreneurship
the individual organizational actors that participated in this study construct
and how their versions relate to theoretically-formulated conceptualizations of
entrepreneurship in the organizational context. The original studies are designed
according to descriptive methodologies typical of the interpretivist paradigm.
They aim to give a voice to individual actors by providing them with the possibility
to make sense of and to construct entrepreneurship as they view it through their
own organizational positions, responsibilities, and work tasks as hired employees
of their frms. The studies focus on the dimensions of autonomy, proactiveness,
and competitive aggressiveness in the concept of EO (Lumpkin & Dess, 1996,
2001), and the theoretical model of strategic entrepreneurship as explained by
Ireland, Covin, and Kuratko (2009). The empirical excursions that describe the
practical application and sensemaking of organizational actors aim to add new
depth and richness to entrepreneurship in the corporate setting by examining
Introduction 17
entrepreneurship from the individual actors’ perspectives and, thereafter, by
comparing their interpretations to the frm-level theoretical concepts of corporate
entrepreneurship.
18 Entrepreneurship in organizations
2. ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN ORGANIZATIONS
2.1 Corporate entrepreneurship
Corporate entrepreneurship (CE) is generally viewed as the overall defnition
of frm-level entrepreneurial behavior in established organizations.
1
The main
goal of CE is to generate new economic activity (Wiklund, et al., 2011; Davidsson
& Wiklund, 2001) leading to growth (Kuratko & Audretsch, 2013; Covin et
al., 2006; Zahra & Covin, 1995). Such economic activity can take the form of
corporate venturing (i.e., the creation of completely new businesses within or
outside the existing frm structure), innovations that result from capitalizing on
opportunities (Wales et al., 2013b), or the strategic renewal of the frm (Kuratko
& Audretsch, 2013; Covin & Miller, 2013; Sharma & Chrisman, 1999; Guth &
Ginsberg, 1990; Gartner, 1985). Growth is most often operationalized as sales
growth leading to growth of other fnancial and non-fnancial indicators, such
as proftability, return on investment, headcount, and customer satisfaction
(Audretsch, 2012; Wales et al., 2013a; Rauch et al., 2009; Wiklund, 1999).
Obviously, one can also stimulate growth with a variety of other strategic,
competitive, and management orientations besides CE (Zahra et al., 1999).
These orientations include, for instance, cost leadership, differentiation, and
segmentation (Porter, 1980). However, innovation is what distinguishes CE
from other approaches, as it forms the core of all corporate entrepreneurship
activities (Kuratko & Audretsch, 2013; Covin & Miles, 1999). Continuous
streams of innovation create a sustainable competitive advantage for the
entrepreneurial frm and differentiate it from the competition (Barney, 1991,
2001; Ireland & Webb, 2007; Ireland et al., 2001). Without innovative products
and services or other types of newness and creativity, a frm cannot be considered
entrepreneurial.
1 The notion of intrepreneurship has also served to describe the phenomenon of entrepreneurship
within existing frms. The theoretical content of intrapreneurship varies from a more limited scope,
such as internal corporate venturing (Parker, 2011) and individual employees who turn new ideas into
proftable outcomes (Pinchot, 1985; see also Section 2.2 on the autonomy dimension of entrepreneurial
orientation), to descriptions of all-encompassing, organization-wide entrepreneurship, which shares
many characteristics similar to those of CE explained here (see, e.g., Antoncic & Hisrich, 2001; 2003).
In the latter examples, intrapreneurship appears as an interchangeable label to CE. In this study, CE
serves as an umbrella concept that includes the notions of entrepreneurial orientation and strategic
entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurship in organizations 19
Corporate entrepreneurship typically emphasizes the behavioral aspect
of entrepreneurship because actions (and not dispositions or attributes) are
what render a frm entrepreneurial (Covin & Slevin, 1991; Covin & Lumpkin,
2011). Entrepreneurial behavior consists of two key dimensions: the ability to
recognize or create an opportunity and to exploit or commercialize it (Audretsch,
2012). Firms translate these opportunities into entrepreneurial projects that the
organization then pursues (Wiklund & Shepherd, 2011). To remain competitive
in the future also, frms should balance the exploitation of existing opportunities
for present success with the search for new ones (Ireland & Webb, 2007, 2009). In
other words, frms should simultaneously take full advantage of their established
business opportunities while searching for unexplored ones that could generate
future revenue and proft. If frms emphasize only one of these, they could
eventually see a continued decline in their market share or incur overwhelming
costs, or worse.
Managers at different organizational levels play an important role in the
successful formulation and implementation of entrepreneurial behavior
throughout the entire frm (Kuratko & Audretsch, 2013; Belousova & Gailly,
2013; De Clercq et al., 2010; Hornsby et al., 2009; Floyd & Lane, 2000; Barringer
& Bluedorn, 1999). Senior-level managers articulate an entrepreneurial strategic
vision for their frm and lay out a pro-entrepreneurship organizational structure
(Ireland et al., 2009). Both the vision and architecture encourage and justify the
systematic and continuous pursuit of opportunities throughout the frm. They
help organizational members to commit to entrepreneurial behavior without
the direct involvement of top executives. Middle-level managers, for their part,
endorse and evaluate entrepreneurial opportunities and deploy the resources
needed to pursue these opportunities (Kuratko et al., 2005). The role of frst-
level managers is to initiate entrepreneurial projects, solve problems related to
these projects, and adjust current practices to the strategic initiatives of senior-
level management (Floyd & Lane, 2000).
Generally, corporate entrepreneurship is considered a positive phenomenon
that generates favorable consequences for frms. However, the theoretical
literature also highlights precautions to and downsides of pursuing CE. First, CE
may rapidly deplete resources if applied in inappropriate environments (Wales et
al., 2013a; Phan et al., 2009; Covin & Slevin, 1991) and increase competition in the
market by goading competitors to fght back (Miller, 1983; Covin & Covin, 1990).
In addition, entrepreneurial actions do not guarantee pre-determined results
because the outcome of any entrepreneurial action is inherently uncertain (Covin
& Miles, 1999). In fact, entrepreneurial projects that focus on experimentation
into the unknown may often end in failure (Wiklund & Shepherd, 2011). Finally,
CE should not be viewed as a quick engine of growth, but instead as a long-
term, resource-consuming orientation that may take longer periods of time to
20 Entrepreneurship in organizations
take full economic effect (Wales et al., 2011; Lechner & Gudmundsson, 2014;
Ireland et al., 2009; Dess et al., 2003; Wiklund, 1999; Zahra & Covin, 1995).
After the general outline of corporate entrepreneurship presented above,
the next two sections explain two specifc approaches to CE. The notion of
entrepreneurial orientation (EO) is the most widely-used theoretical concept
to describe entrepreneurship as frm growth. Strategic entrepreneurship, for
its part, conceptualizes entrepreneurship as frm renewal.
2.2 Entrepreneurial orientation
The concept of entrepreneurial orientation (EO) represents a particular strategy-
making mode (Ireland et al., 2009; Dess et al., 1997; Mintzberg, 1973) based
on decision-making that favors entrepreneurial actions (Lumpkin & Dess,
1996). In recent decades, EO has been the most common conceptualization of
entrepreneurship as frm growth.
To date, the theoretical and empirical formulations of EO have largely taken
place within a positivist and realist research paradigm (Rauch et al. 2009; Covin
& Wales, 2012). EO represents a real organizational, frm-level phenomenon that
exists independently of its measurement (Covin & Lumpkin, 2011). EO cannot
be defned as a distinct, clearly observable entity, but is instead inferred from EO
measures that seek indications of entrepreneurial dispositions and behavioral
patterns within organizations (Covin & Lumpkin, 2011). These indications are
judged and evaluated by executive directors because the senior-most executive is
assumed to possess the most relevant information on an organization to provide
a frm-level viewpoint of its entrepreneurial actions (Wiklund & Shepherd,
2003; Lyon et al., 2000). The original EO measure, the M/C&S scale (Miller,
1983; Covin & Slevin, 1989, see Appendix B), still continues to see extensive
use in empirical research (Wales et al., 2013a). The measure includes not only
indicators of entrepreneurial behavior, but also items that represent beliefs,
preferences, and business outcomes related to entrepreneurship (Covin & Miller,
2013). Even though descriptions of entrepreneurship normally emphasize the
behavioral aspect, this type of triangulation approach is not viewed as problematic
because multiple indicators are considered the best way to capture the nature of
entrepreneurship in the corporate setting (Covin & Miller, 2013).
EO describes frm-level entrepreneurship by foregrounding fve specifc
dimensions. These fve key dimensions include innovativeness, risk-taking,
proactiveness, competitive aggressiveness, and autonomy (Lumpkin &
Dess, 1996, 2001; Covin & Slevin, 1989, 1991; Miller, 1983). The earliest
conceptualizations of EO (Miller, 1983; Covin & Slevin, 1989) consist of
innovativeness, proactiveness, and risk-taking; the dimensions of competitive
Entrepreneurship in organizations 21
aggressiveness and autonomy were added to the construct later (Lumpkin
& Dess, 1996). The original conceptualizations view proactiveness and
competitive aggressiveness as interchangeable (Covin & Slevin, 1991; Covin
& Covin, 1990) because outperforming one’s competition is a manifestation
of proactiveness. Lumpkin and Dess (1996), however, argued for the specifc
inclusion of competitive aggressiveness by pointing out that competing with
rivals and anticipating new opportunities in the market should be conceptually
differentiated from one another, and consequently, operationalized a more
precise distinction between the two dimensions (Lumpkin & Dess, 2001, see
Appendix B). They further argued for the inclusion of autonomy by highlighting
that independent action disengaged from organizational constraints is essential
in the lauch of a new venture. Counter-arguments claim that autonomy is built
into the dimension of risk-taking, because risk-taking would be diffcult to engage
in without autonomy (Basso et al., 2009).
Innovativeness has become a major factor used to characterize the core of
entrepreneurship and the outcomes of entrepreneurial behavior (Lumpkin & Dess,
1996; Covin & Miller, 2013). Entrepreneurial frms pursue new opportunities by
engaging in and supporting new ideas, novelty, experimentation, and creative
practices that may result in new products, services, processes (Dess et al., 1997;
Lumpkin & Dess, 1996), or any new combination of existing means and resources
that eliminate the existing combinations (Schumpeter, 1934/1996).
Risk-taking, frequently used to describe entrepreneurship (Lumpkin & Dess,
1996), is defned as the degree to which managers in a frm are willing to make
large and risky resource commitments that have a reasonable chance of costly
failure (Miller & Friesen, 1978). An entrepreneurial frm views these kinds of bold
and wide-ranging acts as useful and common practice (Miller & Friesen, 1982).
On a more general level, risk-taking refers to any bold action of organizational
members in order to achieve their objectives, often in the face of unknown
opportunities with uncertain outcomes (Lumpkin & Dess, 1996, 2001).
Proactiveness represents a forward-looking response to opportunities in the
market (Lumpkin & Dess, 2001). Proactive actions enable a frm to anticipate
changes and needs in the market and to be the frst to act on them. Proactive
frms introduce new trends to the market by actively shaping the demand, not
merely reacting to it (Lumpkin & Dess, 1996; 2001; Miller & Friesen, 1978).
Shaping demand involves, above all, introducing new products or services
ahead of the competition. Proactiveness suggests a forward-looking perspective
characteristic of a frm that has the foresight to act in anticipation of future
demand to create change (Lumpkin & Dess, 2001). Anticipation and being ahead
of the market are considered benefcial to economic performance, especially
in dynamic, opportunity-rich environments (Lumpkin & Dess, 2001). Some
previous studies (e.g., Tang et al., 2009; Vora et al., 2012) have suggested
22 Entrepreneurship in organizations
that proactiveness occupies a primary position in encouraging and enabling
entrepreneurial behavior in organizations. Proactiveness drives innovative and
risk-taking behavior and enhances concrete, frm-level entrepreneurial activities.
Competitive aggressiveness, in contrast, is a defensive response to
competitive threats (Lumpkin & Dess, 2001). Competitive moves enable a
frm to forcefully secure or improve its position in the market. An aggressively
competitive frm challenges its rivals directly and intensely to achieve entry
or improve its current position in the market. The means for competing
can be also reactive and unconventional (Lumpkin & Dess, 1996; 2001) and
include, for example, cutting prices and sacrifcing proftability (Venkatraman,
1989). Aggressively competitive moves positively contribute to the success of
entrepreneurial activities, especially when competition for clients and resources
is intense (Lumpkin & Dess, 2001). However, competitive aggressiveness may
harm long-term collaborative ventures in the market if pushed to extremes (Certo
et al., 2009). Firms with a reputation for competitive aggressiveness may even
fnd themselves excluded from alliances based on mutual knowledge sharing and
the exploitation of opportunities. Therefore, a more moderate level of competitive
aggressiveness may result in more optimal frm performance than would drastic
measures aimed at outperforming the competition (see Bhuian et al., 2005).
Autonomy in the concept of EO is defned as the independent action of
an individual or team in seizing an opportunity and following it through to
completion (Lumpkin & Dess, 1996, see also Pinchot, 1985). The entrepreneurship
literature and cultural images generally regard autonomy as a central feature
of entrepreneurship and link it to individual actors. Thus, unlike other EO
dimensions, autonomy functions primarily on an individual or micro-level,
and its role is to set in motion and prime the other dimensions. A more
recently developed autonomy measure (Lumpkin et al., 2009, see Appendix
B) conceptually differentiates EO-related autonomy more distinctly from
management-related autonomy, such as autonomy induced by decentralization
or other structural arrangements. A frm and its leaders should promote, shield,
and support the efforts of independently working individuals and teams that
make decisions on their own about what business opportunities to pursue despite
organizational constraints. These initiatives and input should play a major role
when the frm identifes and selects suitable opportunities in the market. If an
organization lacks the freedom to act independently, individuals and teams
will create autonomy for themselves by, for instance, bending rules, bypassing
procedures, and disregarding other organizational constraints (Shane, 1994).
EO research has raised some questions about the potential negative effects of
autonomy. For instance, some researchers have claimed that autonomy carried
to extremes may actually diminish a frm’s returns (Lumpkin et al., 2009).
Entrepreneurship in organizations 23
EO research has also focused on whether the dimensions of EO can occur
independently in various combinations or unidimensionally in a balanced
combination in order for a frm to be considered entrepreneurial. According to
the multidimensional view, the dimensions of EO can and should be emphasized
in different ways depending on environmental and organizational contexts
(Lumpkin & Dess, 1996). In contrast, the unidimensional view proposes that a
frm can be considered entrepreneurial only if it acts upon all the dimensions
simultaneously and thus scores high on all the corresponding variables (Rauch
et al., 2009; Basso et al., 2009). To date, most empirical studies have adopted
the composite, unidimensional view and have therefore presumed that all EO
dimensions add equally to the overall quantitative level of EO in any given frm
(Rauch et al., 2009; Covin & Wales, 2012). EO scholars currently consider these
two views representative of different constructs and not competing ones (Covin
& Miller, 2013). The unidimensional view focuses on the commonality of the
dimensions, whereas the multidimensional view explores the distinctiveness of
each EO dimension (Covin & Lumpkin, 2011).
The concept of EO constructs entrepreneurship in the corporate setting as
a frm-level phenomenon. More specifcally, frm-level refers to each strategic
business unit of an organization. Typically, non-diversifed small and medium-
sized enterprises are considered frm-level units in their entirety, whereas each
diversifed strategic business unit of a multi-business organization is viewed as
if the unit were an entire frm in itself (Covin & Lumpkin, 2011). The concept
of EO further emphasizes sustained entrepreneurial behavior patterns (Covin
& Slevin, 1991; Covin & Lumpkin, 2011) that frms can and should actively
manage (Covin & Slevin, 1991). Entrepreneurial behavior must also occur on an
ongoing basis. Therefore, frms do not merit the label entrepreneurial if their
entrepreneurial actions do not persist over time.
Also, EO as a frm-level concept should pervade all levels of an organization
(Covin & Slevin, 1991). However, recent developments in EO research indicate
that EO may manifest in different ways across hierarchy levels, business units,
functional areas, and the development stages of a frm (Wales et al., 2011; see
also Zahra et al., 1999). EO scholars have also suggested studying more proximal
outcomes of EO, such as whether entrepreneurial projects succeed or fail, in
addition to the traditional frm-level outcomes of EO (Wiklund & Shepherd, 2011).
These theorizations recognize that organizations may contain heterogeneous
conceptualizations of EO, and that these diverse conceptualizations and their
different outcomes may enhance frm performance in varying manners. To fully
tap into entrepreneurship and the positive business outcomes it promises, how
individual actors in different functions of the frm involved in and carrying out
entrepreneurial projects view entrepreneurship from their own positions in the
organization is therefore relevant.
24 Entrepreneurship in organizations
2.3 Strategic entrepreneurship
Whereas entrepreneurial orientation treats entrepreneurship as a particular
strategy-making mode, strategic entrepreneurship represents a distinct survival
and transformation strategy for established frms that face declining business
performance and turnaround situations (Kuratko & Audretsch, 2013, 2009; Dess
et al., 1999). In order to regain competitive superiority, strategic entrepreneurship
requires frms to fundamentally renew themselves (Covin & Miles, 1999). Firms
should redirect their current strategy and signifcantly modify their operational
practices to change their declining position in the market.
Strategic entrepreneurship takes effect by linking renewal to the formulation
of competitive advantage. The specifc aim is to gain sustainable competitive
advantage as a way to manage uncertainty and resources (Ireland & Webb,
2009; Ireland et al., 2003) by implementing a value-creating strategy that no
current or potential competitor takes advantage of or is able to copy (Barney,
1991). New valuable competitive advantages in relation to the frm’s external
environment ought to be explored on an ongoing basis in order for a frm to
continuously differentiate itself from its rivals (Ireland & Webb, 2007, 2009).
Theoretical literature depicts four forms of strategic entrepreneurship
manifestations (Covin & Miles, 1999). These types represent varying degrees
of how fundamentally a frm wishes to redefne itself in order to improve its
competitive standing and reconstruct its business model (Ireland & Webb,
2009). The most common form is sustained regeneration, which develops
internal cultures, processes, and structures to support continuous innovation,
whereas domain redefnition creates a completely new market position for
the frm. Organizational rejuvenation takes an internal look into the frm by
developing the organization itself in strategy execution. Strategic renewal, for
its part, changes the way the frm competes by aligning it successfully with the
external environment. Strategic renewal implements a new business strategy
that differs signifcantly from past practices and aims to utilize resources more
effciently or to exploit available product-market opportunities more fully (Covin
& Miles, 1999; Kuratko & Audretsch, 2009). Strategy renewal represents the
most challenging form of strategic entrepreneurship because changes in strategic
direction may be even harder for most frms than, for instance, implementing
major internal innovations (Covin & Miles, 1999; Kuratko & Audretsch, 2009).
The literature depicts theoretical strategic entrepreneurship models that
defne the antecedents, elements, and consequences of entrepreneurship in the
corporate setting (e.g., Ireland et al., 2003; Ireland et al., 2009). These models
place entrepreneurship in the realm of strategic management by prescribing
ideal combinations of appropriate cultural, structural, and resource variables
to support entrepreneurial behavior and by predicting success if frms conform
Entrepreneurship in organizations 25
to these prescriptions. For instance, the model of Ireland, Covin, and Kuratko
(2009) emphasizes the importance of creating an entrepreneurial strategic
vision and a pro-entrepreneurship organizational architecture to promote the
pursuit of opportunities in the market. However, the strategic entrepreneurship
literature fails to describe how actual entrepreneurship processes, such as the
implementation of CE models, emerge in the everyday reality of organizations
(Steyaert, 2007, 1997). In fact, the lack of a comprehensive model of the
entrepreneurial process that would provide theoretical and practical implications
as to the how of entrepreneurship is considered one of the most pressing
problems in the study of CE (Moroz & Hindle, 2012).
26 Aims of the study
3. AIMS OF THE STUDY
The present dissertation adopts an interpretivist research paradigm to study
entrepreneurship in the organizational context. The interpretivist paradigm
takes a subjective and constructionist perspective of corporate reality and aims
to describe how individual organizational actors themselves perceive their
organization (Grant & Perren, 2002; Anderson & Starnawska, 2008). The
dissertation therefore adopts a fundamentally different research approach to the
phenomenon of corporate entrepreneurship than what has been achieved thus
far. The study aims to describe how organizational actors construct and interpret
the notion of entrepreneurship and to explicate the micro-level behaviors related
to entrepreneurship that frms engage in as part of their everyday activities.
Conventionally, the dominant functionalist research tradition in
entrepreneurship research emphasizes an objective, realist, and positivist
perspective of organizational reality (Grant & Perren, 2002). The positivist
paradigm formulates entrepreneurship as a phenomenon residing beyond
the reality of entrepreneurship itself (i.e., the empirically-measurable reality
of orientations, strategies, and behaviors of frms). However, scholars have
increasingly begun to claim (see, for example, Anderson & Starnawska, 2008;
Gartner & Birley, 2002; Ogbor, 2000) that this research approach has resulted in
a somewhat narrow and one-sided perspective of entrepreneurship, as it has failed
to attend to the unexpected, atypical, and unique nature of entrepreneurship.
For instance, the functionalist paradigm has tended to explain variance in
entrepreneurial activity in the corporate setting, but not the processes leading
to that activity, and to search for regularities in entrepreneurial behaviour instead
of looking at the multiple ways in which entrepreneurship can be enacted and
defned across various organizational actors and contexts.
Within the functionalist paradigm, the theoretical formulations of
entrepreneurship represent the central processes and dimensions that scholars
consider relevant when frms strive for growth and survival by entrepreneurial
activities. According to the interpretivist paradigm, however, any particular choice
of theoretical dimensions and actions that functionalist entrepreneurship studies
have outlined is already a socially-constructed phenomenon. These choices are
not absolute, as their meaning and usage can vary according to context. In
fact, entrepreneurship as defned in theoretical literature, entrepreneurship
operationalized as a particular type of frm behavior, and entrepreneurship
constructed in different occasions, circumstances, and contexts represent various
versions of entrepreneurship that may overlap or differ. The lack of an absolute or
Aims of the study 27
objective meaning of entrepreneurship does not prevent scholars from discussing
entrepreneurship as a socially and discursively constructed phenomenon.
From these general points of departure, studying the interpretations that
owners, managers, and other key actors responsible for the management and
operations of frms actually construct is indeed feasible. In fact, some scholars
have begun to call for interpretivist studies that promise a deeper understanding
of the nature of entrepreneurship in organizations and the practical challenges
and activities related to it (Carlsson et al., 2013; Grant & Perren, 2002; Zahra,
2007). Miller (2011), for instance, suggests interviewing executives and
asking them to share their understandings of the EO dimensions and of the
meaning of pursuing EO. However, even though the benefts of interpretivist
inquiries are considered important in enriching our understanding of corporate
entrepreneurship, empirical research has to date largely failed to take up such a
perspective (Anderson et al., 2013; Vora et al., 2012; Tajeddini & Mueller, 2012;
Lappalainen, 2009 notwithstanding).
In response to the underexplored interpretivist research challenge in the
corporate setting, this study describes what kind of versions of entrepreneurship
individual organizational actors construct and how their versions relate to the
theoretically-formulated conceptualizations of corporate entrepreneurship. The
aim is to examine how organizational actors either individually or collectively
defne entrepreneurship when they construct, interpret, evaluate, and apply
it in the context of their day-to-day activities on different functions and levels
of the organization. The study focuses on the theoretical model of strategic
entrepreneurship as explained by Ireland, Covin, and Kuratko (2009) and the
dimensions of autonomy, proactiveness, and competitive aggressiveness in the
concept of entrepreneurial orientation. These three dimensions were selected
for analysis because their inclusion and operationalization in the concept of EO
remains debatable (Rauch et al., 2009), and because few studies since Lumpkin
and Dess (2001; 1996) have attempted to clarify their individual distinctiveness.
This study sets out to explore the following questions:
1. How do organizational actors react to the general idea of
entrepreneurship? (I–IV; Section 5.1)
2. What kind of interpretations of entrepreneurship do organizational actors
construct and how do they argue for or against these interpretations?
(I, II; Section 5.2)
3. What kind of structural processes of entrepreneurship do organizational
actors construct in their talk and for what purposes? (III, IV; Section
5.3)
4. How is entrepreneurship enacted and accomplished in everyday
organizational interaction situations? (I–IV; Section 6.1.1)
28 Aims of the study
5. How do organizational actors view their own entrepreneurship-related
actions and those of their colleagues in relation to the entire frm? (I,
III; Section 6.1.2)
6. What role do internal and external relations of the frm play in the
construction of entrepreneurship? (I, II, III, IV; Section 6.2)
7. What are the institutional challenges of the legitimization and
institutionalization of entrepreneurship in the organizational context?
(I–IV; Section 6.3)
Materials and methods 29
4. MATERIALS AND METHODS
4.1 Descriptive methodologies
This dissertation employs three descriptive methods to generate and analyze the
empirical research material. Descriptive methods refer to research procedures
that illustrate how societal entities, such as organizations, are regulated and
maintained by, for example, status quo, social order, and consensus (Grant &
Perren, 2002). The methods utilized in this study include discursive psychology,
the qualitative attitude approach, and narrative psychology. They aim to collect
samples of how the research participants subjectively interpret the phenomenon
of entrepreneurship in the specifc context of their everyday corporate reality.
Particular attention focused on choosing methods that would cater to both the
content-related and structural elements of the research material.
Discursive psychology served to explicate the different versions (or discourses)
of corporate entrepreneurship that the research participants constructed in their
ongoing interaction. Discursive psychology focuses on the content of language
use in interactive situations, such as interviews and meetings (Potter & Wetherell,
1987; Burr, 2003) and highlights the situated, constructed, and action-oriented
nature of language use (Potter, 2003; Potter & Edwards, 2001). A variation
in individual accounts is to be expected because the same phenomenon can
be illustrated in a number of different ways (Potter & Wetherell, 1987). Most
importantly, discursive psychology views language use as action. In other words,
individuals can use discourses to accomplish different purposes through their
talk (Potter & Wetherell, 1987), such as to fulfll their own objectives or to satisfy
their own interests. To construct and justify their own versions of social reality,
individuals can draw on diverse resources, such as interpretative repertoires,
categories, and rhetorical devices (Potter & Wetherell, 1995).
In addition to identifying the discursive variation in the research
participants’ talk about entrepreneurship, the analysis took advantage of
established interaction structures and rhetorical devices that conversation
analysis has already laid out. This structural approach to organizational talk
about entrepreneurship proved useful in understanding how entrepreneurial
processes unfold in ongoing interaction. These interaction structures included
proposals (Houtkoop-Steenstra, 1990; Houtkoop, 1987; Davidsson, 1984), joint
decision-making processes of access, agreement, and commitment (Stevanovic &
Peräkylä, 2012; Stevanovic, 2012; Stevanovic, 2013; see also Gunnarsson, 2006;
30 Materials and methods
Huisman, 2001), complaints (Heinemann & Traverso, 2009; Edwards, 2005),
and extreme case formulations (Pomerantz, 1986; Edwards, 2000). Applying
conversation-analytical tools to fne-grained analyses of discourse in this manner
is common in discursive psychology (Billig, 1999).
The qualitative attitude approach (Vesala & Rantanen, 2007; Vesala,
2008) served to bring to the fore the qualitatively different interpretations
about corporate entrepreneurship that research participants constructed
in the interviews. The approach draws on discursive psychology and Billig’s
(1996; 1991; 2009) rhetorical social psychology, which emphasizes rhetoric
as argumentation. Billig considers rhetoric to be the key to understanding the
social nature of human thinking and suggests that the strategy of considering,
searching for, and inventing not only arguments but also counter-arguments
is basic to human cognitive processing. Individuals repeatedly face situations
that demand decisions between alternate options, and therefore also need to
consider and evaluate differing and opposing viewpoints. The qualitative attitude
approach offers a systematic procedure for empirically studying the construction
of attitudes in evaluative argumentative talk in interview settings. An attitude is
studied as an either positive or negative communicative and evaluative viewpoint
of a particular issue in a particular social context. When taking a stand, an
individual usually justifes the stand and accounts for it, even when the stand
is presented conditionally or with reservations. In such argumentative rhetoric,
an attitude toward a particular issue seldom translates into one completely fxed
position that applies unchangeably across different situations.
The qualitative attitude approach uses attitude statements, similar to those
in quantitative attitude measures, as prompts for producing rich and open-
ended argumentation about a particular issue (Vesala, 2008). This approach
was considered particularly suitable because it offers suffcient latitude for
the interviewees to refect on entrepreneurship from multiple perspectives. In
particular, the approach requires that the interviewer not defne the concepts
and ideas included in the statements, but instead permits the interviewees to
defne them. Even though exact (theoretically motivated) wordings can serve
to formulate the statements, the interviewees are free to contest them and
their relevance in each specifc research context. Further, the approach offers
an equal opportunity and position to all research participants as actors in their
organizations to comment on ideas related to entrepreneurship. After that, it
obviously remains to be seen whether and how the participants themselves will
take up this opportunity.
Narrative psychology was chosen to examine how entrepreneurial processes
unfold and link past, present, and future actions together (Down & Warren,
2008; Lindgren & Packendorff, 2009; Steyaert, 1997), because time and context
are crucial elements in narratives (Jones et al., 2008; Bruner, 2004). Narratives
Materials and methods 31
typically take a retrospective look at events and structurally describe how they
progressed over the course of time. Narratives further aim to provide or restore
a sense of meaning and direction to how the events were experienced (Murray,
2008; Frank & Lueger, 1998; Gergen & Gergen, 1984). These features of narratives
are consistent with entrepreneurship scholars’ emphasis on studying realized
strategies as opposed to intended ones (Venkatraman, 1989). During interviews,
the aim is to encourage interviewees to talk freely about their experiences and
opinions on a given topic in order to capture the longitudinal, temporal, and
developmental nature of these experiences. Interviewees offer many narratives
in response to open-ended questions, as they impose no pre-defned limits or
directions on the type of narrative expected (De Fina, 2009). Consequently,
interview topics are typically articulated in a general manner in order to keep
as many views as possible open to interviewees.
4.2 The context of the study
The original studies of this dissertation explore interpretations of entrepreneurship
in two everyday organizational contexts. First, Studies I-III take the perspective
of one organizational function of entrepreneurship. Because EO may manifest
in different manners across functional areas of a frm (Wales et al., 2011), the
studies set out to explore the potential variation in the interpretations of EO
in the sales function and the selling activities that organizational actors pursue
in their everyday operations. The empirical research context of selling can be
considered relevant to corporate entrepreneurship, in particular to EO, as the
sales function combines the results of entrepreneurial efforts performed in
other organizational functions. Salespeople typically operate at the frm-market
interface by offering the outcomes of their frms’ innovative efforts to the market
and by having access to knowledge about competitor actions. Salespeople are
therefore in a relevant position to evaluate how their frm’s behavior is met in
the market and with what kind of results.
More specifcally, Studies I-III focus on individual salespeople either directly
employed in the sales function of each studied organization, managing sales teams
within these functions, or having personal sales obligations in other positions
within the frm, either with their own sales targets to meet or the overall turnover
of the sales function to attend to. This overview of sales activities on different
organizational levels and viewed from different, and even simultaneuous,
organizational roles offers a relatively versatile perspective of entrepreneurship in
the organizational context of selling. For example, management group members,
on the one hand, serve as directors responsible for the entire frm and, on the
other hand, also as salespeople with individual sales responsibilities to fulfll.
32 Materials and methods
Second, in Study IV, the empirical research context is the entire organization
viewed from the perspective of its managing director. Study IV therefore adopts
an empirical research context and perspective typical of CE research. However,
the methodology offers a different argumentative starting point for the managing
director. Instead of being asked to complete a questionnaire about his frm’s
entrepreneurial activities and dispositions, the managing director was offered
the opportunity to tell the story of his frm in an interview.
4.3 Research material
The research material comes from three privately-owned Finnish business service
provider frms in the metropolitan areas of Helsinki and Tampere during 2008-
2011. These frms are service providers that apply their specialized competencies,
knowledge, and skills for the beneft of other organizations (see Vargo & Lusch,
2004). They claimed that their sales function was organized mainly around face-
to-face meetings with representatives of their client organizations.
The material comes from individual interviews and authentic meeting
interaction recordings. I carried out all the interviews but did not participate in
the meetings. All of the meetings in Study III and all of the interviews in Studies
I and II were conducted in Finnish. The interview of Study IV was conducted in
English. All meetings and interviews were recorded for later transcription (see
Appendix A) with the written permission of all participants. The translations
of the meeting and interview talk presented in the excerpts of the original
publications aim to maintain a clear sense of the research participants’ talk
and to keep it as close as possible to the Finnish original (cf. Houtkoop, 1987).
A summary of the research material appears in Table 1.
Table 1. Summary of the research material.
Study Size of
enterprise
(headcount)
Material
collection
period
Research
participants
Research
material
Duration of
recording
Research
method
I Small May 2008 Management
group
members
(N = 6)
Individual
interviews
29 min on
average
Qualitative
attitude
approach
II Large Oct 2010-
Jan 2011
Salespeople
(N = 7) and
sales group
directors
(N = 2)
Individual
interviews
21 min on
average
Qualitative
attitude
approach
III Small Jan-Feb
2008
Management
group
members
(N = 6)
Recorded
meeting
(N = 5)
12 h 40 min
in total
Discursive
psychology,
interaction
structures
IV Medium-sized Dec 2009 Managing
director
(N = 1)
Individual
interview
1 h 7 min Narrative
psychology,
prototypical
story forms
Materials and methods 33
The individual interviews in Studies I and II (management group members,
salespersons, and sales group directors) were conducted according to the
practices of the qualitative attitude approach (Vesala, 2008). The general idea is
to create comparability between individual interviews by using a semi-structured
interview design, which organizes the interview into distinct sections. Each
section involves a conversation which the interviewer begins by introducing
and reading aloud each prompt statement, as well as presenting it in written
form on a sheet of paper. All of the interviews introduced several statements
of the dimensions of EO formulated to address the selling context and other
organizational issues for the interviewees to comment on. The statements about
autonomy, proactiveness, and competitive aggressiveness chosen for analysis
in Studies I and II appear in Appendix C. While conducting the interviews, the
interviewer has to accomplish two tasks: to elicit the interviewees’ opinion about
each attitude statement and to encourage comments while remaining neutral
about the issue at hand. The interviewees, in their own words, take a stand on
each statement and justify their stands. In Studies I and II, the interviewer also
elicited clarifcations from the interviewees by asking them to describe in more
detail how an argument would present itself in practice. The interviewees also
received recapitulations of their previous views in order to encourage more
profound refections on the statement or to ensure a valid understanding of the
given views. At the end of the interviews, in order to give the interviewees one
more opportunity to refect on the statements, all the statements were presented
to the interviewees at the same time, unless they explicitly said the interview
was over or stated that they had nothing more to add.
The research material of Study III contains recordings of management group
meetings. Recordings of authentic meeting interaction offer an opportunity to
study organizational life as it unfolds as a joint achievement of the meeting
participants. In general, meetings are the very situations in which frms produce
and reproduce themselves, where frm activities are created and maintained,
and where divergent issues meet and potentially merge (Boden, 1994; Drew
& Heritage, 1992). Meetings can therefore be considered central places where
entrepreneurship can also emerge and be maintained in social interaction (see
Asmuß & Svennevig, 2009). In fact, some EO scholars consider meetings to
be particularly informative in offering new insights into how directors discuss
their entrepreneurial activities (e.g., Miller, 2011; Covin & Miller, 2013). The
meetings of Study III were audio-recorded by one of the meeting participants.
The same management group members that participated in these meetings were
also interviewed in Study I. A summary of the recordings appears in Appendix D.
The individual interview in Study IV (the managing director) was conducted
according to the interview guidelines of narrative psychology (Murray, 2008;
Mishler, 1986). The study utilized the traditional upper echelon perspective of
empirical entrepreneurship research in the organizational context (Rauch et al.,
34 Materials and methods
2009; Lyon et al., 2000). The managing director’s perspective was considered
particularly relevant in this case because the managing director is arguably
the one individual in frms who is typically responsible for leading frm-level
change and renewal processes. In narrative terms, the managing director was
considered the main character in organizational change. The interview topic was
articulated in a general manner in order to encourage the managing director
to contemplate his experiences as the leader of his frm from as many views
as possible. He was asked to refect on what had occurred in the frm since his
appointment, what the frm’s situation was at the moment of the interview,
and what he expected to occur in the near future. No cues or directions as to
entrepreneurship in general or CE strategies in particular were offered. The
only issues that the managing director was explicitly expected to bring up in
this talk were the temporal elements typical of narrative accounts (i.e., the
past, the present, and the future; see Murray, 2008). During the interview, the
interviewer’s role was typical of narrative interviews: to serve as an interested
audience for the interviewee’s talk and to refrain from demanding clarifcations
until the interview ended.
4.4 Procedures of analysis
4.4.1 STUDIES I AND II: THE QUALITATIVE ATTITUDE APPROACH
The analysis in the qualitative attitude approach proceeds from details of the
material to outlining general patterns of argumentation (Vesala & Rantanen,
2007). The analysis occurs in two stages. First, in the classifying analysis, the
argumentative talk is categorized according to a literal reading of the research
material. Second, the interpretative analysis brings these categories into a
conceptual dialogue with theoretical concepts and discussions relevant to the
particular study at hand.
The classifying analysis identifed different explicit stands taken towards each
attitude statement together with specifc arguments intended to reason and to
justify these stands (Vesala & Rantanen, 2007). The analysis also detailed the
stand-taking that interviewees expressed in a conditional or hesitant manner (see
also Billig, 1996). At this stage of the analysis, individual interviewees were not
the primary analytical units. Therefore, different types of stands or justifcations
were also identifed within one and the same interview. The different stands
were then classifed into categories: frst, according to the type of stand (i.e.,
supporting, rejecting, or conditional), and thereafter on the basis of each
stand’s justifcations. As a result, an overall view of multiple stand-justifcation
combinations observable in the interview material emerged. These overall views
appear in tables of the original Studies I and II.
Materials and methods 35
The interpretative analysis elaborated on the initial classifcatory analysis
(Vesala & Rantanen, 2007) which aimed to identify general patterns of
argumentation evident in the detailed categories of stands and justifcations.
These patterns were thereafter linked to the dimensions of EO and the theoretical
discussions about the concept of EO. The interpretative analysis explicated the
relational aspects of EO, targets of entrepreneurial behavior, and the relationships
between the single dimensions of EO.
4.4.2 STUDY III: DISCURSIVE PSYCHOLOGY AND INTERACTION STRUCTURES
In Study III, the departure point for the analysis was the explicit content of the
meeting talk. The analysis focused on those sequences in which management
group members, frst, described behavior that could be interpreted to match the
concepts of corporate entrepreneurship, in particular that of EO, and, second,
depicted a specifc purpose for this type of behavior. The object of analysis thus
included those meeting interaction sequences in which members discussed both
EO-related behavior and its purposes.
Sequences to be analyzed were selected on three grounds. First, sequences
were selected in which members used specifc EO-related theoretical vocabulary,
including adjectives such as proactive and innovative. Second, sequences
were also selected that depicted entrepreneurial behavior in ways that were in
some way discernibly linked to the concept of EO. For example, taking care of
everything from the beginning to the end can be considered congruent with
the theoretical defnition of autonomy. Third, the content of each sequence was
checked for potential purposes of EO-related behavior. Because the theoretical
concept of EO serves a specifc purpose, namely that of frm growth (Wales et
al., 2013a; Rauch et al., 2009), the analysis concentrated on those sequences in
which members directly described in their talk why entrepreneurial behavior
would be, for example, important to them. At this point, sequences that described
EO-related behavior with no explicitly stated purpose were excluded from
the analysis. For instance, cases in which members lamented the diffculty of
innovation and speculated how much time they would need to spend on it were
omitted. After the sequence selection, the analysis described in detail how EO-
related interaction sequences as mentioned above were structurally organized
in the talk of the management group members.
4.4.3 STUDY IV: NARRATIVE PSYCHOLOGY AND PROTOTYPICAL STORY
FORMS
During the managing director’s interview, it became apparent that strategic
issues formed an integral part of his narrative. The analysis concentrated on this
36 Materials and methods
strategy-related talk that comprised approximately the frst half of the interview.
The managing director’s interview was analyzed in two stages; frst, structurally
and, second, according to the CE strategy model of Ireland, Covin, and Kuratko
(2009).
The analysis of narrative empirical material typically begins by eplicating the
narrative structure – in other words, how events are linked together (Larty &
Hamilton, 2011). In Study IV, the narrative interview was analyzed as a specifc
narrative type. Gergen and Gergen (1984; 1986) depict three prototypical
narrative forms: progressive, regressive, and stable. These forms typically
establish a desired goal or another valued endpoint and describe preceding
events so that the narrator approaches, moves away from, or maintains this
goal. Narratives also anticipate future events (i.e., evaluate how the goal-related
events will evolve in the future). The managing director’s story was interpreted
as a typical progressive narrative with four stages (see also Murray, 2008). These
four stages group individual events together, and the relationships between these
stages establish a particular order to the narrative. This order further motivates
and justifes actions during each stage (cf. Gergen & Gergen, 1986).
Thereafter, the four stages of the managing director’s progressive narrative
were compared to the CE strategy model of Ireland, Covin, and Kuratko (2009).
When the analysis began (in May 2010), this model was one of the most
recently-published CE strategy models. The analysis paid specifc attention to
the two elements that the model places at the core of supporting the pursuit
of entrepreneurial opportunities: entrepreneurial strategic vision and pro-
entrepreneurship organizational architecture. The analysis further explicated
the outcomes of the renewed strategy in terms of desired performance.
Summary of the original studies 37
5. SUMMARY OF THE ORIGINAL STUDIES
By taking into account all four original studies, the present summary answers
research questions 1–3 (see Section 3) by frst considering how the research
participants reacted to the general idea of corporate entrepreneurship. The
summary thereafter explicates what kind of interpretations the participants
constructed of entrepreneurial orientation and how they justifed their views.
These interpretations are drawn from Studies I and II conducted according to
the principles of the qualitative attitude approach. Finally, the summary section
ends with an overview of the processes that the research participants constructed
of corporate entrepreneurship in their interview and meeting talk in Studies
III and IV.
5.1 The reception of corporate entrepreneurship
The reseach participants quite unproblematically and positively reacted to the
general idea of corporate entrepreneurship that was either presented to them in
interviews or constructed in meeting interaction. This observation is unsurprising
because the phenomenon of CE is most prominently related to the economic
sector of our society. This is not to say, however, that more detailed aspects of
CE were met with mere acceptance or treated as self-evident. This section will
show how CE was received both on a general and a more detailed level, and
how different interpretations of CE were rhetorically managed in interaction.
In Studies I-III, the research participants seemed to be familiar with the
phenomenon of corporate entrepreneurship and possess distinct representations
of it. They effortlessly commented on the EO statements and applied EO-related
vocabulary in both their interview and meeting talk. The participants described
EO, for example, as an entrepreneurial spirit, attitude, and characteristic.
Corporate entrepreneurship was relevant to the case frm of Studies I and III,
even as an offcially stated key aspect of its strategic goals. The participants also
often utilized a metaphor typically related to entrepreneurs, namely lone wolves.
This metaphor commonly describes the dominant image of entrepreneurs as
predators, or aggressive and exploitative actors (Anderson et al., 2009).
Interestingly, the research participants presented no arguments against the
general idea or importance of CE in their interview or meeting talk. This was
38 Summary of the original studies
evident, for instance, in Study III, when the research participants often oriented
to the entrepreneurial ideals as already existing: the entrepreneurial basis for
the new sales practices was frst presented as self-evident and only afterwards
as something new by assigning to the ideal a somewhat new interpretation. For
example, proactiveness seemed to be part of the participants’ common ground
because there was no need to explain why it was too late if the client approaches
the case frm frst. Thereafter, the new practice was formulated by proposing
that the case frm should always be the frst to contact the client.
Consequently, considerable consensus and shared understanding of
the relevance of CE seemed to prevail within the research participants,
notwithstanding individual differences in the tone of argumentation. In the
organizational context of this study, the general notion of CE seemed therefore to
occupy the position of an acknowledged ideal according to which organizational
actors should pursue their daily business endeavors. In fact, in Study II, the
interviewees either claimed that they themselves indeed conduct their selling
activities according to the principles described in the statements or said that the
principles represent ideals that every salespeople of the case frm should follow.
These fndings contrast with what some other studies in other empirical research
contexts have suggested. In the farming context, for example, some of the Finnish
farmers interviewed vehemently denied the relevance of entrepreneurship for
themselves by stating that entrepreneurial ideals cannot be applied to farming
activities (Pyysiäinen et al., 2011).
However, the individual dimensions of autonomy, proactiveness, and
competitive aggressiveness did provoke qualitatively different interpretations
among the research participants. They enumerated both positive and negative
aspects and consequences of these dimensions, and their talk depicted several
different perspectives of them. Overall, instead of directly refusing CE as a guiding
principle of their daily work, the participants constructed preconditions, practices,
and circumstances under which CE would function in full and produce desired
business outcomes for the frm. Negative evaluations of single dimensions and
proposals that contest current understandings and practices played an integral
part in these constructions.
To manage their conficting evaluations and proposals, the participants
used rhetorical devices in their talk about CE. In the interviews, conditional
argumentation in their initial responses to the interview statements served as just
such a resource. In other words, once the interviewee was capable of constructing
more than one view of the same object of evaluation, the argumentation
became conditional and reserved. The conditional argumentation allowed the
interviewees to adjust their stands later in order to ensure a thorough evaluation
of the statement before reaching a more defnite stand or a more comprehensive
view towards the issue. In the meeting interaction, the potential problems
Summary of the original studies 39
that might arise from presenting proposals that confict with current working
methods were expressed in careful formulations, such as conditional verb forms
and softeners. The careful talk was further intertwined with more adamant
expressions that utilized extreme case formulations (Pomerantz, 1986; Edwards,
2000) and emphases to render the actual proposal explicit and unambiguous.
In Study IV, the managing director’s interview talk contained no explicit
references to CE. For example, he did not describe his frm’s renewal process or
any elements in that process as entrepreneurial. The link between the managing
director’s narrative and the CE strategy model of Ireland, Covin, and Kuratko
(2009) therefore stems only from the analysis. However, the managing director
did contemplate the strategy renewal process in relation to competitors (as in
describing the acquisition of new clients) and emphasized that the frm should
take a forward-looking perspective of its future actions. So, one important
function of the strategy renewal process for the managing director seemed to
be to deal with competition by proactive and aggressive actions. This observation
is in line with the concept of EO in which proactiveness serves as a way to undo
competition (see Section 2.2). Even though the managing director did not directly
refer to CE in his talk, he did describe the actions of his frm in terms that can
be interpreted to correspond to the theoretical formulations of CE. It is therefore
reasonable to assume that organizational actors need not necessarily utilize
explicit theoretically-motivated vocabulary about CE or be able to identify and
label their behaviour in entrepreneurial terms in order to behave according to
ideals that the theoretical literature describes as entrepreneurial.
In summary, the organizational actors of this study had many argumentative
resources at their disposal to talk about and discuss corporate entrepreneurship,
defend their personal stands about it, and accept or contest those of other actors.
The next section will summarize these diverse interpretations about corporate
entrepreneurship.
5.2 The multifaceted interpretations of corporate
entrepreneurship
The original Studies I-II demonstrated the variation in how CE was understood,
evaluated, and applied in the organizational context of this study. Even though
the theoretical literature depicts CE in particular ways (see Section 2), the
research participants regarded it as something more. Along with accepting views,
the participants also constructed more problematic and nuanced views of CE.
Study I, ‘Constructing entrepreneurial orientation in a selling context’,
evaluated the idea of an autonomous entrepreneur in selling as both a positive
and a negative phenomenon. Autonomy was evaluated positively when it
40 Summary of the original studies
was connected to another EO dimension (proactiveness), but negatively
when linked to another one (competitive aggressiveness). Consequently, the
positive version was labeled proactive selling, and the negative one, internal
competitive aggressiveness. The simultaneous presence of these two opposing
interpretations suggests not only how frms may attain a positive competitive
status in the market, but also how they can jeopardize their position and weaken
their overall results. Therefore, contrary to what the concept of EO suggests, the
relationship of autonomy with other EO dimensions, rather than the amount of
autonomy as such, appeared to be a key question (see Lumpkin et al., 2009).
However, autonomy failed to connect to the other two of the EO dimensions,
namely innovativeness and risk-taking. This would have been possible, in
principle at least, because of the open-ended interview design, as the link with
proactiveness and competitive aggressiveness attests.
The analysis further highlighted the relational aspects of EO. The interviewees
constructed their positive and negative evaluations by way of their external client
relationships and their internal relationships that can, if non-existent or poor,
harm external relationships along with their personal responsibilities towards
the frm itself. Even though the prompt statement presented autonomy as an
individual-level issue, the interviewees also considered the issue of autonomy
in relation to the salesperson’s co-workers, clients, and the entire frm. In the
larger context of EO as a frm-level strategy-making process, it is paramount
that individual actions be constructed as a frm-level issue.
The second study, ‘Proactiveness and competitive aggressiveness in the
selling context’, constructed the practical application of these two dimensions of
EO to address two different groups in the market, namely competitors and clients
(i.e., not only to the competition, as the concept of EO would suggest). The two
constructions linked to competitors were labeled competitive aggressiveness and
competitive proactiveness, and those linked to clients, protective proactiveness
and protective aggressiveness. Clients as an important target group of EO in
the practical context of selling brought to the fore the notion of protectiveness
that was present in the interviewees’ argumentation about both EO dimensions.
Protectiveness can be interpreted to represent a practical means by which
frms can protect and shield what they have already won from the market.
To this end, the argumentation patterns of protective aggressiveness and
proactiveness demonstrated how frms may gain, maintain, and nurture existing
and prospective client relationships in their pursuit of economic success. The
fndings further suggest that the ability to construct practical applications of EO
and to adjust these applications according to each target group and context is
an essential characteristic of frms interested in applying EO for their beneft.
The frm-level strategy-making process of EO may therefore require that each
dimension of EO be translated into concrete, contextually relevant applications
Summary of the original studies 41
that serve everyday frm operations before EO can provide positive business
outcomes to its proponents.
Study II did not treat the dimensions of proactiveness and competitive
aggressiveness as interchangeable, however, as the original concept of EO suggests
(Covin & Slevin, 1991; Covin & Covin, 1990). Even though the both dimensions
address the same target groups (i.e., competitors and clients) and therefore
overlap, they both nevertheless play distinct roles in the practical application of
EO (see Lumpkin & Dess, 2001). The most distinctive function of proactiveness
is the specifc competitive advantage it creates for frms. When a frm is the
frst business to identify and satisfy unmet client needs, the frm possesses the
primary means to outperform its competition and differentiate itself from its
rivals in the market. The distinctiveness of competitive aggressiveness relates,
on one hand, to the frm’s need to eventually resort to reactive moves if the
practical competitive advantage of EO (i.e., competitive proactiveness) has not
been constructed and has therefore failed to keep competitors at bay. On the
other hand, protective aggressiveness may enhance the success of competitive
advantages when translated into explicitly determined, respectful, and trust-
building actions towards clients. Unlike proactive behavior, however, competitive
activities must be controlled within frms. The pursuit of proftability serves as
just such a practical controlling tool against haphazard, ill-directed competitive
activities.
In summary, the empirical excursions introduced in Studies I-II painted a
more multifaceted picture of corporate entrepreneurship than what has to date
been laid out by the dominant functionalist research tradition. The descriptive
analyses brought to the fore local, micro-level understandings of different actors
on different levels of the organization. These actors constructed, interpreted, and
evaluated the ideal and ideas of CE from multiple perspectives and by multiple
argumentative means. Even though the participants did not outright reject the
general relevance of CE to them and their frms, they did attach both positive
and negative meanings to it.
5.3 Corporate entrepreneurship as processes of decision-
making and strategic renewal
Studies III-IV originally described how the research participants applied the ideal
and ideas of corporate entrepreneurship to practical, everyday frm operations.
The studies depicted two specifc implementation processes, namely those of
joint decision-making and strategic renewal. These processes extend beyond
mere theoretical prescriptions of CE and instead explain the actual stages that
the case frms followed when attempting to implement CE for their beneft.
42 Summary of the original studies
The third study, ‘The emergence of entrepreneurship in organizations’,
conceptualized CE as a collaborative, four-stage decision-making process based
on shared understandings of entrepreneurial ideals, contingent on the agreement
and commitment of organizational members who bear the responsibility to
apply entrepreneurial practices in their daily work. In their meeting interaction,
management group members jointly negotiated new entrepreneurial sales
practices, but failed to demonstrate commitment to their future application.
Several reasons may explain why commitment decisions were entirely absent
from the research material. For example, the practices failed to describe the
desired entrepreneurial behavior in detail, but remained abstract instead. The
participants in the meeting also used the practices in their negotiations to steer
the conversation away from delicate issues and to avoid directly addressing
complaints on a personal level. As a result, the argumentative purposes for which
CE-related ideals are used in interaction may pose an obstacle to commitment.
From a structural viewpoint, the process of how the management group
members negotiated the new sales practices exemplifes typical decision-making
sequences in interaction (Stevanovic, 2012; 2013). In this process, complaints
problematize past practices and proposals construct experience-based solutions
to reach positive business outcomes. As the detailed analysis demonstrated, the
process requires particular conversational subtlety in order to maintain good
working relationships between organizational actors. To this end, proposals
may be utilized to negotiate experience-based practices to reach desirable future
states because they place all participants on an equal footing to evaluate and
commit to the suggested action (see Stevanovic & Peräkylä, 2012). However,
if proposals are formulated in explicitly accusatory or declarative manners or
unilaterally imposed on other participants, they may fail to meet with agreement
or to evoke commitment. In Study III, this problem seemed to concern the
autonomy dimension, and unlike the proposals about innovativeness and
proactiveness, complaining about sales problems led to recommendations of
personal responsibility that were also met with disagreement and overt rejection.
The fourth and fnal study, ‘Can an old frm learn new tricks?’, described
CE as a strategic renewal process. In his story, the managing director explained
how dire circumstances occurred for his frm, and how he and his management
team set out to cope with them. The beginning of the managing director’s story
not only described the dramatic loss of a client as the reason for change in
an effort to survive, but also motivated forthcoming action to reach this goal.
In the frst stage, the management group analyzed the frm’s history, and
formulated a future vision and a new competitive advantage for the frm. The
second part depicted three activity processes that were utilized to implement
these changes. These processes included redefning employee roles, downsizing
personnel, and acquiring a new client. The third stage evaluated the success
Summary of the original studies 43
of the implementation processes in terms of an improved frm image and a
growing number of new clients. The managing director further anticipated two
alternative continuations for his story, which were either stable or regressive. In
the stable version, his frm manages to survive, whereas in the regressive one,
his frm merely struggles in the market.
The results of Study IV underscore the progressive, proactive, and
impermanent nature of CE strategies. The fndings suggest that frms beneft
from being proactive when formulating an entrepreneurial strategic vision for
themselves. Also, the less-distant future requires proactive measures. Instead
of merely reacting to market changes and demands, the frm should create
its own business opportunities by offering proactive suggestions that create
value for both the frm and its clients. However, not all clients self-evidently
accept these suggestions, but they can obviously also resist or disapprove of
them. Therefore, frms need clients and other external partners with equally
ambitious business objectives in order to successfully implement their CE
strategies. The impermanent nature of CE strategies can be linked to the idea
of entrepreneurship as a short-lived line of events (Steyaert, 1997). CE strategies
may therefore require constant renewal and maintenance within frms that
wish to maintain their position in demanding markets. This fnding suggests
that the effects of strategic renewal do not necessarily extend beyond a limited
period of time. However, one could rightfully ask whether the departure point
for progressive CE strategies is always a major external shock or whether a new
strategy can be implemented differently by, for instance, not laying off employees
or by retaining a core of existing clients instead of procuring new ones.
In summary, the research participants in Studies III-IV constructed practical
applications of CE in the form of decision-making and strategic renewal processes.
These processes highlight CE as a growth- and results-oriented concept. The
decision-making process aimed to introduce new practices to increase and
improve the case frm’s sales efforts. The process of strategic renewal, for its
part, served to compensate for the case frm’s dire economic circumstances and to
improve its longer-term position in the market. These fndings therefore indicate
that, in everyday organizational life, several micro-level processes of CE which
seek to improve economic indicators and business outcomes may be ongoing.
44 Discussion
6. DISCUSSION
In the present discussion section, the micro social constructions summarized
in Section 5 serve as starting points to further develop the theoretical concept
of corporate entrepreneurship. These constructions underscore the socially
embedded and relational nature of corporate entrepreneurship within
established organizational structures and arrangements. Previous studies of the
socially embedded and relational nature of entrepreneurship have highlighted
entrepreneurs’ ability to understand the social context in which they operate
in order to identify relevant business opportunities and acquire resources to
accomplish them (see, e.g., Jack & Anderson, 2002). The present study introduces
these ideas to corporate entrepreneurship, from which they have thus far
remained largely absent. In what follows, I briefy review what the functionalist
research paradigm has thus far explicated about the theoretical premises of CE.
Each subsection thereafter examines these premises from the perspective of the
present fndings drawn from the individual organizational actors’ argumentation
about CE. The aim is to shed new light on the current theoretical understandings
of corporate entrepreneurship that tend to illustrate CE from a unilateral and
taken-for-granted perspective by omitting the importance of the social context
to the practical accomplishment of CE.
6.1 The socially embedded nature of corporate
entrepreneurship
The functionalist paradigm typically regards entrepreneurship in the corporate
setting as a socially isolated economic phenomenon (see Jack & Anderson, 2002;
Gartner, 1985). Theoretical and empirical conceptualizations have focused
on defning prescriptive models of CE that promise economic success (e.g.,
Ireland et al., 2003; Ireland et al., 2009), establishing a link between CE and
fnancial performance (e.g., Kreiser et al., 2013; Wiklund & Shepherd, 2005;
Lumpkin & Dess, 2001; Zahra & Covin, 1995), and specifying environmental
and organizational moderators that enhance this link (e.g., Hamilton, 2012; De
Clercq et al., 2010; Covin et al., 2006; Lumpkin & Dess, 2001).
In contrast, the fndings of this study highlight corporate entrepreneurship
as anchored and sustained in the social context of everyday organizational
interaction and activities (see Anderson & Starnawska, 2008; Jack & Andersson,
2002; Gartner, 1985). This section answers to research questions 4–5 (see
Section 3) by explicating how corporate entrepreneurship is accomplished
Discussion 45
through talk, what kind of institutional problems may arise from individual
CE-related behavior, and how these problems might be solved.
6.1.1 THE INTERACTIONAL ACHIEVEMENT OF CORPORATE
ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Functionalist studies of corporate entrepreneurship typically view
entrepreneurship in the organizational context as a phenomenon that cannot
be defned as a clearly observable entity within frms, but something that is
instead inferred from survey measures that seek indications of entrepreneurial
behavioral patterns (Covin & Lumpkin, 2011). The paradigm also takes a
retrospective look at CE (cf. Zahra & Covin, 1995) and regards entrepreneurial
activities and their outcomes as already accomplished facts by utilizing, for
instance, archival data and assessments of past activities when measuring the
hypothetical entrepreneurial behavior of frms (Covin & Slevin, 1989; Rauch et
al., 2009). Therefore, CE research has thus far focused on the measurement of
past entrepreneurial behavior (see Wiklund, 1999) and has largely omitted the
present situation as well as the potential future intentions of frms.
In contrast, the present study suggests that corporate entrepreneurship
is not only an abstract characteristic of frms, but also a concrete, observable
phenomenon in organizations. The study highlights CE as a socially embedded
phenomenon that is created, maintained, and negotiated in ongoing everyday
organizational interaction. CE represents a long-term interaction-based process
in which past, present, and future activities are closely intertwined in the current
interaction. CE therefore cannot exist as a one-off occurrence, but rather as a
dynamic activity that must continuously reoccur and be renewed and maintained
in the everyday interaction of frms to produce positive business outcomes in
the more or less near future (cf. Boden, 1994; Lechner & Gudmundsson, 2014;
Ireland et al., 2009; Dess et al., 2003; Zahra & Covin, 1995). So, instead of
considering entrepreneurial behavior something that takes place only when frms
actualize their entrepreneurial projects (see Wiklund & Shepherd, 2011), CE can
also take place when individuals talk about the normative ideals, preconditions,
and obstacles of CE and how they should apply CE to the advantage of their
frm on the practical level of frm operations.
In this study, the research participants interpreted CE in interaction in
a variety of ways and constructed practical applications of it in their talk for
subsequent use in their selling and strategy renewal tasks. On a more general
level, individual organizational actors may contribute to their frms’ practical
entrepreneurial efforts by constructing contextually sensitive and target-specifc
applications of CE in interaction and establishing the intra- and inter-frm
46 Discussion
relationships that are required to enact and sustain long-term economic behavior
within their organization.
In summary, because CE can also be performed and implemented through talk,
organizational interaction is a highly relevant context to the general enactment
and accomplishment of corporate entrepreneurship. For instance, even though
the offcial strategic talk in organizations may emphasize the importance of CE,
it does not necessarily guarantee the presence of CE in everyday activities. This
may result, for example, from organizational actors interpreting and evaluating
top management’s entrepreneurial visions (see Ireland et al., 2009) differently
and constructing their own applications of CE that may contradict the visionary
ideas of top management. In this respect, CE is similar to all other types of
organizational behavior in that it requires continuous collective maintenance
and the active participation of organizational actors in interaction situations.
This observation may be particularly relevant for frms that offcially espouse CE
or tentatively explore its possibilities in an attempt to create ways of applying
it for their own purposes.
6.1.2 INSTITUTIONAL ASPECTS OF CORPORATE ENTREPRENEURSHIP
The different ways in which the research participants oriented themselves to
the dimensions of autonomy, proactiveness, and competitive aggressiveness
illustratively capture the institutional aspects of CE. These aspects create a
relationship between individual actors and the entire organization (see Vesala,
2013; Lumpkin & Dess, 1996), and demonstrate the internal challenges of
entrepreneurial behavior within existing structural arrangements (Garud et
al., 2007).
According to the present study, the autonomy dimension of CE seems to
occupy a double-edged position in CE, as it appeared to be overly dilemmatic
for the research participants to become easily oriented to it as a self-evident
entrepreneurial ideal. This was apparent in Study III, when proposals based
on the idea of autonomy were met with disagreement and resistance, and in
Study I, when the research participants evaluated the idea of an autonomous
entrepreneur in two contradictory ways, both as an active relationship promoter
and a self-serving lone wolf. These evaluations represented such distinct opinions
that they could even be linked to two separate EO dimensions (proactiveness
and competitive activeness). Therefore, the corporate setting of this study also
challenged and criticized the autonomy that typically occupies the position of a
celebrated hallmark of entrepreneurship.
The EO literature suggests that organizational actors are free to pursue
their own interests and may, for instance, bend organizational rules and other
Discussion 47
structural restraints to further their ideas (see, e.g., Shane, 1994). However, the
research participants of this study did not in general take up such possibilities;
rather, they positioned themselves as agents of the entire organization for
which they worked. They accepted this position as self-evident by presenting
themselves as protecting and pursuing the collective interests of their frm. The
pursuit of collective interests may be interpreted to represent one way by which
organizational actors respect the structural arrangements of their organizations,
instead of bending these constraints to their own advantage. To this end, the
research partcipants organized their own actions to serve both personal and
overall organizational goals and criticized colleagues for selfshly serving only
their own personal interests. According to this type of argumentation, individual
organizational actors serve their own interests by meeting their personal goals
and, by meeting their personal goals, thus serve the interests of the frm. This
observation indicates that individual targets should be met within the process of
attending to collective goals while, for instance, taking care of client relationships
in the selling context.
In terms of institutional entrepreneurship, links between the autonomy
dimension and the dimensions of proactiveness and competitive aggressiveness
also construct a relationship between individual actions and the frm-level
construct of corporate entrepreneurship. In Study I, these constructions were
labeled proactive selling and internal competitive aggressiveness.
Proactive selling served to reduce uncertainty and opportunistic behavior
among organizational actors (see Garud et al., 2007). Selling arranged according
to the ideal of proactiveness did not restrict the entrepreneurial actions of an
individual, but instead encouraged individual organizational actors to collaborate
and share knowledge in order to achieve even better results with the help of
the expertise of their colleagues. The potential of each individual organizational
member is therefore best realized and put into the service of the entire frm
through proactive collaboration. In the selling context, proactiveness displaced
autonomous and short-term sales-maximizing activities in favor of external
client relationships, and used internal working relationships to anticipate sales
opportunities within client relationships to reach personal and frm-level goals.
In contrast, the construct of internal competitive aggressiveness is an
example of how individual actors can violate institutional norms and structural
arrangements to the detriment of not only the individual actors themselves, but
also the entire frm. If organizational actors refuse to share their knowledge
and experience with each other, they may jeopardize the attainment of their
goals, because opportunities may go unnoticed or underexplored. Internal
competition between individual organizational members can therefore wipe out
any competitive advantage that frms acquire by applying CE in their practical
everyday operations. As a result, both the individual and the frm fail to fully
48 Discussion
meet their longer-term objectives. Unsurprisingly, the research participants of
this study considered this type of behavior both illegitimate and inappropriate
in the organizational context.
The phenomenon of internal competition has also been identifed in other
research settings that have studied how entrepreneurship fts into existing
institutional arrangements. For instance, Finnish comprehensive school teachers
deemed entrepreneurship inappropriate in the school context when they
interpreted entrepreneurship as selfsh competition (Korhonen et al., 2012). Even
though teachers widely valued entrepreneurial behavior as a description of the
behavior of a diligent pupil, they stated that over-emphasizing competition over
good grades and other rewards widens the gap between talented and less talented
pupils, discourages less successful pupils, and disrupts benefcial collaboration
between pupils. From this perspective, entrepreneurship was viewed as a threat
to traditional school values and principles, such as collaboration, solidarity,
equality, security, and communal care.
In short, entrepreneurship in the corporate setting produces positive business
outcomes not in isolation, but instead in the everyday practical activities between
individual organizational actors. The position of individuals as autonomous
practitioners of CE within existing structural arrangements can be supported
and promoted by proactiveness, which invites one to collaborate. However,
their position can be undermined if top management allows or even encourages
internal competitive aggressiveness. From the perspective of institutional
entrepreneurship, the present fndings raise an intriguing question about the
conceptual nature of autonomy in the concept of EO, in particular its relationship
to innovativeness considered to be the core of CE. For instance, does any form of
autonomy contribute to the level of EO even if unconnected to innovativeness or
the processes of generating innovations? Or is it specifcally the innovativeness-
enhancing type of autonomy that should be considered relevant in the case of
EO? Consequently, the theoretical and empirical formulations of CE should focus
more attention on the institutional aspects of CE by exploring how autonomy
links to the other EO dimensions and supports innovative activities.
6.2 The relational nature of corporate entrepreneurship
The present section answers to the research question 6 (see Section 3) by
underscoring CE as a subtle relational and communicative phenomenon
manifested in everyday organizational interactions. The analyses illustrated that
a frm’s internal and external relationships are interdependent on each other
in successfully leveraging CE into new economic activity. The study therefore
highlights the importance of relationships not only among colleagues within
Discussion 49
frms (see also De Clercq et al., 2013), but also between organizational actors
and actors in the market (see Vesala, 2005; 1996 on the meaning and social
nature of entrepreneurs’ relationships with the market). The internal relations
link to collective negotiations about decisions, plans, and practical applications
related to CE, whereas external relations highlight the importance of clients in
effectively actualizing these plans.
6.2.1 JOINTLY NEGOTIATING ENTREPRENEURIAL DECISIONS AND
PRACTICES
The theoretical and empirical literature on entrepreneurial decision-making
aims to determine, which criteria are emphasized when making decisions about
entrepreneurial projects and how individuals weight these criteria differently
(Shepherd, 2011). Studies can address criteria such as intrinsic and extrinsic
motivation, entrepreneurial experience, gain and loss situations, and high and
low time pressure. This dissertation conceptualizes entrepreneurial decision-
making from quite another perspective. Instead of underscoring optimal criteria
and situation variables to reach the best possible decisions on entrepreneurial
projects, Studies III and IV embed entrepreneurial decision-making in internal
organizational interaction and collective efforts in order to effect change in
organizations.
More specifcally, in the light of Studies III and IV, entrepreneurial decision-
making emerges in meeting interaction between organizational actors. In the
present studies, the question was not about straightforwardly or unproblematically
defning the meaning of entrepreneurship for the case frms, but instead about
subtle collective negotiations that extended over a longer sequence of meetings
(cf. Pyysiäinen, 2011). The management group members of Study III were
involved in negotiation sequences in which the meaning and purpose of CE for
the frm entailed making collective decisions about new entrepreneurial practices
in selling. In addition, the management group members of Study IV negotiated
in their meetings the strategy renewal process to improve the frm’s longer-term
position in the market. As the managing director explained, top management
collectively took part in analyzing the present situation of the frm, defning what
ought to be done to improve the situation and executing the required change.
The management group members in Study III failed to commit to the proposed
new practices, whereas the retrospective narrative account in Study IV described
jointly agreed-upon strategy renewal actions that management group members
decided on and put into practice together.
The tactful task of negotiation underscores the relational nature of CE as
a joint decision-making process between relevant organizational actors and
50 Discussion
the need to maintain productive internal working relationships during the
process. Participants in negotiations about CE must manage two specifc
issues about their relationships. First, as Study III indicates, they must attend
to their mutual relationships in the interaction situation itself by, for instance,
carefully formulating and re-formulating their proposals. Second, this type of
conversational subtlety can also be seen as constructing common ground for
future collective negotiations of CE and how these joint negotiations can be
managed in upcoming events. In fact, inviting organizational actors to participate
in discussions which defne the details of desired entrepreneurial behavior may
be a useful vehicle for CE to actually take effect. For example, the dilemmatic
dimensions of CE, such as autonomy (see Section 6.1.2), may need to be discussed
together before any joint decisions can be reached.
Proposals may be particularly relevant to participation because they, frst,
initiate processes that lead to collectively-made decisions and, second, place
all participants on equal footing to evaluate and commit to the suggested
entrepreneurial action (Stevanovic, 2012; Stevanovic & Peräkylä, 2012).
Proposals also typically promote something that benefts all participants,
not just the person who put the proposal forward (Stevanovic, 2013). In the
present study, the proposed actions were constructed to beneft both individual
organizational actors and the entire frm. In the corporate setting, proposals
and their subsequent versions about entrepreneurial behavior may include
suggestions about the exact content and targets of entrepreneurial behavior,
the resources for and costs of this behavior (such as mutual collaboration and
proftability), and those individual organizational actors who should eventually
act according to the proposed entrepreneurial behavior. In this type of discussion,
some participants may assume the position of defning the desired behavior
while others co-participate by agreeing, rejecting, assessing, contesting, and
reformulating this behavior, and actively steering the proposal towards a
decision. Most essentially, permitting and encouraging competing perspectives
and subsequent versions of current and future states as well as proposals to
emerge may help organizations fnd wider acceptance and support for CE.
In short, instead of continuing to overemphasize the explication of decision-
making criteria and individual differences in the weighing of these criteria, this
study suggests that scholars should better understand the relational nature of
the entrepreneurial decision-making process and how it plays out in internal
interaction within organizations.
6.2.2 TARGETING CLIENTS WITH ENTREPRENEURIAL BEHAVIOR
Theoretically, the concept of EO defnes the entrepreneurial behavior of frms
in relation to the market. This is evident in the M/C&S measure (1983/1989,
Discussion 51
Appendix B), which treats the notion of market in three senses. First, the market
is seen as the target of a frm’s innovative efforts (i.e., an arena into which the
frm’s new products or services are launched). Second, the nature of the market
is treated as an environmental force that impacts the risk-level of decisions
frms make to reach their objectives. Third, the market is conceptualized as
a collection of competitors that an entrepreneurial frm should be ahead of
and beat. The measure explicates specifc competitive moves that represent
the actions of entrepreneurial frms towards their competition. However, if the
market is viewed in its entirety as a place where buying and selling transactions
traditionally occur, the M/C&S measure fails to take into account the buying
activities in the market or the perspective of the client.
One the other hand, even though the EO measure does not take into
consideration the buying activities in the market, the role of clients has been
present in EO research most often in settings that address EO and its interaction
with market orientation (MO) (Wales et al., 2013a). Some researchers claim
that MO helps frms to create outstanding value for their clients by generating
information about current and future client needs and by producing new
products and services to meet these needs (Jaworski & Kohli, 1993; Kohli &
Jaworski, 1990; Narver & Slater, 1990). MO is believed to enhance the positive
business outcomes of EO which might, without explicit information of clients,
prove to be insuffcient for superior fnancial performance (Wales et al., 2013a;
see also Atuahene-Gima & Ko, 2001). Previous research has also laid out the
importance of relational support, such as the reputation of client organizations
and the quality of communicating with them, to entrepreneurs’ willingness to
invest in cultivating long-term relationships with existing or prospective client
organizations (e.g., De Clercq & Rangarajan, 2008; De Clercq & Sapienza, 2006;
Yli-Renko et al., 2001).
The importance of clients to the success of CE was also evident in Studies II
and IV. Study II illustrated, frst of all, that the practical micro-level behaviors
that frms engage in as part of their EO should be adjusted according to the
targets of this behavior (i.e., both clients and competitors). These context-specifc
practical applications translate EO into concrete practices that frms can utilize
in their pursuit of new economic activity. Further, the pursuit of clients should
be conducted on the basis of assumed future proftability. Proftability, one of
the most widely-used effciency indicators of EO (Wales et al., 2013a), served as
a strong argument against haphazard, ill-directed competitive activities. Study
IV, for its part, demonstrated that frms need clients with equally ambitious
business objectives in order to successfully execute their CE strategies. Superior
performance as an outcome of CE takes place when client organizations also act
according to the ideals of CE or at least strive for outstanding business results
that the service provider can help the client to achieve.
52 Discussion
The fndings highlight the bilateral and results-oriented aspects of nurturing
long-term client relationships on the basis of CE. First, CE did not appear to be a
unilateral behavioral construct that would self-evidently produce results as long
as the frm were simply to launch new innovative products and services on the
market. Instead, in the business services context of this study, the results required
proactive moves from salespeople towards their business clients. Because clients
can obviously also resist any new ideas presented to them, the salespersons’ role
in understanding and explicating how these ideas eventually meet their clients’
current or future needs seems crucial.
Further, the results indicated that the primary goal of mutually supportive, CE-
based relationships between service provider frms and their client organizations
is to provide positive business performance through the introduction of new
products, services, and ideas. Even though extensive information about client
needs and well-functioning mutual collaboration may indeed enhance the success
of CE, client organizations ultimately expect positive business results that, in
turn, positively enhance the business outcomes of the service provider as well.
Economic indicators, in particular future proftability, regulate the relationships
when deciding, for example, which clients to keep and which ones to hand over
to competitors. These observations bring us back to the original idea of CE as
an results-oriented behavioral concept. The optimal business results of CE are
therefore obtained when both parties strive for business excellence.
In short, one could rightfully ask whether the role of clients as relevant actors
in the market should in fact be explicitly taken into account in, for instance,
EO measures. These measures already explicate what kind of behavior the
entrepreneurial frm is typically seen as taking towards its competitors but the
direct role of clients or other external relations has thus far been neglected.
6.3 Legitimizing and institutionalizing corporate
entrepreneurship
According to Burr’s (2003) macro and micro social constructionist views, when
a certain version of reality becomes a legitimate way of viewing and making
sense of the world, it encourages and sustains particular types of behavior and
excludes other types of actions. Corporate entrepreneurship can be viewed as one
version of organizational reality that, from the organization’s perspective, should
gain the status of a legitimate discourse that guides the behavior of individual
organizational actors and produces desired business results. Individual actors
should view CE as an internalized ideal according to which they organize, adjust,
and carry out their daily intra- and inter-frm activities. The normative standards
of frm-level CE therefore control and structure individual behavior for the beneft
of the entire frm (see Burr, 2003). The autonomy dimension in the concept of
Discussion 53
EO appears to entail just such controlling and structuring aspects (see Lumpkin
et al., 2009 in Appendix B). It lays out general explicit guiding principles, frst,
for individual organizational actors, detailing how they should promote CE in
their daily work, and, second, for top management, describing what type of
autonomous behavior they should encourage and retain in their organization.
For instance, instead of non-entrepreneurial, conservative actions, individual
organizational actors should take the initiative to instigate change and growth
in the organization.
On the other hand, individuals might not be aware of the control effects of the
CE discourse to which they are submitted, but instead willingly accept it (Burr,
2003). According to this view, discourse constructs individual organizational
actors as agents that serve the frm, yet may believe to act on their own behalf
(Vesala, 2013). Nevertheless, however controlling the prevailing discourse may
appear, individual actors still have the agency to defend, legitimize, and justify
their own actions and opinions against it, and to deliberate which principals to
serve or resist (Vesala, 2013). Therefore, individual organizational actors can
also take up the position to modify the prevailing CE discourse to their own
advantage and resist those versions that other organizational actors, such as
top management, have formulated.
In this study, the research participants displayed their agency by adopting
the perspective of individual organizational actors in the CE discourse. They
both accepted and contested the theoretically motivated entrepreneurial ideals
presented to them, evaluated individual EO-related actions from the perspective
of the overall business interests of the frm, and legitimized their interpretations
by adopting the perspective of the entire frm. The research participants also
constructed their versions of CE for different functions. These functions included
negotiating personal entrepreneurial orientations (Studies I and II, in which
research participants argued for and against the dimensions of EO in very
specifc ways), utilizing the CE discourse for argumentative purposes (Study
III, in which participants steered the conversation away from delicate issues and
avoided addressing complaints by applying the CE discourse), and constructing
entrepreneurial processes in order to solve specifc problems, such as declining
sales or strategy renewal and execution (Studies III and IV).
In response to research question 7 (see Section 3), CE represented a legitimate
discourse that the research participants of this study could effortlessly use and
orient themselves to. From the perspective of joint decision-making, the
participants seemed to have easy access to the general notion of CE, so there was
no need to build common ground for the overall acceptance of entrepreneurial
ideals. The autonomy dimension of CE, however, was an exception. Despite the
general controlling elements included in the autonomy measure (see Appendix
B), the legitimacy of the CE discourse seems to hinge on how the autonomy
dimension is treated in organizations on the practical level of frm operations.
54 Discussion
To fully tap into the entrepreneurial potential of individual organizational actors,
frms should link autonomy to the proactiveness dimension that underscores
collaborative efforts and avoid any manifestations of internal competitive
aggressiveness that result in nonfunctional internal relationships and undermine
collective efforts to reach organizational objectives.
In order to institutionalize CE, the construction of practical everyday details
of CE may require and be founded on a continuous line of collective decisions in
which organizational actors negotiate concrete details of CE and try to convince
themselves of their utility. However, the ideal decision-making process may not
always actualize from proposals, access, and agreement to a fnal commitment
(Stevanovic, 2013). This may occur at junctures between the different stages
of the process when other participants, for instance, do not take up proposals
presented to them or when they implicitly or explicitly steer the conversation to
a non-decision (see Stevanovic, 2012), as in, for instance, collectively deciding
not to pursue entrepreneurial practices in the frst place. As this study indicated,
organizational actors may possess easy access to shared understandings of the
ideals of CE, and even relatively effortlessly acknowledge and agree on the content
and benefts of CE. The joint decision-making process can, however, be blocked
at the fnal commitment stage. These observations can be especially important
in complex organizational phenomena such as CE. They may also represent
one reason why CE is considered a long-term orientation that may take longer
periods of time to take full economic effect (see, e.g., Ireland et al., 2009).
In short, CE is implemented by individual organizational actors who may
view the entrepreneurial ideals proposed to them quite differently and therefore
construct differing versions of them to better suit their own responsibilities,
interests, and work tasks. Consequently, how these individual actors interpret
and evaluate the entrepreneurial vision of top management is relevant. The
theoretical literature depicts CE as the dominant discourse in which all frms
must participate in order to grow and survive (see, e.g., Kuratko, 2009). The
adoption of such a discourse, however, even when considered legitimate, is
not a straightforward or uncontested process among individual organizational
actors. As this study demonstrated, the institutionalization of CE seems to require
the more active participation of individual organizational actors than what the
research practices informed by the concept of CE thus far suggest.
6.4 Limitations of the study
Epistemologically, the fndings of this dissertation represent a sample of the
variety of local, micro-level understandings that different actors serving different
organizational functions constructed to interpret and evaluate CE in the selling
Discussion 55
context. Because the fndings rely on research material drawn from three case
frms, they obviously cannot offer an exhaustive description of other opinions
or structural processes that managing directors, management group members,
or salespeople in other business service organizations may hold or construct of
CE. Therefore, generalization of the present fndings cannot follow the logic of
statistical generalization. Rather, the fndings from the case frms demonstrate
possibilities which may also be relevant for other business service organizations
with similar interaction-based selling activities. The generalizability of possibilities
is a view that social scientists generally adopt to explain the validity of qualitative
research in social interaction (Peräkylä, 2004).
Because the present study examined CE by focusing on the autonomy,
proactiveness, and competitive aggressiveness dimensions in the selling context,
the fndings obviously do not address entrepreneurship in the organizational
context in its entirety. Even though some conclusions on the level of entire
conceptualizations were reached, clarifying other interpretations and processes
remains a task for future CE studies.
6.5 Suggestions for future research
The present dissertation points out that the conventional functionalist premises
of CE studies may unnecessarily limit the development of the theoretical concept
of CE and the understanding of its practical applications (see also Anderson et al.,
2012; Lindgren & Packendorff, 2009). An important avenue for future research
therefore resides in the application of fne-grained, contextually sensitive, and
interpretivist methods for studies that aim to further explicate the multifaceted,
socially embedded, and relational nature of CE. These studies could focus on
describing how the processes of enacting, legitimizing, and institutionalizing CE
unfold in organizations across hierarchy levels, business units, and functional
areas (see also Wales et al., 2011).
The qualitative attitude approach simulates well the controversial nature of
CE-related issues. The approach is therefore well suited to make analytically
visible the multifaceted variation that immediate commentary on the dimensions
of CE produces. This could be particularly valuable when studying the
institutional aspects of CE and clarifying the contextual relationships between
innovativeness and the other dimensions of EO. Because innovativeness
typically characterizes the core of CE, future studies could explicate what forms
of autonomy, proactiveness, and risk-taking foster or hinder innovativeness
in organizations. Once the analyses have established the differing individual
opinions on these issues, this qualitative variation can thereafter be utilized
to contest traditional, taken-for-granted, and often unilateral theoretical
56 Discussion
understandings of CE. These new insights could, for instance, offer critical
contributions to the future development of EO measures. In fact, Covin and
Wales (2012) claim that the development of EO assessment saw practically no
progress during the past decade.
Narrative approaches in entrepreneurship studies in general have drawn
increasing attention (e.g., Watson, 2009; Down & Warren, 2008; Downing,
2005; Johansson, 2004; Hjorth, 2007; Jack & Anderson, 2002) and could
continue to offer a longitudinal and retrospective perspective of the empirical
process dynamics of CE (Busenitz et al., 2003). To contribute to establishing
a comprehensive model of the entrepreneurial process (see Larty & Hamilton,
2011), narrative methods could focus on exploring the structural processes of
change embedded in narratives of organizational actors on different organizational
levels. Thereafter, these narrative structures could be interpreted in the light of
the theoretical concepts of CE and combined to form a comprehensive narrative
about organizational change in selected case frms. Specifc attention could focus
on understanding the actions of individual organizational actors in relation to
the entire frm and its overall objectives.
Scholars interested in explicating more deeply the socially-embedded
entrepreneurial decision-making process might want to study meeting
interaction and how commitment that was lacking from the research material
of this study emerges during the negotiation process. Obviously, decision-making
related to CE may also entail other aspects besides deciding about entrepreneurial
practices. These aspects can include assessing and deciding on new opportunities,
competitive moves, high-risk projects, and new products or services, as current
EO measures (Appendix B) suggest.
6.6 Practical implications
This dissertation demonstrated that entrepreneurship is a multifaceted, socially
embedded, and relational phenomenon in the organizational context. Firms that
choose to engage in CE or are interested in developing their existing CE strategies
might gain from paying attention to these aspects in their intra- and inter-frm
activities. This could be especially worthwhile in those business service frms
where independent actors, teams, and business units are expected to collaborate
to anticipate and meet client needs.
The frst step for practitioners to implement and manage CE is to understand
what the multiple and potentially controversial viewpoints towards it actually are
within their organizations, and how organizational actors justify these views for
themselves and for the entire frm. Awareness of all types of views may provide
frms with better tools to manage their applications of CE, compared to a situation
Discussion 57
in which, for instance, the downsides of CE fail to emerge. Therefore, allowing
organizational actors to participate in negotiating concrete, everyday practices
based on top management’s vision of CE may prove crucial for new economic
activity and other desired business outcomes to emerge. Participation may make
explicit use of the structural process of joint decision-making that proceeds
from proposals to constructing common access to the CE-related ideal on which
the proposal is grounded and thereafter to negotiations of collective agreement
and commitment. However, frms may wish to bear in mind that negotiation
processes require particular conversational subtlety in order to implement CE
in practical frm operations.
Firms may also beneft from considering carefully what kind of requirements of
proactiveness, collaboration, and knowledge exchange they set for organizational
actors who hold the responsibility to construct practical applications of CE for
implementation in their daily work tasks across teams and business units. As it
is crucial for entrepreneurship in the corporate setting that individual actions be
constructed as a frm-level issue, frms should at least ensure that these actions
do not override ultimate frm-level objectives, but serve as a means towards
reaching collective goals.
Instead of waiting for major external shocks before launching CE strategies,
frms should cultivate CE on an ongoing basis by creating their own business
opportunities and not merely waiting for clients to provide orders to fulfll.
Because the outcomes of CE tend to be impermanent and uncertain, frms
should continuously experiment with proactive suggestions to their existing
and potential clients. However, as previous studies also suggest, poorly accepted
suggestions should be terminated early in order not to sacrifce proftability
(Wiklund & Shepherd, 2011). Firms may also need to enhance their internal
collaborative routines to produce viable suggestions with the minimum
consumption of resources.
A frm’s external environment impacts the success of the frm’s CE strategy,
especially through its clients. Therefore, in order to leverage CE strategies in
practice, frms may need to demonstrate innovativeness in choosing clients with
equally ambitious business targets or outside conventional interest domains. The
key question is to defne which clients best suit the frm’s CE strategy or, on the
other hand, forestall the frm’s growth by clinging to past ways of doing business
or yielding future proftability that falls below minimum levels. Even though
the best results emerge from collaborating with demanding clients, longer-term
success may nevertheless depend on the frm’s overall ability to cater to its clients
58 Discussion
in innovative ways and with matching levels of ambition, irrespective of whether
the client acknowledges the service provider frm’s entrepreneurial efforts.
Finally, client organizations that receive proactive suggestions from their
service provider frms might gain from developing their ability to identify
potential opportunities that these suggestions may entail for them. Because
service providers that act according to the ideals of CE strive to anticipate
future needs and trends, their proactive suggestions may not, at frst glance,
appear valid or interesting. The challenge for client organizations is therefore to
understand whether these suggestions (or certain elements included in them)
may in fact beneft them either immediately or in a longer range. To enhance
their opportunity identifcation, clients may wish to require and actively establish
collaborative knowledge exchange practices with their service providers. Within
these practices, both parties may jointly construct and regularly review a proactive
service proposal portfolio that includes both actualized ideas and proposals that
have been shelved for future development. Clients may also want to explicitly
ensure that their existing service providers have relevant business information
at their disposal in order for the service provider to proactively anticipate their
needs and to create innovative solutions to meet these needs.
6.7 Concluding remarks
This dissertation has not questioned the importance of entrepreneurship in the
organizational context. On the contrary, based on the research participants’
argumentation, it has acknowledged the potential usefulness and relevance of CE
in solving organizational problems and leading frms to new economic activity.
However, this study has contested the unilateral view that the current theoretical
formulations hold of the phenomenon of frm-level entrepreneurship in the
corporate setting. In the pursuit to reach the status of legitimate, hegemonic,
and self-evident discourse, corporate entrepreneurship has neglected to explicate
the position of individual organizational actors as practitioners of CE within the
social context of practical frm operations. This study therefore introduced the
perspective of individual organizational actors to these frm-level concepts and
offered individual actors the opportunity to construct their own versions of CE
in the context of their day-to-day activities.
The present study highlights CE as a socially embedded phenomenon that
does not unproblematically become grafted into practical frm operations
or self-evidently fit into established organizational arrangements. The
study further indicates that CE is a concrete, observable phenomenon in
organizations, not merely an abstract characteristic of frms or a behavioral
concept that produces change and growth in isolation. Instead, CE is a process
Discussion 59
that individual organizational actors collectively bring about and shape in their
everyday organizational interaction. In other words, individual organizational
actors implement CE in their daily work tasks when discussing the ideals of
CE and how they could apply these ideals to achieve their goals. Individual
actors contribute to their frms’ entrepreneurial endeavors by jointly negotiating
contextually sensitive and target-specifc practical applications of CE, and
establish intra- and inter-frm relationships that are necessary to sustain long-
term economic behavior. However, not all negotiations necessarily lead to a
uniform commitment to these applications.
This dissertation further suggests that CE cannot be regarded as a permanent
characteristic of frms, but is instead a process that requires continuous
maintainance. The nature and practices of CE must be updated and renewed
regularly as contexts and target groups in the business environment change.
Organizations can support the position of individual actors in actualizing these
efforts through proactiveness that invites collaboration. However, institutional
problems in implementing CE may emerge if top management permits internal
competitive aggressiveness and the related short-term maximization of profts to
undermine the ability of organizational actors to fully realize their entrepreneurial
potential.
The micro social constructionist and interpretivist research approach of
this study served to present a new, different perspective of CE. In addition
to what the functionalist research paradigm has already established about
the relationship between CE and business performance, this study painted a
context-specifc, relational, and socially embedded picture of CE. Because CE
is also a subtle communicative phenomenon between organizational actors and
those in the market, the long-term maintenance of these relationships may
critically contribute to how successfully frms are eventually able to legitimize
and institutionalize CE for their beneft.
60 References
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Appendixes 71
APPENDIXES
Appendix A: Transcription symbols
Symbol Explanation
[ the point of overlap onset
(.) a micropause
(1.2) silence timed in seconds
?yes rising intonation
?yes falling intonation
ye:s lengthening of the sound
ye- cut off
YES increased volume
°yes° especially soft sounds relative to the surrounding talk
yes emphasis
#yes# different voice quality relative to the surrounding talk
<yes> slower speech
y(h)es laughing voice
£yes£ smiling voice
heh heh laugh
.hh audible intake of breath
( ) dubious hearings
(( )) transcriber’s comments
72 Appendixes
Appendix B: Entrepreneurial orientation measures
EO dimension
EO: Innovativeness, proactiveness, and risk-taking
The M/C&S scale (Miller, 1983; Covin & Slevin, 1989)
Entrepreneurial ?rms Non-entrepreneurial ?rms
Innovativeness In general, the top managers of my ?rm
favor:
• A strong emphasis on R&D,
technological leadership, and
innovations
How many new lines of products or services
has your ?rm marketed in the past 5 years
(or since its establishment)?
• Very many new lines of products or
services
• Changes in product or service lines
have usually been quite dramatic
In general, the top managers of my ?rm
favor:
• A strong emphasis on the marketing
of tried-and-true products or services
How many new lines of products or services
has your ?rm marketed in the past 5 years
(or since its establishment)?
• No new lines of products or services
• Changes in product or service
lines have been mostly of a minor
nature
Proactiveness In dealing with its competitors, my ?rm:
• Typically initiates actions to which
competitors then respond
• Is very often the ?rst business to
introduce new products/services,
administrative techniques, operating
technologies, etc.
• Typically adopts a very competitive,
“undo-the-competitors” posture
In dealing with its competitors, my ?rm:
• Typically responds to action which
competitors initiate
• Is very seldom the ?rst business to
introduce new products/services,
administrative techniques, operating
technologies, etc.
• Typically seeks to avoid competitive
clashes, preferring a “live-and-let-live”
posture
Risk-taking In general, the top managers of my ?rm
have:
• A strong proclivity for high-risk
projects (with chances of very high
returns)
In general, the top managers of my ?rm
believe that:
• Owing to the nature of the
environment, bold, wide-ranging acts
are necessary to achieve the ?rm’s
objectives
When confronted with decision-making
situations involving uncertainty, my ?rm:
• Typically adopts a bold, aggressive
posture in order to maximize the
probability of exploiting potential
opportunities
In general, the top managers of my ?rm
have:
• A strong proclivity for low-risk
projects (with normal and certain
rates of return)
In general, the top managers of my ?rm
believe that:
• Owing to the nature of the
environment, it is best to explore it
gradually via cautious, incremental
behavior
When confronted with decision- making
situations involving uncertainty, my ?rm:
• Typically adopts a cautious, “wait-
and-see” posture in order to minimize
the probability of making costly
decisions
Appendixes 73
EO dimension
EO: Proactiveness and competitive aggressiveness
Lumpkin & Dess, 2001
Entrepreneurial ?rms Non-entrepreneurial ?rms
Proactiveness In dealing with its competitors, my ?rm:
• Typically initiates actions to which
competitors then respond
• Is very often the ?rst business to
introduce new products/services,
administrative techniques, operating
technologies, etc.
In general, the top managers of my ?rm
have:
• A strong tendency to be ahead of
other competitors in introducing novel
ideas or products
In dealing with its competitors, my ?rm:
• Typically responds to action which
competitors initiate
• Is very seldom the ?rst business to
introduce new products/services,
administrative techniques, operating
technologies, etc.
In general, the top managers of my ?rm
have:
• A strong tendency to “follow the
leader” in introducing new products
or ideas
Competitive
aggressiveness
In dealing with its competitors, my ?rm:
• Typically adopts a very competitive,
‘undo-the-competitors’ posture
• My ?rm is very aggressive and
intensely competitive
In dealing with its competitors, my ?rm:
• Typically seeks to avoid competitive
clashes, preferring a “live-and-let-live”
posture
• My ?rm makes no special effort to
take business from the competition
EO dimension
EO: Autonomy
Lumpkin, Cogliser, & Schneider, 2009
Entrepreneurial ?rms Non-entrepreneurial ?rms
Autonomy My ?rm:
• Supports the efforts of individuals
and/or teams that work
autonomously.
In general, the top managers of my ?rm
believe that:
• The best results occur when
individuals and/or teams
decide for themselves what business
opportunities to pursue.
In my ?rm:
• Individuals and/or teams pursuing
business opportunities make decisions
on their own without constantly
referring to their supervisor(s).
• Employee initiatives and input play a
major role in identifying and selecting
the entrepreneurial opportunities my
?rm pursues.
My ?rm:
• Requires individuals or teams to rely
on senior managers to guide their
work.
In general, the top managers of my ?rm
believe that:
• The best results occur when
individuals the CEO and top managers
provide the primary impetus for
pursuing business opportunities.
In my ?rm:
• Individuals and/or teams pursuing
business opportunities are expected
to obtain approval from their
supervisor(s) before making decisions.
• The CEO and top management
team play a major role in identifying
and selecting the entrepreneurial
opportunities my ?rm pursues.
74 Appendixes
Appendix C: Interview statements
Study Interviewees EO dimension Prompt statement in English Prompt statement in Finnish
I Management
group members
Autonomy Each salesperson is an
autonomous entrepreneur.
Jokainen myyjä on
itsenäinen yrittäjä.
II Salespersons
and sales group
directors
Proactiveness We anticipate clients’ needs
before our competitors.
Ennakoimme asiakkaiden
tarpeet ennen kilpailijoi-
tamme.
II Salespersons
and sales group
directors
Competitive
aggressiveness
We compete aggressively in
selling.
Kilpailemme myyntityössä
aggressiivisesti.
Appendix D: Summary of the management group meeting
recordings
Meeting Duration Participants
1 1 h 28 min 5 participants, two of whom left after 30 min
2 2 h 29 min 6 participants, two of whom left after 1 h 23 min
3 4 h 38 min 6 participants
4 2 h 16 min 3 participants
5 1 h 49 min 4 participants
Total 12 h 40 min
doc_328286710.pdf
Constructing the multifaceted, socially embedded, and relational nature of corporate entrepreneurship.
ENTREPRENEURSHIP TALK IN THE
ORGANIZATIONAL CONTEXT
Constructing the multifaceted, socially embedded,
and relational nature of corporate entrepreneurship
Soili Peltola
ACADEMIC DISSERTATION
To be presented, with the permission of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University
of Helsinki, for public examination in the lecture room XII, University main building,
on 5 April 2014, at 10 o’clock.
Helsinki 2014
Department of Social Research
University of Helsinki
Finland
Publications of the Department of Social Research 2014:2
Social Psychology
© Soili Peltola
Cover: Jere Kasanen
Photo: Satu Pennanen
Distribution and Sales:
Unigrafa Bookstore
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ISSN-L 1798-9140
ISSN 1798-9132 (Online)
ISSN 1798-9140 (Print)
ISBN 978-952-10- 9090-5 (Print)
ISBN 978-952-10- 9091-2 (Online)
Unigrafa, Helsinki 2014
3
Abstract
In today’s increasingly competitive and global economy, many claim that
entrepreneurial attitudes and behavior are paramount for established frms
to grow and survive. To deal with these demanding business environments,
academic discussions have emphasized the status of corporate entrepreneurship
(CE) as a legitimate and self-evident strategy that frms must adopt. In
underscoring the hegemony of frm-level CE strategies, however, the dominant
functionalist research paradigm of CE has neglected to explicate the evaluation
and implementation of CE and the position of individual organizational actors
as practitioners of CE within frms. The present dissertation therefore adopts a
fundamentally different research approach to corporate entrepreneurship. By
applying a micro social constructionist and interpretivist research paradigm, the
study explores what kind of versions and practical applications of CE individual
organizational actors as hired employees of their frms subjectively construct
in the social context of their daily activities, and how their versions relate to
theoretical conceptualizations of CE.
The research material is drawn from individual interviews and meeting
interaction recordings from three Finnish privately-owned business service
frms in the metropolitan areas of Helsinki and Tampere during 2008–2011.
The empirical designs make use of descriptive qualitative methods in generating
and analyzing the research material.
The present study highlights CE as a socially embedded phenomenon that
does not unproblematically become grafted into practical frm operations or self-
evidently ft into established organizational arrangements. The study indicates
that CE is a concrete, observable phenomenon in organizations, not merely an
abstract characteristic of frms or a behavioral concept that produces change and
growth in isolation. Instead, CE is a process that individual organizational actors
collectively bring about and shape in their everyday organizational interaction.
Organizational actors jointly negotiate contextually sensitive and target-specifc
practical applications of CE, and establish intra- and inter-frm relationships
that are necessary to sustain long-term economic behavior. However, not all
negotiations necessarily lead to a uniform commitment to these applications.
This dissertation further suggests that CE cannot be regarded as a permanent
characteristic of frms, but is instead a process that requires continuous
maintenance. The nature and practices of CE must be updated and renewed
regularly as contexts and target groups in the frm’s business environment change.
Organizations can support the position of individual actors in actualizing these
efforts through proactiveness that invites collaboration. However, institutional
4
problems in implementing CE may emerge if top management permits internal
competitive aggressiveness and the related short-term maximization of profts to
undermine the ability of organizational actors to fully realize their entrepreneurial
potential.
This study presents a new, alternative perspective of entrepreneurship in the
corporate setting by painting a context-specifc, relational, and socially embedded
picture of CE. Because CE is also a subtle communicative phenomenon between
organizational actors and those in the market, the long-term maintenance
of these relationships may critically contribute to how successfully frms are
eventually able to legitimize and institutionalize CE for their beneft.
5
Tiivistelmä
Organisaatioiden ja johtamisen tutkimuksen funktionalistisessa
tutkimusperinteessä yrittäjyyttä pidetään taloudellista kasvua ja toiminnan
uudistamista tukevana strategiana, joka organisaatioiden täytyy omaksua
selviytyäkseen kiristyvässä globaalissa kilpailussa. Yrittäjyys nähdään
yritysjohdon linjaamana, koko organisaatiota ohjaavana uutta luovana,
ennakoivana ja riskejä ottavana toimintana, joka valmiina mallina ongelmitta
solahtaa osaksi yrityksen arjen käytäntöjä. Väitöskirja haastaa tämän yksipuolisen,
yrittäjyystutkimusta edelleen hallitsevan käsitteellistämisen tavan ja soveltaa
sen sijaan mikrotason sosiaaliseen konstruktionismiin perustuvaa tulkinnallista
tutkimusotetta. Väitöskirjan neljässä osatutkimuksessa tarkastellaan sitä,
miten yksittäiset, organisaatioon palkkasuhteessa olevat työntekijät tulkitsevat
yrittäjyyden periaatteita ja millaisia käytännön toimintatapoja he niistä
rakentavat omista vastuualueistaan ja työtehtävistään käsin.
Tutkimusaineisto koostuu yritysjohtajien ja myyjien yksilöhaastatteluista
sekä johtoryhmän kokousäänityksistä, jotka on kerätty kolmesta
pääkaupunkiseudulla ja Tampereella toimivasta, yrityspalveluita tarjoavasta
yrityksestä vuosina 2008–2011. Tutkimusaineistojen analyysissä hyödynnetään
laadullisen asennetutkimuksen sekä diskursiivisen ja narratiivisen psykologian
tutkimusmenetelmiä.
Väitöskirjatutkimuksen mukaan yrittäjyys ei tuota kasvua tai uudistumista
irrallaan organisaation muusta toiminnasta, kuten funktionalistinen
tutkimusperinne yleensä olettaa. Sen sijaan yrittäjyys on yksittäisten, eri ryhmiä
edustavien organisaation jäsenten yhdessä aikaansaama prosessi. Yrittäjyys
johdon linjaamana valmiina mallina ei siis välttämättä toteudu organisaation
arjessa sellaisenaan, vaan organisaation jäsenten yhdessä tulkitsemana
ja ylläpitämänä prosessina. Koska yrittäjyys syntyy ja siitä neuvotellaan
organisaation vuorovaikutustilanteissa, neuvottelunvaraisuus voi myös estää
yrittäjyyden toteutumisen käytännössä. Vaikka jäsenet pitäisivätkin yrittäjyyden
toimintatapoja pätevinä ratkaisuina organisaationsa ongelmiin, neuvottelu ei
aina johda tilanteeseen, jossa he sitoutuisivat noudattamaan näitä käytäntöjä
päivittäisessä työssään.
Tutkimuksen perusteella yrittäjyys ei myöskään ole organisaation pysyvä,
kertaluonteisesti hankittava ominaisuus, vaan prosessi, joka vaatii jatkuvaa
päivittämistä. Päivittämisen tarkoituksena on uudistaa toimintatapoja
aina sen mukaan, miten tilanteet ja kohderyhmät muuttuvat organisaation
toimintaympäristössä.
6
Väitöskirjatutkimuksen valossa yrittäjyys organisaatioissa näyttäytyy
sosiaalisena, kontekstiinsa sidoksissa olevana sekä sisäisiin ja ulkoisiin
yhteistyösuhteisiin perustuvana prosessina, joka voi myös jäädä toteutumatta.
Organisaatio voi tukea yrittäjyyden toteutumista kannustamalla jäseniään
keskinäiseen yhteistyöhön. Yrittäjyyden hyötyjen saavuttaminen koko
organisaation tasolla kuitenkin hankaloituu merkittävästi, jos yritysjohto
sallii jäsentensä sisäisen kilpailun ja siihen liittyvän lyhytnäköisen voiton
maksimoinnin tai jopa kannustaa heitä siihen. Koska pysyvien taloudellisten
hyötyjen saavuttaminen perustuu toimiviin yhteistyösuhteisiin, näiden
suhteiden jatkuva vaaliminen ratkaisee sen, kuinka hyvin organisaatiot lopulta
onnistuvat sitouttamaan jäsenensä yrittäjyyden toimintatapojen käyttöön
pitkällä aikavälillä.
7
Acknowledgements
First, I want to express my sincerest gratitude to my supervisor and co-
author, Docent Kari Mikko Vesala. His thoughtful insights into theories of
entrepreneurship together with his profound expertise on qualitative research
proved invaluable in focusing my thinking and tackling the multifaceted
questions of academic research. His generous help in advising the planning
and execution of my empirical studies and in resolving questions about research
funding were also vastly important. And, most importantly, I warmly thank him
for suggesting to me that I begin my PhD journey in the frst place.
I am very grateful to the external pre-examiners, Professor Alistair R.
Anderson and Professor Katri Komulainen, for their valuable and encouraging
reviews of this dissertation. I express my special thanks to Professor Anderson
for agreeing to serve as my opponent. I am also indebted to the conference
participants, anonymous reviewers, and journal editors who have helped me
signifcantly improve my article manuscripts. My deepest gratitude also goes to
the three case frms and all the research participants of this study who, in the
end, made this dissertation possible.
My closest research environment at the Department of Social Research at
the University of Helsinki has been the Research Group on Social Psychology
of Entrepreneurship, headed by Kari Mikko Vesala. I warmly thank the other
members of our group, especially Miira Niska and Jarkko Pyysiäinen, for their
inspiring empirical work on entrepreneurship and practical insights into the
academic world. I also thank Professor Anna-Maija Pirttilä-Backman and
Professor Emeritus Klaus Helkama, who commented on my manuscripts in
post-graduate seminars and helped me sort out practical issues related to my
doctoral studies. I further thank Professor Pirttilä-Backman for asking me to join
the task group responsible for planning the 50
th
anniversary of Social Psychology
at the University of Helsinki in 2012. I also thank my fellow PhD students for
their helpful feedback on my research in our post-graduate seminars. I especially
acknowledge all those who, like me, labored on their PhD theses during the hot
summer months of 2013.
I am very thankful to Professor Anssi Peräkylä for inviting me to participate
in data sessions and seminars of conversation analysis during the 2010–2011
academic year. I truly appreciate the talent of his research group, whose remarks
proved signifcant in cultivating the empirical analysis of Study III. I am also
grateful to my fellow project researchers Heidi Korhonen, Markku Mikkola,
and Tapani Ryynänen from the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland,
and Assistant Professor Mika Westerlund from the Sprott School of Business
at Carleton University. It was indeed my great pleasure to work with you in our
8
collaborative TAPI research project and to learn from your extensive expertise
on service innovation research. I also express my sincere gratitude to Dr. Pekka
Killström for his constructive and always encouraging comments on my article
manuscripts.
The practical execution of this dissertation benefted greatly from the help
of Stephen Stalter, who revised my English throughout the process, and Maija
Bergström, who meticulously transcribed the interview material of Study II.
Any errors remain mine alone.
My sincere appreciation goes to the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation
(Tekes) and the Emil Aaltonen Foundation, whose funding made this thesis
possible. I am especially grateful to Jaana Auramo, who helped me to fnd
experienced research partners who shared similar interests on which to construct
a solid research project.
I am also immensily grateful to my employer SEK Loyal Oy for granting
me suffcient leave of absence to allow me to focus on my research on two
crucial occasions. I am especially indebted to Minna Lenander for her insightful
comments on the practical implications of this thesis and her support throughout
my PhD studies. I also warmly thank Satu Yrjänen for her enthusiasm for my
research fndings and her invaluable help with media relations, Satu Pennanen
for the beautiful photograph that appears on the front cover of this publication,
Tiina Uusitalo for attending to its technical details, and Pia Perola for our
inspiring discussions over lunch. A special acknowledgement is due to all my
colleagues who never fail to demonstrate how collaborative efforts produce
creative solutions in everyday practice.
I also wish to acknowledge the inspiration that Dr. Kauko Kaurola and Dr.
Olavi Hämäläinen have provided me over the years. Their PhD publications
on the bookshelves of my childhood home were a concrete reminder of the
possibility that someday, however remote the idea those days indeed seemed,
I might be able to celebrate the fnalization of my own PhD thesis.
Finally, I owe my warm, heartfelt thanks to my husband Vesa and our
daughters Silva and Eve for their understanding of and patience with my
academic endeavors. Their love and trust not only smoothed out the more
frustrating bumps in my research journey, but also reminded me to celebrate
even the smallest successes along the way. I also warmly thank my sister Outi
for her help in guiding us together through some challenging times during the
past few years.
I dedicate this dissertation to my late parents Martta and Tuomo Jaakkola.
Thank you for providing me with an appreciation for academic education and
giving me a peaceful, happy childhood.
Helsinki, February 2014
Soili Peltola
9
Contents
Abstract ........................................................................................................ 3
Tiivistelmä ................................................................................................... 5
Acknowledgements ...................................................................................... 7
Contents ....................................................................................................... 9
List of original publications........................................................................11
1. Introduction ......................................................................................... 13
2. Entrepreneurship in organizations ...................................................... 18
2.1 Corporate entrepreneurship ........................................................ 18
2.2 Entrepreneurial orientation .........................................................20
2.3 Strategic entrepreneurship .......................................................... 24
3. Aims of the study ..................................................................................26
4. Materials and methods .........................................................................29
4.1 Descriptive methodologies ........................................................... 29
4.2 The context of the study ............................................................... 31
4.3 Research material ......................................................................... 32
4.4 Procedures of analysis .................................................................. 34
4.4.1 Studies I and II: The qualitative attitude approach.......... 34
4.4.2 Study III: Discursive psychology and interaction
structures ........................................................................... 35
4.4.3 Study IV: Narrative psychology and prototypical
story forms ......................................................................... 35
5. Summary of the original studies .......................................................... 37
5.1 The reception of corporate entrepreneurship ............................. 37
10
5.2 The multifaceted interpretations of corporate
entrepreneurship .......................................................................... 39
5.3 Corporate entrepreneurship as processes of decision-making
and strategic renewal ................................................................... 41
6. Discussion .............................................................................................44
6.1 The socially embedded nature of corporate entrepreneurship ... 44
6.1.1 The interactional achievement of corporate
entrepreneurship ............................................................... 45
6.1.2 Institutional aspects of corporate entrepreneurship ........ 46
6.2 The relational nature of corporate entrepreneurship..................48
6.2.1 Jointly negotiating entrepreneurial decisions and
practices ............................................................................. 49
6.2.2 Targeting clients with entrepreneurial behavior .............. 50
6.3 Legitimizing and institutionalizing corporate
entrepreneurship .......................................................................... 52
6.4 Limitations of the study ............................................................... 54
6.5 Suggestions for future research ................................................... 55
6.6 Practical implications ................................................................... 56
6.7 Concluding remarks ..................................................................... 58
References ..................................................................................................60
Appendixes .................................................................................................71
Original publications ................................................................................ 75
11
List of original publications
This thesis is based on the following publications:
I Soili Peltola & Kari Mikko Vesala (2013). Constructing entrepreneurial
orientation in a selling context: The qualitative attitude approach. Pozna?
University of Economics Review, 13(1), 26–47.
II Soili Peltola (2013). The practical application of entrepreneurial
orientation: Proactiveness and competitive aggressiveness in the selling
context. (Unpublished manuscript currently under review).
III Soili Peltola (2013). The emergence of entrepreneurship in organizations:
Joint decision-making about new sales practices in management group
meeting interaction. Pozna? University of Economics Review, 13(1),
48–67.
IV Soili Peltola (2012). Can an old frm learn new tricks? A corporate
entrepreneurship approach to organizational renewal. Business Horizons,
55(1), 43–51. Copyright © Elsevier. All rights reserved.
The publications are referred to in the text by their roman numerals.
The original articles are reprinted here with the kind permission of the Pozna?
University of Economics Press (I, III) and Elsevier (IV).
Introduction 13
1. INTRODUCTION
In today’s increasingly competitive, fast-paced, global economy, many claim
that entrepreneurial attitudes and behavior are crucial for established frms to
grow and survive, and that a lack of entrepreneurial behavior even portends
a frm’s inevitable failure in the market (Kuratko, 2009) and the accelerated
downsizing of its personnel (Hornsby et al., 2013). In organizational contexts,
entrepreneurship aims to instigate new economic activity (Wiklund et al., 2011)
by improving economic performance and rejuvenating strategies and operations
(Rauch et al., 2009; Ireland et al., 2009). Entrepreneurship represents a growth
orientation which best suits hostile and dynamic business environments
characterized by high competitive intensity, unpredictability, and low customer
loyalty (Green et al., 2008; Lumpkin & Dess, 1996; Covin & Slevin, 1989). To
deal with these increasingly demanding environments, entrepreneurial frms
engage in product and service innovation, explore the unknown by embarking
on risky projects, and outperform their competitors by attaining leadership in
the market (Miller, 1983). One can also view entrepreneurship in organizations
within the framework of a wider discussion on how entrepreneurial actions
presumably resolve economic dilemmas (e.g., Perren & Jennings, 2005; Jack
& Anderson, 1999) and grand challenges (Sarasvathy & Venkataraman, 2011)
of contemporary societies.
Academic discussions have explicitly tailored entrepreneurship in the
organizational context to meet foregoing theoretical and practical ends. For
instance, strategic entrepreneurship has laid out theoretical models that defne
the antecedents, elements, and consequences of entrepreneurship for frms
that face declining business performance and turnaround situations (Kuratko
& Audretsch, 2013, 2009; Dess et al., 1999; Ireland et al., 2003; Ireland et al.,
2009). Entrepreneurial orientation, for its part, has been the most common
conceptualization of entrepreneurship that emphasizes growth as the outcome
of innovative, proactive, and risk-taking behavior (Lumpkin & Dess, 1996; Covin
& Slevin, 1989, 1991; Miller, 1983). To date, these theoretical and empirical
formulations have largely taken place within a functionalist research paradigm
(Covin & Wales, 2012; Tedmanson et al., 2012; Rauch et al., 2009; Grant &
Perren, 2002). Even though their theoretical and practical utility is widely
acclaimed, the idea of entrepreneurship in the organizational context as a
socially-constructed concept has begun to grow in importance (e.g., Anderson
et al., 2012; Lindgren & Packendorff, 2009). To date, however, empirical research
on entrepreneurship in the corporate setting has yet to provide major evidence
of such development.
14 Introduction
The social constructionist view of entrepreneurship focuses attention on
discourses that construct the social reality of entrepreneurship in contextually
and contingently different ways. Existing research demonstrates the wide variety
of entrepreneurship discourses that individual actors utilize to construct their
everyday reality. For example, previous studies have illustrated how government
discourses on entrepreneurship portray entrepreneurs and their role in society
(Perren & Jennings, 2005), how entrepreneurship policy implementers use
entrepreneurship discourse to maintain and defend their mission (Pyysiäinen
& Vesala, 2013), how social entrepreneurship balances social and economic
behaviour to create both types of value (Chell, 2007), how entrepreneurial
opportunities are relationally and communally formed and enacted (Fletcher,
2006), how narrative and dramatic processes construct entrepreneurial
identities (Downing, 2005), and how these identities are constructed of different
entrepreneurship discourses (Berglund, 2006).
As previous studies of entrepreneurship as a social construct demonstrate,
entrepreneurship discourses can defne and evaluate entrepreneurial phenomena
in more ways than one. For instance, the meaning of an entrepreneur can range
from the founder-creator of a frm to its owner-manager (e.g., Gartner, 1988).
According to a widely recognized distinction, founder-creators pursue proft
and growth, whereas owner-managers settle for making a primary living out
of their frms (Carland et al., 1984). In cultural representations, evaluative
meanings of the entrepreneur also include contrasting aspects, such as good–
bad, predator–victim, and hero –villain (e.g., Anderson et al., 2009; Nicholson
& Anderson, 2005). Further, entrepreneurship may serve as a case for the
individual as either a practicing entrepreneur or an entrepreneurial employee
in an organization, and even for the entire frm, as theoretical discussions
on corporate entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial orientation demonstrate
(Kuratko & Audretsch, 2013; Covin & Slevin, 1989, 1991; Miller, 1983; Lumpkin
& Dess, 1996). As a result of this variation in entrepreneurship discourses, what
a particular entrepreneurship phenomenon eventually comes to signify is neither
self-evident nor obvious. When theoretical concepts employ expressions related
to entrepreneurship, such as the word entrepreneurial, one can rightfully ask
what kind of version of entrepreneurship in organizations these discourses
construct. A multitude of contextual and contingent meanings can therefore
be attached to entrepreneurship in the organizational context also (see Anderson
et al., 2012).
Within the functionalist research paradigm, entrepreneurship in the
corporate setting is typically constructed as a frm-level phenomenon. These
frm-level concepts treat entrepreneurship not as an attitude or a characteristic of
individual employees, but as something connected with a frm’s strategy-making
process which thus encompasses the entire frm (Covin & Miller, 2013; Dess et
Introduction 15
al., 1997; Gawe?, 2012). These concepts emphasize the upper echelon’s leading
role in defning, encouraging, and evaluating their organization’s entrepreneurial
behavior (Kuratko et al., 2014; Ireland et al., 2006; Covin & Slevin, 1991), whereas
managers on different levels of the frm share the responsibility of implementing
the top management’s visions of entrepreneurship in the practical reality of
frm operations (Kuratko & Audretsch, 2013). However, the theoretical models
of entrepreneurship in the organizational context seldom explicitly explicate
the position and role of individual organizational actors as practitioners of
entrepreneurship within frms. Even though the top management typically sets
the scope and pace for their frm’s entrepreneurial strategy-making process,
employees on other organizational levels may react to and view these visions
differently and therefore act accordingly in ways not always aligned with the
intended formulations. As Stevenson and Jarillo (1990, 24) state, opportunity
for the frm has to be pursued by individuals within it, who may have
perceptions of personal opportunity more or less at variance with
opportunity for the frm.
Institutional entrepreneurship conceptualizes the potential variance
mentioned above in terms of agency, interests, and change (Garud et al., 2007).
According to these views, the key question for the emergence and maintenance of
entrepreneurship in the organizational context is to understand how individuals
within established organizational structures are able to instigate change, and get
other organizational actors to adopt and apply these new forms of acting. Stated
differently, entrepreneurship as a frm-level concept depends on individual
organizational actors and how they pursue entrepreneurship within the practical
everyday activities of their frm. Consequently, the individual’s position within
frms is not unambiguous or unproblematic for either the individuals themselves
or the entire frm, as the theoretical concepts of frm-level entrepreneurship
would seem to suggest.
More specifcally, the institutional challenge of entrepreneurship is two-
fold: frst, how to bring about new economic activity or organizational change
within existing structural arrangements, and, second, how to obtain legitimacy
for these emerging new activities (Garud et al., 2007). From the individual
actor’s viewpoint, the professionally-run frm can often be an inferior context for
entrepreneurship-oriented individuals to fully realize their potential compared to
their positions in frms run by these individuals themselves (Shane, 1995). The
paradox stems from the regulative and normative institutional arrangements
that emphasize stability and continuity, and aim to reduce uncertainty,
unfairness, and opportunistic behavior within organizations (Garud et al.,
2007; see also Shimizu, 2012). These arrangements restrict the actions of an
individual because the actions they instigate usually deviate from institutional
norms and encounter resistance from other organizational actors. Before new
16 Introduction
ideas gain wider legitimacy, they are likely to be considered an unusual and
competing activity within the organization (Hwang & Powell, 2005). In short,
the institutional perspective of entrepreneurship emphasizes the structural
restrictions of an organization that individuals must overcome in order to launch
and institutionalize new modes of acting.
In contrast, the micro social constructionist approach views individual actors
as principals serving their own interest (Burr, 2003), despite any restrictive
structures that might be present. Individual actors can also deliberate which
principals, besides themselves, they choose to serve or, alternatively, to reject
and resist (Vesala, 2013). Even though entrepreneurship discourses aim to
create and maintain a relationship between individual actors and the entire
organization (see Vesala, 2013; Lumpkin & Dess, 1996) however tight or loose it
may theoretically appear, individual actors may also reject such relationships and
formulations. Individual actors can therefore utilize discourses to construct their
own versions of any given issue, such as the phenomenon of entrepreneurship,
and reject other versions that other actors have explicated. For instance, they
can reject entrepreneuship discourses in general or established organizational
structures in particular to further their own ideas about change and newness.
Nevertheless, the central idea is to understand how individual organizational
actors make it happen (Sarasvathy, 2004) as hired employees of their frms
by choosing to serve the interests of the frm with efforts and ideas based on
corporate entrepreneurship.
Regarding the ambiguous position of individuals within the frm-level
phenomenon of entrepreneurship as a point of departure for the present
dissertation, this study sets out to explore entrepreneurship in the organizational
context from a micro social constructionist, interpretivist perspective (Vesala,
2013; Burr, 2003; Potter & Wetherell, 1987; Grant & Perren, 2002; Anderson &
Starnawska, 2008). The study explores what kind of versions of entrepreneurship
the individual organizational actors that participated in this study construct
and how their versions relate to theoretically-formulated conceptualizations of
entrepreneurship in the organizational context. The original studies are designed
according to descriptive methodologies typical of the interpretivist paradigm.
They aim to give a voice to individual actors by providing them with the possibility
to make sense of and to construct entrepreneurship as they view it through their
own organizational positions, responsibilities, and work tasks as hired employees
of their frms. The studies focus on the dimensions of autonomy, proactiveness,
and competitive aggressiveness in the concept of EO (Lumpkin & Dess, 1996,
2001), and the theoretical model of strategic entrepreneurship as explained by
Ireland, Covin, and Kuratko (2009). The empirical excursions that describe the
practical application and sensemaking of organizational actors aim to add new
depth and richness to entrepreneurship in the corporate setting by examining
Introduction 17
entrepreneurship from the individual actors’ perspectives and, thereafter, by
comparing their interpretations to the frm-level theoretical concepts of corporate
entrepreneurship.
18 Entrepreneurship in organizations
2. ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN ORGANIZATIONS
2.1 Corporate entrepreneurship
Corporate entrepreneurship (CE) is generally viewed as the overall defnition
of frm-level entrepreneurial behavior in established organizations.
1
The main
goal of CE is to generate new economic activity (Wiklund, et al., 2011; Davidsson
& Wiklund, 2001) leading to growth (Kuratko & Audretsch, 2013; Covin et
al., 2006; Zahra & Covin, 1995). Such economic activity can take the form of
corporate venturing (i.e., the creation of completely new businesses within or
outside the existing frm structure), innovations that result from capitalizing on
opportunities (Wales et al., 2013b), or the strategic renewal of the frm (Kuratko
& Audretsch, 2013; Covin & Miller, 2013; Sharma & Chrisman, 1999; Guth &
Ginsberg, 1990; Gartner, 1985). Growth is most often operationalized as sales
growth leading to growth of other fnancial and non-fnancial indicators, such
as proftability, return on investment, headcount, and customer satisfaction
(Audretsch, 2012; Wales et al., 2013a; Rauch et al., 2009; Wiklund, 1999).
Obviously, one can also stimulate growth with a variety of other strategic,
competitive, and management orientations besides CE (Zahra et al., 1999).
These orientations include, for instance, cost leadership, differentiation, and
segmentation (Porter, 1980). However, innovation is what distinguishes CE
from other approaches, as it forms the core of all corporate entrepreneurship
activities (Kuratko & Audretsch, 2013; Covin & Miles, 1999). Continuous
streams of innovation create a sustainable competitive advantage for the
entrepreneurial frm and differentiate it from the competition (Barney, 1991,
2001; Ireland & Webb, 2007; Ireland et al., 2001). Without innovative products
and services or other types of newness and creativity, a frm cannot be considered
entrepreneurial.
1 The notion of intrepreneurship has also served to describe the phenomenon of entrepreneurship
within existing frms. The theoretical content of intrapreneurship varies from a more limited scope,
such as internal corporate venturing (Parker, 2011) and individual employees who turn new ideas into
proftable outcomes (Pinchot, 1985; see also Section 2.2 on the autonomy dimension of entrepreneurial
orientation), to descriptions of all-encompassing, organization-wide entrepreneurship, which shares
many characteristics similar to those of CE explained here (see, e.g., Antoncic & Hisrich, 2001; 2003).
In the latter examples, intrapreneurship appears as an interchangeable label to CE. In this study, CE
serves as an umbrella concept that includes the notions of entrepreneurial orientation and strategic
entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurship in organizations 19
Corporate entrepreneurship typically emphasizes the behavioral aspect
of entrepreneurship because actions (and not dispositions or attributes) are
what render a frm entrepreneurial (Covin & Slevin, 1991; Covin & Lumpkin,
2011). Entrepreneurial behavior consists of two key dimensions: the ability to
recognize or create an opportunity and to exploit or commercialize it (Audretsch,
2012). Firms translate these opportunities into entrepreneurial projects that the
organization then pursues (Wiklund & Shepherd, 2011). To remain competitive
in the future also, frms should balance the exploitation of existing opportunities
for present success with the search for new ones (Ireland & Webb, 2007, 2009). In
other words, frms should simultaneously take full advantage of their established
business opportunities while searching for unexplored ones that could generate
future revenue and proft. If frms emphasize only one of these, they could
eventually see a continued decline in their market share or incur overwhelming
costs, or worse.
Managers at different organizational levels play an important role in the
successful formulation and implementation of entrepreneurial behavior
throughout the entire frm (Kuratko & Audretsch, 2013; Belousova & Gailly,
2013; De Clercq et al., 2010; Hornsby et al., 2009; Floyd & Lane, 2000; Barringer
& Bluedorn, 1999). Senior-level managers articulate an entrepreneurial strategic
vision for their frm and lay out a pro-entrepreneurship organizational structure
(Ireland et al., 2009). Both the vision and architecture encourage and justify the
systematic and continuous pursuit of opportunities throughout the frm. They
help organizational members to commit to entrepreneurial behavior without
the direct involvement of top executives. Middle-level managers, for their part,
endorse and evaluate entrepreneurial opportunities and deploy the resources
needed to pursue these opportunities (Kuratko et al., 2005). The role of frst-
level managers is to initiate entrepreneurial projects, solve problems related to
these projects, and adjust current practices to the strategic initiatives of senior-
level management (Floyd & Lane, 2000).
Generally, corporate entrepreneurship is considered a positive phenomenon
that generates favorable consequences for frms. However, the theoretical
literature also highlights precautions to and downsides of pursuing CE. First, CE
may rapidly deplete resources if applied in inappropriate environments (Wales et
al., 2013a; Phan et al., 2009; Covin & Slevin, 1991) and increase competition in the
market by goading competitors to fght back (Miller, 1983; Covin & Covin, 1990).
In addition, entrepreneurial actions do not guarantee pre-determined results
because the outcome of any entrepreneurial action is inherently uncertain (Covin
& Miles, 1999). In fact, entrepreneurial projects that focus on experimentation
into the unknown may often end in failure (Wiklund & Shepherd, 2011). Finally,
CE should not be viewed as a quick engine of growth, but instead as a long-
term, resource-consuming orientation that may take longer periods of time to
20 Entrepreneurship in organizations
take full economic effect (Wales et al., 2011; Lechner & Gudmundsson, 2014;
Ireland et al., 2009; Dess et al., 2003; Wiklund, 1999; Zahra & Covin, 1995).
After the general outline of corporate entrepreneurship presented above,
the next two sections explain two specifc approaches to CE. The notion of
entrepreneurial orientation (EO) is the most widely-used theoretical concept
to describe entrepreneurship as frm growth. Strategic entrepreneurship, for
its part, conceptualizes entrepreneurship as frm renewal.
2.2 Entrepreneurial orientation
The concept of entrepreneurial orientation (EO) represents a particular strategy-
making mode (Ireland et al., 2009; Dess et al., 1997; Mintzberg, 1973) based
on decision-making that favors entrepreneurial actions (Lumpkin & Dess,
1996). In recent decades, EO has been the most common conceptualization of
entrepreneurship as frm growth.
To date, the theoretical and empirical formulations of EO have largely taken
place within a positivist and realist research paradigm (Rauch et al. 2009; Covin
& Wales, 2012). EO represents a real organizational, frm-level phenomenon that
exists independently of its measurement (Covin & Lumpkin, 2011). EO cannot
be defned as a distinct, clearly observable entity, but is instead inferred from EO
measures that seek indications of entrepreneurial dispositions and behavioral
patterns within organizations (Covin & Lumpkin, 2011). These indications are
judged and evaluated by executive directors because the senior-most executive is
assumed to possess the most relevant information on an organization to provide
a frm-level viewpoint of its entrepreneurial actions (Wiklund & Shepherd,
2003; Lyon et al., 2000). The original EO measure, the M/C&S scale (Miller,
1983; Covin & Slevin, 1989, see Appendix B), still continues to see extensive
use in empirical research (Wales et al., 2013a). The measure includes not only
indicators of entrepreneurial behavior, but also items that represent beliefs,
preferences, and business outcomes related to entrepreneurship (Covin & Miller,
2013). Even though descriptions of entrepreneurship normally emphasize the
behavioral aspect, this type of triangulation approach is not viewed as problematic
because multiple indicators are considered the best way to capture the nature of
entrepreneurship in the corporate setting (Covin & Miller, 2013).
EO describes frm-level entrepreneurship by foregrounding fve specifc
dimensions. These fve key dimensions include innovativeness, risk-taking,
proactiveness, competitive aggressiveness, and autonomy (Lumpkin &
Dess, 1996, 2001; Covin & Slevin, 1989, 1991; Miller, 1983). The earliest
conceptualizations of EO (Miller, 1983; Covin & Slevin, 1989) consist of
innovativeness, proactiveness, and risk-taking; the dimensions of competitive
Entrepreneurship in organizations 21
aggressiveness and autonomy were added to the construct later (Lumpkin
& Dess, 1996). The original conceptualizations view proactiveness and
competitive aggressiveness as interchangeable (Covin & Slevin, 1991; Covin
& Covin, 1990) because outperforming one’s competition is a manifestation
of proactiveness. Lumpkin and Dess (1996), however, argued for the specifc
inclusion of competitive aggressiveness by pointing out that competing with
rivals and anticipating new opportunities in the market should be conceptually
differentiated from one another, and consequently, operationalized a more
precise distinction between the two dimensions (Lumpkin & Dess, 2001, see
Appendix B). They further argued for the inclusion of autonomy by highlighting
that independent action disengaged from organizational constraints is essential
in the lauch of a new venture. Counter-arguments claim that autonomy is built
into the dimension of risk-taking, because risk-taking would be diffcult to engage
in without autonomy (Basso et al., 2009).
Innovativeness has become a major factor used to characterize the core of
entrepreneurship and the outcomes of entrepreneurial behavior (Lumpkin & Dess,
1996; Covin & Miller, 2013). Entrepreneurial frms pursue new opportunities by
engaging in and supporting new ideas, novelty, experimentation, and creative
practices that may result in new products, services, processes (Dess et al., 1997;
Lumpkin & Dess, 1996), or any new combination of existing means and resources
that eliminate the existing combinations (Schumpeter, 1934/1996).
Risk-taking, frequently used to describe entrepreneurship (Lumpkin & Dess,
1996), is defned as the degree to which managers in a frm are willing to make
large and risky resource commitments that have a reasonable chance of costly
failure (Miller & Friesen, 1978). An entrepreneurial frm views these kinds of bold
and wide-ranging acts as useful and common practice (Miller & Friesen, 1982).
On a more general level, risk-taking refers to any bold action of organizational
members in order to achieve their objectives, often in the face of unknown
opportunities with uncertain outcomes (Lumpkin & Dess, 1996, 2001).
Proactiveness represents a forward-looking response to opportunities in the
market (Lumpkin & Dess, 2001). Proactive actions enable a frm to anticipate
changes and needs in the market and to be the frst to act on them. Proactive
frms introduce new trends to the market by actively shaping the demand, not
merely reacting to it (Lumpkin & Dess, 1996; 2001; Miller & Friesen, 1978).
Shaping demand involves, above all, introducing new products or services
ahead of the competition. Proactiveness suggests a forward-looking perspective
characteristic of a frm that has the foresight to act in anticipation of future
demand to create change (Lumpkin & Dess, 2001). Anticipation and being ahead
of the market are considered benefcial to economic performance, especially
in dynamic, opportunity-rich environments (Lumpkin & Dess, 2001). Some
previous studies (e.g., Tang et al., 2009; Vora et al., 2012) have suggested
22 Entrepreneurship in organizations
that proactiveness occupies a primary position in encouraging and enabling
entrepreneurial behavior in organizations. Proactiveness drives innovative and
risk-taking behavior and enhances concrete, frm-level entrepreneurial activities.
Competitive aggressiveness, in contrast, is a defensive response to
competitive threats (Lumpkin & Dess, 2001). Competitive moves enable a
frm to forcefully secure or improve its position in the market. An aggressively
competitive frm challenges its rivals directly and intensely to achieve entry
or improve its current position in the market. The means for competing
can be also reactive and unconventional (Lumpkin & Dess, 1996; 2001) and
include, for example, cutting prices and sacrifcing proftability (Venkatraman,
1989). Aggressively competitive moves positively contribute to the success of
entrepreneurial activities, especially when competition for clients and resources
is intense (Lumpkin & Dess, 2001). However, competitive aggressiveness may
harm long-term collaborative ventures in the market if pushed to extremes (Certo
et al., 2009). Firms with a reputation for competitive aggressiveness may even
fnd themselves excluded from alliances based on mutual knowledge sharing and
the exploitation of opportunities. Therefore, a more moderate level of competitive
aggressiveness may result in more optimal frm performance than would drastic
measures aimed at outperforming the competition (see Bhuian et al., 2005).
Autonomy in the concept of EO is defned as the independent action of
an individual or team in seizing an opportunity and following it through to
completion (Lumpkin & Dess, 1996, see also Pinchot, 1985). The entrepreneurship
literature and cultural images generally regard autonomy as a central feature
of entrepreneurship and link it to individual actors. Thus, unlike other EO
dimensions, autonomy functions primarily on an individual or micro-level,
and its role is to set in motion and prime the other dimensions. A more
recently developed autonomy measure (Lumpkin et al., 2009, see Appendix
B) conceptually differentiates EO-related autonomy more distinctly from
management-related autonomy, such as autonomy induced by decentralization
or other structural arrangements. A frm and its leaders should promote, shield,
and support the efforts of independently working individuals and teams that
make decisions on their own about what business opportunities to pursue despite
organizational constraints. These initiatives and input should play a major role
when the frm identifes and selects suitable opportunities in the market. If an
organization lacks the freedom to act independently, individuals and teams
will create autonomy for themselves by, for instance, bending rules, bypassing
procedures, and disregarding other organizational constraints (Shane, 1994).
EO research has raised some questions about the potential negative effects of
autonomy. For instance, some researchers have claimed that autonomy carried
to extremes may actually diminish a frm’s returns (Lumpkin et al., 2009).
Entrepreneurship in organizations 23
EO research has also focused on whether the dimensions of EO can occur
independently in various combinations or unidimensionally in a balanced
combination in order for a frm to be considered entrepreneurial. According to
the multidimensional view, the dimensions of EO can and should be emphasized
in different ways depending on environmental and organizational contexts
(Lumpkin & Dess, 1996). In contrast, the unidimensional view proposes that a
frm can be considered entrepreneurial only if it acts upon all the dimensions
simultaneously and thus scores high on all the corresponding variables (Rauch
et al., 2009; Basso et al., 2009). To date, most empirical studies have adopted
the composite, unidimensional view and have therefore presumed that all EO
dimensions add equally to the overall quantitative level of EO in any given frm
(Rauch et al., 2009; Covin & Wales, 2012). EO scholars currently consider these
two views representative of different constructs and not competing ones (Covin
& Miller, 2013). The unidimensional view focuses on the commonality of the
dimensions, whereas the multidimensional view explores the distinctiveness of
each EO dimension (Covin & Lumpkin, 2011).
The concept of EO constructs entrepreneurship in the corporate setting as
a frm-level phenomenon. More specifcally, frm-level refers to each strategic
business unit of an organization. Typically, non-diversifed small and medium-
sized enterprises are considered frm-level units in their entirety, whereas each
diversifed strategic business unit of a multi-business organization is viewed as
if the unit were an entire frm in itself (Covin & Lumpkin, 2011). The concept
of EO further emphasizes sustained entrepreneurial behavior patterns (Covin
& Slevin, 1991; Covin & Lumpkin, 2011) that frms can and should actively
manage (Covin & Slevin, 1991). Entrepreneurial behavior must also occur on an
ongoing basis. Therefore, frms do not merit the label entrepreneurial if their
entrepreneurial actions do not persist over time.
Also, EO as a frm-level concept should pervade all levels of an organization
(Covin & Slevin, 1991). However, recent developments in EO research indicate
that EO may manifest in different ways across hierarchy levels, business units,
functional areas, and the development stages of a frm (Wales et al., 2011; see
also Zahra et al., 1999). EO scholars have also suggested studying more proximal
outcomes of EO, such as whether entrepreneurial projects succeed or fail, in
addition to the traditional frm-level outcomes of EO (Wiklund & Shepherd, 2011).
These theorizations recognize that organizations may contain heterogeneous
conceptualizations of EO, and that these diverse conceptualizations and their
different outcomes may enhance frm performance in varying manners. To fully
tap into entrepreneurship and the positive business outcomes it promises, how
individual actors in different functions of the frm involved in and carrying out
entrepreneurial projects view entrepreneurship from their own positions in the
organization is therefore relevant.
24 Entrepreneurship in organizations
2.3 Strategic entrepreneurship
Whereas entrepreneurial orientation treats entrepreneurship as a particular
strategy-making mode, strategic entrepreneurship represents a distinct survival
and transformation strategy for established frms that face declining business
performance and turnaround situations (Kuratko & Audretsch, 2013, 2009; Dess
et al., 1999). In order to regain competitive superiority, strategic entrepreneurship
requires frms to fundamentally renew themselves (Covin & Miles, 1999). Firms
should redirect their current strategy and signifcantly modify their operational
practices to change their declining position in the market.
Strategic entrepreneurship takes effect by linking renewal to the formulation
of competitive advantage. The specifc aim is to gain sustainable competitive
advantage as a way to manage uncertainty and resources (Ireland & Webb,
2009; Ireland et al., 2003) by implementing a value-creating strategy that no
current or potential competitor takes advantage of or is able to copy (Barney,
1991). New valuable competitive advantages in relation to the frm’s external
environment ought to be explored on an ongoing basis in order for a frm to
continuously differentiate itself from its rivals (Ireland & Webb, 2007, 2009).
Theoretical literature depicts four forms of strategic entrepreneurship
manifestations (Covin & Miles, 1999). These types represent varying degrees
of how fundamentally a frm wishes to redefne itself in order to improve its
competitive standing and reconstruct its business model (Ireland & Webb,
2009). The most common form is sustained regeneration, which develops
internal cultures, processes, and structures to support continuous innovation,
whereas domain redefnition creates a completely new market position for
the frm. Organizational rejuvenation takes an internal look into the frm by
developing the organization itself in strategy execution. Strategic renewal, for
its part, changes the way the frm competes by aligning it successfully with the
external environment. Strategic renewal implements a new business strategy
that differs signifcantly from past practices and aims to utilize resources more
effciently or to exploit available product-market opportunities more fully (Covin
& Miles, 1999; Kuratko & Audretsch, 2009). Strategy renewal represents the
most challenging form of strategic entrepreneurship because changes in strategic
direction may be even harder for most frms than, for instance, implementing
major internal innovations (Covin & Miles, 1999; Kuratko & Audretsch, 2009).
The literature depicts theoretical strategic entrepreneurship models that
defne the antecedents, elements, and consequences of entrepreneurship in the
corporate setting (e.g., Ireland et al., 2003; Ireland et al., 2009). These models
place entrepreneurship in the realm of strategic management by prescribing
ideal combinations of appropriate cultural, structural, and resource variables
to support entrepreneurial behavior and by predicting success if frms conform
Entrepreneurship in organizations 25
to these prescriptions. For instance, the model of Ireland, Covin, and Kuratko
(2009) emphasizes the importance of creating an entrepreneurial strategic
vision and a pro-entrepreneurship organizational architecture to promote the
pursuit of opportunities in the market. However, the strategic entrepreneurship
literature fails to describe how actual entrepreneurship processes, such as the
implementation of CE models, emerge in the everyday reality of organizations
(Steyaert, 2007, 1997). In fact, the lack of a comprehensive model of the
entrepreneurial process that would provide theoretical and practical implications
as to the how of entrepreneurship is considered one of the most pressing
problems in the study of CE (Moroz & Hindle, 2012).
26 Aims of the study
3. AIMS OF THE STUDY
The present dissertation adopts an interpretivist research paradigm to study
entrepreneurship in the organizational context. The interpretivist paradigm
takes a subjective and constructionist perspective of corporate reality and aims
to describe how individual organizational actors themselves perceive their
organization (Grant & Perren, 2002; Anderson & Starnawska, 2008). The
dissertation therefore adopts a fundamentally different research approach to the
phenomenon of corporate entrepreneurship than what has been achieved thus
far. The study aims to describe how organizational actors construct and interpret
the notion of entrepreneurship and to explicate the micro-level behaviors related
to entrepreneurship that frms engage in as part of their everyday activities.
Conventionally, the dominant functionalist research tradition in
entrepreneurship research emphasizes an objective, realist, and positivist
perspective of organizational reality (Grant & Perren, 2002). The positivist
paradigm formulates entrepreneurship as a phenomenon residing beyond
the reality of entrepreneurship itself (i.e., the empirically-measurable reality
of orientations, strategies, and behaviors of frms). However, scholars have
increasingly begun to claim (see, for example, Anderson & Starnawska, 2008;
Gartner & Birley, 2002; Ogbor, 2000) that this research approach has resulted in
a somewhat narrow and one-sided perspective of entrepreneurship, as it has failed
to attend to the unexpected, atypical, and unique nature of entrepreneurship.
For instance, the functionalist paradigm has tended to explain variance in
entrepreneurial activity in the corporate setting, but not the processes leading
to that activity, and to search for regularities in entrepreneurial behaviour instead
of looking at the multiple ways in which entrepreneurship can be enacted and
defned across various organizational actors and contexts.
Within the functionalist paradigm, the theoretical formulations of
entrepreneurship represent the central processes and dimensions that scholars
consider relevant when frms strive for growth and survival by entrepreneurial
activities. According to the interpretivist paradigm, however, any particular choice
of theoretical dimensions and actions that functionalist entrepreneurship studies
have outlined is already a socially-constructed phenomenon. These choices are
not absolute, as their meaning and usage can vary according to context. In
fact, entrepreneurship as defned in theoretical literature, entrepreneurship
operationalized as a particular type of frm behavior, and entrepreneurship
constructed in different occasions, circumstances, and contexts represent various
versions of entrepreneurship that may overlap or differ. The lack of an absolute or
Aims of the study 27
objective meaning of entrepreneurship does not prevent scholars from discussing
entrepreneurship as a socially and discursively constructed phenomenon.
From these general points of departure, studying the interpretations that
owners, managers, and other key actors responsible for the management and
operations of frms actually construct is indeed feasible. In fact, some scholars
have begun to call for interpretivist studies that promise a deeper understanding
of the nature of entrepreneurship in organizations and the practical challenges
and activities related to it (Carlsson et al., 2013; Grant & Perren, 2002; Zahra,
2007). Miller (2011), for instance, suggests interviewing executives and
asking them to share their understandings of the EO dimensions and of the
meaning of pursuing EO. However, even though the benefts of interpretivist
inquiries are considered important in enriching our understanding of corporate
entrepreneurship, empirical research has to date largely failed to take up such a
perspective (Anderson et al., 2013; Vora et al., 2012; Tajeddini & Mueller, 2012;
Lappalainen, 2009 notwithstanding).
In response to the underexplored interpretivist research challenge in the
corporate setting, this study describes what kind of versions of entrepreneurship
individual organizational actors construct and how their versions relate to the
theoretically-formulated conceptualizations of corporate entrepreneurship. The
aim is to examine how organizational actors either individually or collectively
defne entrepreneurship when they construct, interpret, evaluate, and apply
it in the context of their day-to-day activities on different functions and levels
of the organization. The study focuses on the theoretical model of strategic
entrepreneurship as explained by Ireland, Covin, and Kuratko (2009) and the
dimensions of autonomy, proactiveness, and competitive aggressiveness in the
concept of entrepreneurial orientation. These three dimensions were selected
for analysis because their inclusion and operationalization in the concept of EO
remains debatable (Rauch et al., 2009), and because few studies since Lumpkin
and Dess (2001; 1996) have attempted to clarify their individual distinctiveness.
This study sets out to explore the following questions:
1. How do organizational actors react to the general idea of
entrepreneurship? (I–IV; Section 5.1)
2. What kind of interpretations of entrepreneurship do organizational actors
construct and how do they argue for or against these interpretations?
(I, II; Section 5.2)
3. What kind of structural processes of entrepreneurship do organizational
actors construct in their talk and for what purposes? (III, IV; Section
5.3)
4. How is entrepreneurship enacted and accomplished in everyday
organizational interaction situations? (I–IV; Section 6.1.1)
28 Aims of the study
5. How do organizational actors view their own entrepreneurship-related
actions and those of their colleagues in relation to the entire frm? (I,
III; Section 6.1.2)
6. What role do internal and external relations of the frm play in the
construction of entrepreneurship? (I, II, III, IV; Section 6.2)
7. What are the institutional challenges of the legitimization and
institutionalization of entrepreneurship in the organizational context?
(I–IV; Section 6.3)
Materials and methods 29
4. MATERIALS AND METHODS
4.1 Descriptive methodologies
This dissertation employs three descriptive methods to generate and analyze the
empirical research material. Descriptive methods refer to research procedures
that illustrate how societal entities, such as organizations, are regulated and
maintained by, for example, status quo, social order, and consensus (Grant &
Perren, 2002). The methods utilized in this study include discursive psychology,
the qualitative attitude approach, and narrative psychology. They aim to collect
samples of how the research participants subjectively interpret the phenomenon
of entrepreneurship in the specifc context of their everyday corporate reality.
Particular attention focused on choosing methods that would cater to both the
content-related and structural elements of the research material.
Discursive psychology served to explicate the different versions (or discourses)
of corporate entrepreneurship that the research participants constructed in their
ongoing interaction. Discursive psychology focuses on the content of language
use in interactive situations, such as interviews and meetings (Potter & Wetherell,
1987; Burr, 2003) and highlights the situated, constructed, and action-oriented
nature of language use (Potter, 2003; Potter & Edwards, 2001). A variation
in individual accounts is to be expected because the same phenomenon can
be illustrated in a number of different ways (Potter & Wetherell, 1987). Most
importantly, discursive psychology views language use as action. In other words,
individuals can use discourses to accomplish different purposes through their
talk (Potter & Wetherell, 1987), such as to fulfll their own objectives or to satisfy
their own interests. To construct and justify their own versions of social reality,
individuals can draw on diverse resources, such as interpretative repertoires,
categories, and rhetorical devices (Potter & Wetherell, 1995).
In addition to identifying the discursive variation in the research
participants’ talk about entrepreneurship, the analysis took advantage of
established interaction structures and rhetorical devices that conversation
analysis has already laid out. This structural approach to organizational talk
about entrepreneurship proved useful in understanding how entrepreneurial
processes unfold in ongoing interaction. These interaction structures included
proposals (Houtkoop-Steenstra, 1990; Houtkoop, 1987; Davidsson, 1984), joint
decision-making processes of access, agreement, and commitment (Stevanovic &
Peräkylä, 2012; Stevanovic, 2012; Stevanovic, 2013; see also Gunnarsson, 2006;
30 Materials and methods
Huisman, 2001), complaints (Heinemann & Traverso, 2009; Edwards, 2005),
and extreme case formulations (Pomerantz, 1986; Edwards, 2000). Applying
conversation-analytical tools to fne-grained analyses of discourse in this manner
is common in discursive psychology (Billig, 1999).
The qualitative attitude approach (Vesala & Rantanen, 2007; Vesala,
2008) served to bring to the fore the qualitatively different interpretations
about corporate entrepreneurship that research participants constructed
in the interviews. The approach draws on discursive psychology and Billig’s
(1996; 1991; 2009) rhetorical social psychology, which emphasizes rhetoric
as argumentation. Billig considers rhetoric to be the key to understanding the
social nature of human thinking and suggests that the strategy of considering,
searching for, and inventing not only arguments but also counter-arguments
is basic to human cognitive processing. Individuals repeatedly face situations
that demand decisions between alternate options, and therefore also need to
consider and evaluate differing and opposing viewpoints. The qualitative attitude
approach offers a systematic procedure for empirically studying the construction
of attitudes in evaluative argumentative talk in interview settings. An attitude is
studied as an either positive or negative communicative and evaluative viewpoint
of a particular issue in a particular social context. When taking a stand, an
individual usually justifes the stand and accounts for it, even when the stand
is presented conditionally or with reservations. In such argumentative rhetoric,
an attitude toward a particular issue seldom translates into one completely fxed
position that applies unchangeably across different situations.
The qualitative attitude approach uses attitude statements, similar to those
in quantitative attitude measures, as prompts for producing rich and open-
ended argumentation about a particular issue (Vesala, 2008). This approach
was considered particularly suitable because it offers suffcient latitude for
the interviewees to refect on entrepreneurship from multiple perspectives. In
particular, the approach requires that the interviewer not defne the concepts
and ideas included in the statements, but instead permits the interviewees to
defne them. Even though exact (theoretically motivated) wordings can serve
to formulate the statements, the interviewees are free to contest them and
their relevance in each specifc research context. Further, the approach offers
an equal opportunity and position to all research participants as actors in their
organizations to comment on ideas related to entrepreneurship. After that, it
obviously remains to be seen whether and how the participants themselves will
take up this opportunity.
Narrative psychology was chosen to examine how entrepreneurial processes
unfold and link past, present, and future actions together (Down & Warren,
2008; Lindgren & Packendorff, 2009; Steyaert, 1997), because time and context
are crucial elements in narratives (Jones et al., 2008; Bruner, 2004). Narratives
Materials and methods 31
typically take a retrospective look at events and structurally describe how they
progressed over the course of time. Narratives further aim to provide or restore
a sense of meaning and direction to how the events were experienced (Murray,
2008; Frank & Lueger, 1998; Gergen & Gergen, 1984). These features of narratives
are consistent with entrepreneurship scholars’ emphasis on studying realized
strategies as opposed to intended ones (Venkatraman, 1989). During interviews,
the aim is to encourage interviewees to talk freely about their experiences and
opinions on a given topic in order to capture the longitudinal, temporal, and
developmental nature of these experiences. Interviewees offer many narratives
in response to open-ended questions, as they impose no pre-defned limits or
directions on the type of narrative expected (De Fina, 2009). Consequently,
interview topics are typically articulated in a general manner in order to keep
as many views as possible open to interviewees.
4.2 The context of the study
The original studies of this dissertation explore interpretations of entrepreneurship
in two everyday organizational contexts. First, Studies I-III take the perspective
of one organizational function of entrepreneurship. Because EO may manifest
in different manners across functional areas of a frm (Wales et al., 2011), the
studies set out to explore the potential variation in the interpretations of EO
in the sales function and the selling activities that organizational actors pursue
in their everyday operations. The empirical research context of selling can be
considered relevant to corporate entrepreneurship, in particular to EO, as the
sales function combines the results of entrepreneurial efforts performed in
other organizational functions. Salespeople typically operate at the frm-market
interface by offering the outcomes of their frms’ innovative efforts to the market
and by having access to knowledge about competitor actions. Salespeople are
therefore in a relevant position to evaluate how their frm’s behavior is met in
the market and with what kind of results.
More specifcally, Studies I-III focus on individual salespeople either directly
employed in the sales function of each studied organization, managing sales teams
within these functions, or having personal sales obligations in other positions
within the frm, either with their own sales targets to meet or the overall turnover
of the sales function to attend to. This overview of sales activities on different
organizational levels and viewed from different, and even simultaneuous,
organizational roles offers a relatively versatile perspective of entrepreneurship in
the organizational context of selling. For example, management group members,
on the one hand, serve as directors responsible for the entire frm and, on the
other hand, also as salespeople with individual sales responsibilities to fulfll.
32 Materials and methods
Second, in Study IV, the empirical research context is the entire organization
viewed from the perspective of its managing director. Study IV therefore adopts
an empirical research context and perspective typical of CE research. However,
the methodology offers a different argumentative starting point for the managing
director. Instead of being asked to complete a questionnaire about his frm’s
entrepreneurial activities and dispositions, the managing director was offered
the opportunity to tell the story of his frm in an interview.
4.3 Research material
The research material comes from three privately-owned Finnish business service
provider frms in the metropolitan areas of Helsinki and Tampere during 2008-
2011. These frms are service providers that apply their specialized competencies,
knowledge, and skills for the beneft of other organizations (see Vargo & Lusch,
2004). They claimed that their sales function was organized mainly around face-
to-face meetings with representatives of their client organizations.
The material comes from individual interviews and authentic meeting
interaction recordings. I carried out all the interviews but did not participate in
the meetings. All of the meetings in Study III and all of the interviews in Studies
I and II were conducted in Finnish. The interview of Study IV was conducted in
English. All meetings and interviews were recorded for later transcription (see
Appendix A) with the written permission of all participants. The translations
of the meeting and interview talk presented in the excerpts of the original
publications aim to maintain a clear sense of the research participants’ talk
and to keep it as close as possible to the Finnish original (cf. Houtkoop, 1987).
A summary of the research material appears in Table 1.
Table 1. Summary of the research material.
Study Size of
enterprise
(headcount)
Material
collection
period
Research
participants
Research
material
Duration of
recording
Research
method
I Small May 2008 Management
group
members
(N = 6)
Individual
interviews
29 min on
average
Qualitative
attitude
approach
II Large Oct 2010-
Jan 2011
Salespeople
(N = 7) and
sales group
directors
(N = 2)
Individual
interviews
21 min on
average
Qualitative
attitude
approach
III Small Jan-Feb
2008
Management
group
members
(N = 6)
Recorded
meeting
(N = 5)
12 h 40 min
in total
Discursive
psychology,
interaction
structures
IV Medium-sized Dec 2009 Managing
director
(N = 1)
Individual
interview
1 h 7 min Narrative
psychology,
prototypical
story forms
Materials and methods 33
The individual interviews in Studies I and II (management group members,
salespersons, and sales group directors) were conducted according to the
practices of the qualitative attitude approach (Vesala, 2008). The general idea is
to create comparability between individual interviews by using a semi-structured
interview design, which organizes the interview into distinct sections. Each
section involves a conversation which the interviewer begins by introducing
and reading aloud each prompt statement, as well as presenting it in written
form on a sheet of paper. All of the interviews introduced several statements
of the dimensions of EO formulated to address the selling context and other
organizational issues for the interviewees to comment on. The statements about
autonomy, proactiveness, and competitive aggressiveness chosen for analysis
in Studies I and II appear in Appendix C. While conducting the interviews, the
interviewer has to accomplish two tasks: to elicit the interviewees’ opinion about
each attitude statement and to encourage comments while remaining neutral
about the issue at hand. The interviewees, in their own words, take a stand on
each statement and justify their stands. In Studies I and II, the interviewer also
elicited clarifcations from the interviewees by asking them to describe in more
detail how an argument would present itself in practice. The interviewees also
received recapitulations of their previous views in order to encourage more
profound refections on the statement or to ensure a valid understanding of the
given views. At the end of the interviews, in order to give the interviewees one
more opportunity to refect on the statements, all the statements were presented
to the interviewees at the same time, unless they explicitly said the interview
was over or stated that they had nothing more to add.
The research material of Study III contains recordings of management group
meetings. Recordings of authentic meeting interaction offer an opportunity to
study organizational life as it unfolds as a joint achievement of the meeting
participants. In general, meetings are the very situations in which frms produce
and reproduce themselves, where frm activities are created and maintained,
and where divergent issues meet and potentially merge (Boden, 1994; Drew
& Heritage, 1992). Meetings can therefore be considered central places where
entrepreneurship can also emerge and be maintained in social interaction (see
Asmuß & Svennevig, 2009). In fact, some EO scholars consider meetings to
be particularly informative in offering new insights into how directors discuss
their entrepreneurial activities (e.g., Miller, 2011; Covin & Miller, 2013). The
meetings of Study III were audio-recorded by one of the meeting participants.
The same management group members that participated in these meetings were
also interviewed in Study I. A summary of the recordings appears in Appendix D.
The individual interview in Study IV (the managing director) was conducted
according to the interview guidelines of narrative psychology (Murray, 2008;
Mishler, 1986). The study utilized the traditional upper echelon perspective of
empirical entrepreneurship research in the organizational context (Rauch et al.,
34 Materials and methods
2009; Lyon et al., 2000). The managing director’s perspective was considered
particularly relevant in this case because the managing director is arguably
the one individual in frms who is typically responsible for leading frm-level
change and renewal processes. In narrative terms, the managing director was
considered the main character in organizational change. The interview topic was
articulated in a general manner in order to encourage the managing director
to contemplate his experiences as the leader of his frm from as many views
as possible. He was asked to refect on what had occurred in the frm since his
appointment, what the frm’s situation was at the moment of the interview,
and what he expected to occur in the near future. No cues or directions as to
entrepreneurship in general or CE strategies in particular were offered. The
only issues that the managing director was explicitly expected to bring up in
this talk were the temporal elements typical of narrative accounts (i.e., the
past, the present, and the future; see Murray, 2008). During the interview, the
interviewer’s role was typical of narrative interviews: to serve as an interested
audience for the interviewee’s talk and to refrain from demanding clarifcations
until the interview ended.
4.4 Procedures of analysis
4.4.1 STUDIES I AND II: THE QUALITATIVE ATTITUDE APPROACH
The analysis in the qualitative attitude approach proceeds from details of the
material to outlining general patterns of argumentation (Vesala & Rantanen,
2007). The analysis occurs in two stages. First, in the classifying analysis, the
argumentative talk is categorized according to a literal reading of the research
material. Second, the interpretative analysis brings these categories into a
conceptual dialogue with theoretical concepts and discussions relevant to the
particular study at hand.
The classifying analysis identifed different explicit stands taken towards each
attitude statement together with specifc arguments intended to reason and to
justify these stands (Vesala & Rantanen, 2007). The analysis also detailed the
stand-taking that interviewees expressed in a conditional or hesitant manner (see
also Billig, 1996). At this stage of the analysis, individual interviewees were not
the primary analytical units. Therefore, different types of stands or justifcations
were also identifed within one and the same interview. The different stands
were then classifed into categories: frst, according to the type of stand (i.e.,
supporting, rejecting, or conditional), and thereafter on the basis of each
stand’s justifcations. As a result, an overall view of multiple stand-justifcation
combinations observable in the interview material emerged. These overall views
appear in tables of the original Studies I and II.
Materials and methods 35
The interpretative analysis elaborated on the initial classifcatory analysis
(Vesala & Rantanen, 2007) which aimed to identify general patterns of
argumentation evident in the detailed categories of stands and justifcations.
These patterns were thereafter linked to the dimensions of EO and the theoretical
discussions about the concept of EO. The interpretative analysis explicated the
relational aspects of EO, targets of entrepreneurial behavior, and the relationships
between the single dimensions of EO.
4.4.2 STUDY III: DISCURSIVE PSYCHOLOGY AND INTERACTION STRUCTURES
In Study III, the departure point for the analysis was the explicit content of the
meeting talk. The analysis focused on those sequences in which management
group members, frst, described behavior that could be interpreted to match the
concepts of corporate entrepreneurship, in particular that of EO, and, second,
depicted a specifc purpose for this type of behavior. The object of analysis thus
included those meeting interaction sequences in which members discussed both
EO-related behavior and its purposes.
Sequences to be analyzed were selected on three grounds. First, sequences
were selected in which members used specifc EO-related theoretical vocabulary,
including adjectives such as proactive and innovative. Second, sequences
were also selected that depicted entrepreneurial behavior in ways that were in
some way discernibly linked to the concept of EO. For example, taking care of
everything from the beginning to the end can be considered congruent with
the theoretical defnition of autonomy. Third, the content of each sequence was
checked for potential purposes of EO-related behavior. Because the theoretical
concept of EO serves a specifc purpose, namely that of frm growth (Wales et
al., 2013a; Rauch et al., 2009), the analysis concentrated on those sequences in
which members directly described in their talk why entrepreneurial behavior
would be, for example, important to them. At this point, sequences that described
EO-related behavior with no explicitly stated purpose were excluded from
the analysis. For instance, cases in which members lamented the diffculty of
innovation and speculated how much time they would need to spend on it were
omitted. After the sequence selection, the analysis described in detail how EO-
related interaction sequences as mentioned above were structurally organized
in the talk of the management group members.
4.4.3 STUDY IV: NARRATIVE PSYCHOLOGY AND PROTOTYPICAL STORY
FORMS
During the managing director’s interview, it became apparent that strategic
issues formed an integral part of his narrative. The analysis concentrated on this
36 Materials and methods
strategy-related talk that comprised approximately the frst half of the interview.
The managing director’s interview was analyzed in two stages; frst, structurally
and, second, according to the CE strategy model of Ireland, Covin, and Kuratko
(2009).
The analysis of narrative empirical material typically begins by eplicating the
narrative structure – in other words, how events are linked together (Larty &
Hamilton, 2011). In Study IV, the narrative interview was analyzed as a specifc
narrative type. Gergen and Gergen (1984; 1986) depict three prototypical
narrative forms: progressive, regressive, and stable. These forms typically
establish a desired goal or another valued endpoint and describe preceding
events so that the narrator approaches, moves away from, or maintains this
goal. Narratives also anticipate future events (i.e., evaluate how the goal-related
events will evolve in the future). The managing director’s story was interpreted
as a typical progressive narrative with four stages (see also Murray, 2008). These
four stages group individual events together, and the relationships between these
stages establish a particular order to the narrative. This order further motivates
and justifes actions during each stage (cf. Gergen & Gergen, 1986).
Thereafter, the four stages of the managing director’s progressive narrative
were compared to the CE strategy model of Ireland, Covin, and Kuratko (2009).
When the analysis began (in May 2010), this model was one of the most
recently-published CE strategy models. The analysis paid specifc attention to
the two elements that the model places at the core of supporting the pursuit
of entrepreneurial opportunities: entrepreneurial strategic vision and pro-
entrepreneurship organizational architecture. The analysis further explicated
the outcomes of the renewed strategy in terms of desired performance.
Summary of the original studies 37
5. SUMMARY OF THE ORIGINAL STUDIES
By taking into account all four original studies, the present summary answers
research questions 1–3 (see Section 3) by frst considering how the research
participants reacted to the general idea of corporate entrepreneurship. The
summary thereafter explicates what kind of interpretations the participants
constructed of entrepreneurial orientation and how they justifed their views.
These interpretations are drawn from Studies I and II conducted according to
the principles of the qualitative attitude approach. Finally, the summary section
ends with an overview of the processes that the research participants constructed
of corporate entrepreneurship in their interview and meeting talk in Studies
III and IV.
5.1 The reception of corporate entrepreneurship
The reseach participants quite unproblematically and positively reacted to the
general idea of corporate entrepreneurship that was either presented to them in
interviews or constructed in meeting interaction. This observation is unsurprising
because the phenomenon of CE is most prominently related to the economic
sector of our society. This is not to say, however, that more detailed aspects of
CE were met with mere acceptance or treated as self-evident. This section will
show how CE was received both on a general and a more detailed level, and
how different interpretations of CE were rhetorically managed in interaction.
In Studies I-III, the research participants seemed to be familiar with the
phenomenon of corporate entrepreneurship and possess distinct representations
of it. They effortlessly commented on the EO statements and applied EO-related
vocabulary in both their interview and meeting talk. The participants described
EO, for example, as an entrepreneurial spirit, attitude, and characteristic.
Corporate entrepreneurship was relevant to the case frm of Studies I and III,
even as an offcially stated key aspect of its strategic goals. The participants also
often utilized a metaphor typically related to entrepreneurs, namely lone wolves.
This metaphor commonly describes the dominant image of entrepreneurs as
predators, or aggressive and exploitative actors (Anderson et al., 2009).
Interestingly, the research participants presented no arguments against the
general idea or importance of CE in their interview or meeting talk. This was
38 Summary of the original studies
evident, for instance, in Study III, when the research participants often oriented
to the entrepreneurial ideals as already existing: the entrepreneurial basis for
the new sales practices was frst presented as self-evident and only afterwards
as something new by assigning to the ideal a somewhat new interpretation. For
example, proactiveness seemed to be part of the participants’ common ground
because there was no need to explain why it was too late if the client approaches
the case frm frst. Thereafter, the new practice was formulated by proposing
that the case frm should always be the frst to contact the client.
Consequently, considerable consensus and shared understanding of
the relevance of CE seemed to prevail within the research participants,
notwithstanding individual differences in the tone of argumentation. In the
organizational context of this study, the general notion of CE seemed therefore to
occupy the position of an acknowledged ideal according to which organizational
actors should pursue their daily business endeavors. In fact, in Study II, the
interviewees either claimed that they themselves indeed conduct their selling
activities according to the principles described in the statements or said that the
principles represent ideals that every salespeople of the case frm should follow.
These fndings contrast with what some other studies in other empirical research
contexts have suggested. In the farming context, for example, some of the Finnish
farmers interviewed vehemently denied the relevance of entrepreneurship for
themselves by stating that entrepreneurial ideals cannot be applied to farming
activities (Pyysiäinen et al., 2011).
However, the individual dimensions of autonomy, proactiveness, and
competitive aggressiveness did provoke qualitatively different interpretations
among the research participants. They enumerated both positive and negative
aspects and consequences of these dimensions, and their talk depicted several
different perspectives of them. Overall, instead of directly refusing CE as a guiding
principle of their daily work, the participants constructed preconditions, practices,
and circumstances under which CE would function in full and produce desired
business outcomes for the frm. Negative evaluations of single dimensions and
proposals that contest current understandings and practices played an integral
part in these constructions.
To manage their conficting evaluations and proposals, the participants
used rhetorical devices in their talk about CE. In the interviews, conditional
argumentation in their initial responses to the interview statements served as just
such a resource. In other words, once the interviewee was capable of constructing
more than one view of the same object of evaluation, the argumentation
became conditional and reserved. The conditional argumentation allowed the
interviewees to adjust their stands later in order to ensure a thorough evaluation
of the statement before reaching a more defnite stand or a more comprehensive
view towards the issue. In the meeting interaction, the potential problems
Summary of the original studies 39
that might arise from presenting proposals that confict with current working
methods were expressed in careful formulations, such as conditional verb forms
and softeners. The careful talk was further intertwined with more adamant
expressions that utilized extreme case formulations (Pomerantz, 1986; Edwards,
2000) and emphases to render the actual proposal explicit and unambiguous.
In Study IV, the managing director’s interview talk contained no explicit
references to CE. For example, he did not describe his frm’s renewal process or
any elements in that process as entrepreneurial. The link between the managing
director’s narrative and the CE strategy model of Ireland, Covin, and Kuratko
(2009) therefore stems only from the analysis. However, the managing director
did contemplate the strategy renewal process in relation to competitors (as in
describing the acquisition of new clients) and emphasized that the frm should
take a forward-looking perspective of its future actions. So, one important
function of the strategy renewal process for the managing director seemed to
be to deal with competition by proactive and aggressive actions. This observation
is in line with the concept of EO in which proactiveness serves as a way to undo
competition (see Section 2.2). Even though the managing director did not directly
refer to CE in his talk, he did describe the actions of his frm in terms that can
be interpreted to correspond to the theoretical formulations of CE. It is therefore
reasonable to assume that organizational actors need not necessarily utilize
explicit theoretically-motivated vocabulary about CE or be able to identify and
label their behaviour in entrepreneurial terms in order to behave according to
ideals that the theoretical literature describes as entrepreneurial.
In summary, the organizational actors of this study had many argumentative
resources at their disposal to talk about and discuss corporate entrepreneurship,
defend their personal stands about it, and accept or contest those of other actors.
The next section will summarize these diverse interpretations about corporate
entrepreneurship.
5.2 The multifaceted interpretations of corporate
entrepreneurship
The original Studies I-II demonstrated the variation in how CE was understood,
evaluated, and applied in the organizational context of this study. Even though
the theoretical literature depicts CE in particular ways (see Section 2), the
research participants regarded it as something more. Along with accepting views,
the participants also constructed more problematic and nuanced views of CE.
Study I, ‘Constructing entrepreneurial orientation in a selling context’,
evaluated the idea of an autonomous entrepreneur in selling as both a positive
and a negative phenomenon. Autonomy was evaluated positively when it
40 Summary of the original studies
was connected to another EO dimension (proactiveness), but negatively
when linked to another one (competitive aggressiveness). Consequently, the
positive version was labeled proactive selling, and the negative one, internal
competitive aggressiveness. The simultaneous presence of these two opposing
interpretations suggests not only how frms may attain a positive competitive
status in the market, but also how they can jeopardize their position and weaken
their overall results. Therefore, contrary to what the concept of EO suggests, the
relationship of autonomy with other EO dimensions, rather than the amount of
autonomy as such, appeared to be a key question (see Lumpkin et al., 2009).
However, autonomy failed to connect to the other two of the EO dimensions,
namely innovativeness and risk-taking. This would have been possible, in
principle at least, because of the open-ended interview design, as the link with
proactiveness and competitive aggressiveness attests.
The analysis further highlighted the relational aspects of EO. The interviewees
constructed their positive and negative evaluations by way of their external client
relationships and their internal relationships that can, if non-existent or poor,
harm external relationships along with their personal responsibilities towards
the frm itself. Even though the prompt statement presented autonomy as an
individual-level issue, the interviewees also considered the issue of autonomy
in relation to the salesperson’s co-workers, clients, and the entire frm. In the
larger context of EO as a frm-level strategy-making process, it is paramount
that individual actions be constructed as a frm-level issue.
The second study, ‘Proactiveness and competitive aggressiveness in the
selling context’, constructed the practical application of these two dimensions of
EO to address two different groups in the market, namely competitors and clients
(i.e., not only to the competition, as the concept of EO would suggest). The two
constructions linked to competitors were labeled competitive aggressiveness and
competitive proactiveness, and those linked to clients, protective proactiveness
and protective aggressiveness. Clients as an important target group of EO in
the practical context of selling brought to the fore the notion of protectiveness
that was present in the interviewees’ argumentation about both EO dimensions.
Protectiveness can be interpreted to represent a practical means by which
frms can protect and shield what they have already won from the market.
To this end, the argumentation patterns of protective aggressiveness and
proactiveness demonstrated how frms may gain, maintain, and nurture existing
and prospective client relationships in their pursuit of economic success. The
fndings further suggest that the ability to construct practical applications of EO
and to adjust these applications according to each target group and context is
an essential characteristic of frms interested in applying EO for their beneft.
The frm-level strategy-making process of EO may therefore require that each
dimension of EO be translated into concrete, contextually relevant applications
Summary of the original studies 41
that serve everyday frm operations before EO can provide positive business
outcomes to its proponents.
Study II did not treat the dimensions of proactiveness and competitive
aggressiveness as interchangeable, however, as the original concept of EO suggests
(Covin & Slevin, 1991; Covin & Covin, 1990). Even though the both dimensions
address the same target groups (i.e., competitors and clients) and therefore
overlap, they both nevertheless play distinct roles in the practical application of
EO (see Lumpkin & Dess, 2001). The most distinctive function of proactiveness
is the specifc competitive advantage it creates for frms. When a frm is the
frst business to identify and satisfy unmet client needs, the frm possesses the
primary means to outperform its competition and differentiate itself from its
rivals in the market. The distinctiveness of competitive aggressiveness relates,
on one hand, to the frm’s need to eventually resort to reactive moves if the
practical competitive advantage of EO (i.e., competitive proactiveness) has not
been constructed and has therefore failed to keep competitors at bay. On the
other hand, protective aggressiveness may enhance the success of competitive
advantages when translated into explicitly determined, respectful, and trust-
building actions towards clients. Unlike proactive behavior, however, competitive
activities must be controlled within frms. The pursuit of proftability serves as
just such a practical controlling tool against haphazard, ill-directed competitive
activities.
In summary, the empirical excursions introduced in Studies I-II painted a
more multifaceted picture of corporate entrepreneurship than what has to date
been laid out by the dominant functionalist research tradition. The descriptive
analyses brought to the fore local, micro-level understandings of different actors
on different levels of the organization. These actors constructed, interpreted, and
evaluated the ideal and ideas of CE from multiple perspectives and by multiple
argumentative means. Even though the participants did not outright reject the
general relevance of CE to them and their frms, they did attach both positive
and negative meanings to it.
5.3 Corporate entrepreneurship as processes of decision-
making and strategic renewal
Studies III-IV originally described how the research participants applied the ideal
and ideas of corporate entrepreneurship to practical, everyday frm operations.
The studies depicted two specifc implementation processes, namely those of
joint decision-making and strategic renewal. These processes extend beyond
mere theoretical prescriptions of CE and instead explain the actual stages that
the case frms followed when attempting to implement CE for their beneft.
42 Summary of the original studies
The third study, ‘The emergence of entrepreneurship in organizations’,
conceptualized CE as a collaborative, four-stage decision-making process based
on shared understandings of entrepreneurial ideals, contingent on the agreement
and commitment of organizational members who bear the responsibility to
apply entrepreneurial practices in their daily work. In their meeting interaction,
management group members jointly negotiated new entrepreneurial sales
practices, but failed to demonstrate commitment to their future application.
Several reasons may explain why commitment decisions were entirely absent
from the research material. For example, the practices failed to describe the
desired entrepreneurial behavior in detail, but remained abstract instead. The
participants in the meeting also used the practices in their negotiations to steer
the conversation away from delicate issues and to avoid directly addressing
complaints on a personal level. As a result, the argumentative purposes for which
CE-related ideals are used in interaction may pose an obstacle to commitment.
From a structural viewpoint, the process of how the management group
members negotiated the new sales practices exemplifes typical decision-making
sequences in interaction (Stevanovic, 2012; 2013). In this process, complaints
problematize past practices and proposals construct experience-based solutions
to reach positive business outcomes. As the detailed analysis demonstrated, the
process requires particular conversational subtlety in order to maintain good
working relationships between organizational actors. To this end, proposals
may be utilized to negotiate experience-based practices to reach desirable future
states because they place all participants on an equal footing to evaluate and
commit to the suggested action (see Stevanovic & Peräkylä, 2012). However,
if proposals are formulated in explicitly accusatory or declarative manners or
unilaterally imposed on other participants, they may fail to meet with agreement
or to evoke commitment. In Study III, this problem seemed to concern the
autonomy dimension, and unlike the proposals about innovativeness and
proactiveness, complaining about sales problems led to recommendations of
personal responsibility that were also met with disagreement and overt rejection.
The fourth and fnal study, ‘Can an old frm learn new tricks?’, described
CE as a strategic renewal process. In his story, the managing director explained
how dire circumstances occurred for his frm, and how he and his management
team set out to cope with them. The beginning of the managing director’s story
not only described the dramatic loss of a client as the reason for change in
an effort to survive, but also motivated forthcoming action to reach this goal.
In the frst stage, the management group analyzed the frm’s history, and
formulated a future vision and a new competitive advantage for the frm. The
second part depicted three activity processes that were utilized to implement
these changes. These processes included redefning employee roles, downsizing
personnel, and acquiring a new client. The third stage evaluated the success
Summary of the original studies 43
of the implementation processes in terms of an improved frm image and a
growing number of new clients. The managing director further anticipated two
alternative continuations for his story, which were either stable or regressive. In
the stable version, his frm manages to survive, whereas in the regressive one,
his frm merely struggles in the market.
The results of Study IV underscore the progressive, proactive, and
impermanent nature of CE strategies. The fndings suggest that frms beneft
from being proactive when formulating an entrepreneurial strategic vision for
themselves. Also, the less-distant future requires proactive measures. Instead
of merely reacting to market changes and demands, the frm should create
its own business opportunities by offering proactive suggestions that create
value for both the frm and its clients. However, not all clients self-evidently
accept these suggestions, but they can obviously also resist or disapprove of
them. Therefore, frms need clients and other external partners with equally
ambitious business objectives in order to successfully implement their CE
strategies. The impermanent nature of CE strategies can be linked to the idea
of entrepreneurship as a short-lived line of events (Steyaert, 1997). CE strategies
may therefore require constant renewal and maintenance within frms that
wish to maintain their position in demanding markets. This fnding suggests
that the effects of strategic renewal do not necessarily extend beyond a limited
period of time. However, one could rightfully ask whether the departure point
for progressive CE strategies is always a major external shock or whether a new
strategy can be implemented differently by, for instance, not laying off employees
or by retaining a core of existing clients instead of procuring new ones.
In summary, the research participants in Studies III-IV constructed practical
applications of CE in the form of decision-making and strategic renewal processes.
These processes highlight CE as a growth- and results-oriented concept. The
decision-making process aimed to introduce new practices to increase and
improve the case frm’s sales efforts. The process of strategic renewal, for its
part, served to compensate for the case frm’s dire economic circumstances and to
improve its longer-term position in the market. These fndings therefore indicate
that, in everyday organizational life, several micro-level processes of CE which
seek to improve economic indicators and business outcomes may be ongoing.
44 Discussion
6. DISCUSSION
In the present discussion section, the micro social constructions summarized
in Section 5 serve as starting points to further develop the theoretical concept
of corporate entrepreneurship. These constructions underscore the socially
embedded and relational nature of corporate entrepreneurship within
established organizational structures and arrangements. Previous studies of the
socially embedded and relational nature of entrepreneurship have highlighted
entrepreneurs’ ability to understand the social context in which they operate
in order to identify relevant business opportunities and acquire resources to
accomplish them (see, e.g., Jack & Anderson, 2002). The present study introduces
these ideas to corporate entrepreneurship, from which they have thus far
remained largely absent. In what follows, I briefy review what the functionalist
research paradigm has thus far explicated about the theoretical premises of CE.
Each subsection thereafter examines these premises from the perspective of the
present fndings drawn from the individual organizational actors’ argumentation
about CE. The aim is to shed new light on the current theoretical understandings
of corporate entrepreneurship that tend to illustrate CE from a unilateral and
taken-for-granted perspective by omitting the importance of the social context
to the practical accomplishment of CE.
6.1 The socially embedded nature of corporate
entrepreneurship
The functionalist paradigm typically regards entrepreneurship in the corporate
setting as a socially isolated economic phenomenon (see Jack & Anderson, 2002;
Gartner, 1985). Theoretical and empirical conceptualizations have focused
on defning prescriptive models of CE that promise economic success (e.g.,
Ireland et al., 2003; Ireland et al., 2009), establishing a link between CE and
fnancial performance (e.g., Kreiser et al., 2013; Wiklund & Shepherd, 2005;
Lumpkin & Dess, 2001; Zahra & Covin, 1995), and specifying environmental
and organizational moderators that enhance this link (e.g., Hamilton, 2012; De
Clercq et al., 2010; Covin et al., 2006; Lumpkin & Dess, 2001).
In contrast, the fndings of this study highlight corporate entrepreneurship
as anchored and sustained in the social context of everyday organizational
interaction and activities (see Anderson & Starnawska, 2008; Jack & Andersson,
2002; Gartner, 1985). This section answers to research questions 4–5 (see
Section 3) by explicating how corporate entrepreneurship is accomplished
Discussion 45
through talk, what kind of institutional problems may arise from individual
CE-related behavior, and how these problems might be solved.
6.1.1 THE INTERACTIONAL ACHIEVEMENT OF CORPORATE
ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Functionalist studies of corporate entrepreneurship typically view
entrepreneurship in the organizational context as a phenomenon that cannot
be defned as a clearly observable entity within frms, but something that is
instead inferred from survey measures that seek indications of entrepreneurial
behavioral patterns (Covin & Lumpkin, 2011). The paradigm also takes a
retrospective look at CE (cf. Zahra & Covin, 1995) and regards entrepreneurial
activities and their outcomes as already accomplished facts by utilizing, for
instance, archival data and assessments of past activities when measuring the
hypothetical entrepreneurial behavior of frms (Covin & Slevin, 1989; Rauch et
al., 2009). Therefore, CE research has thus far focused on the measurement of
past entrepreneurial behavior (see Wiklund, 1999) and has largely omitted the
present situation as well as the potential future intentions of frms.
In contrast, the present study suggests that corporate entrepreneurship
is not only an abstract characteristic of frms, but also a concrete, observable
phenomenon in organizations. The study highlights CE as a socially embedded
phenomenon that is created, maintained, and negotiated in ongoing everyday
organizational interaction. CE represents a long-term interaction-based process
in which past, present, and future activities are closely intertwined in the current
interaction. CE therefore cannot exist as a one-off occurrence, but rather as a
dynamic activity that must continuously reoccur and be renewed and maintained
in the everyday interaction of frms to produce positive business outcomes in
the more or less near future (cf. Boden, 1994; Lechner & Gudmundsson, 2014;
Ireland et al., 2009; Dess et al., 2003; Zahra & Covin, 1995). So, instead of
considering entrepreneurial behavior something that takes place only when frms
actualize their entrepreneurial projects (see Wiklund & Shepherd, 2011), CE can
also take place when individuals talk about the normative ideals, preconditions,
and obstacles of CE and how they should apply CE to the advantage of their
frm on the practical level of frm operations.
In this study, the research participants interpreted CE in interaction in
a variety of ways and constructed practical applications of it in their talk for
subsequent use in their selling and strategy renewal tasks. On a more general
level, individual organizational actors may contribute to their frms’ practical
entrepreneurial efforts by constructing contextually sensitive and target-specifc
applications of CE in interaction and establishing the intra- and inter-frm
46 Discussion
relationships that are required to enact and sustain long-term economic behavior
within their organization.
In summary, because CE can also be performed and implemented through talk,
organizational interaction is a highly relevant context to the general enactment
and accomplishment of corporate entrepreneurship. For instance, even though
the offcial strategic talk in organizations may emphasize the importance of CE,
it does not necessarily guarantee the presence of CE in everyday activities. This
may result, for example, from organizational actors interpreting and evaluating
top management’s entrepreneurial visions (see Ireland et al., 2009) differently
and constructing their own applications of CE that may contradict the visionary
ideas of top management. In this respect, CE is similar to all other types of
organizational behavior in that it requires continuous collective maintenance
and the active participation of organizational actors in interaction situations.
This observation may be particularly relevant for frms that offcially espouse CE
or tentatively explore its possibilities in an attempt to create ways of applying
it for their own purposes.
6.1.2 INSTITUTIONAL ASPECTS OF CORPORATE ENTREPRENEURSHIP
The different ways in which the research participants oriented themselves to
the dimensions of autonomy, proactiveness, and competitive aggressiveness
illustratively capture the institutional aspects of CE. These aspects create a
relationship between individual actors and the entire organization (see Vesala,
2013; Lumpkin & Dess, 1996), and demonstrate the internal challenges of
entrepreneurial behavior within existing structural arrangements (Garud et
al., 2007).
According to the present study, the autonomy dimension of CE seems to
occupy a double-edged position in CE, as it appeared to be overly dilemmatic
for the research participants to become easily oriented to it as a self-evident
entrepreneurial ideal. This was apparent in Study III, when proposals based
on the idea of autonomy were met with disagreement and resistance, and in
Study I, when the research participants evaluated the idea of an autonomous
entrepreneur in two contradictory ways, both as an active relationship promoter
and a self-serving lone wolf. These evaluations represented such distinct opinions
that they could even be linked to two separate EO dimensions (proactiveness
and competitive activeness). Therefore, the corporate setting of this study also
challenged and criticized the autonomy that typically occupies the position of a
celebrated hallmark of entrepreneurship.
The EO literature suggests that organizational actors are free to pursue
their own interests and may, for instance, bend organizational rules and other
Discussion 47
structural restraints to further their ideas (see, e.g., Shane, 1994). However, the
research participants of this study did not in general take up such possibilities;
rather, they positioned themselves as agents of the entire organization for
which they worked. They accepted this position as self-evident by presenting
themselves as protecting and pursuing the collective interests of their frm. The
pursuit of collective interests may be interpreted to represent one way by which
organizational actors respect the structural arrangements of their organizations,
instead of bending these constraints to their own advantage. To this end, the
research partcipants organized their own actions to serve both personal and
overall organizational goals and criticized colleagues for selfshly serving only
their own personal interests. According to this type of argumentation, individual
organizational actors serve their own interests by meeting their personal goals
and, by meeting their personal goals, thus serve the interests of the frm. This
observation indicates that individual targets should be met within the process of
attending to collective goals while, for instance, taking care of client relationships
in the selling context.
In terms of institutional entrepreneurship, links between the autonomy
dimension and the dimensions of proactiveness and competitive aggressiveness
also construct a relationship between individual actions and the frm-level
construct of corporate entrepreneurship. In Study I, these constructions were
labeled proactive selling and internal competitive aggressiveness.
Proactive selling served to reduce uncertainty and opportunistic behavior
among organizational actors (see Garud et al., 2007). Selling arranged according
to the ideal of proactiveness did not restrict the entrepreneurial actions of an
individual, but instead encouraged individual organizational actors to collaborate
and share knowledge in order to achieve even better results with the help of
the expertise of their colleagues. The potential of each individual organizational
member is therefore best realized and put into the service of the entire frm
through proactive collaboration. In the selling context, proactiveness displaced
autonomous and short-term sales-maximizing activities in favor of external
client relationships, and used internal working relationships to anticipate sales
opportunities within client relationships to reach personal and frm-level goals.
In contrast, the construct of internal competitive aggressiveness is an
example of how individual actors can violate institutional norms and structural
arrangements to the detriment of not only the individual actors themselves, but
also the entire frm. If organizational actors refuse to share their knowledge
and experience with each other, they may jeopardize the attainment of their
goals, because opportunities may go unnoticed or underexplored. Internal
competition between individual organizational members can therefore wipe out
any competitive advantage that frms acquire by applying CE in their practical
everyday operations. As a result, both the individual and the frm fail to fully
48 Discussion
meet their longer-term objectives. Unsurprisingly, the research participants of
this study considered this type of behavior both illegitimate and inappropriate
in the organizational context.
The phenomenon of internal competition has also been identifed in other
research settings that have studied how entrepreneurship fts into existing
institutional arrangements. For instance, Finnish comprehensive school teachers
deemed entrepreneurship inappropriate in the school context when they
interpreted entrepreneurship as selfsh competition (Korhonen et al., 2012). Even
though teachers widely valued entrepreneurial behavior as a description of the
behavior of a diligent pupil, they stated that over-emphasizing competition over
good grades and other rewards widens the gap between talented and less talented
pupils, discourages less successful pupils, and disrupts benefcial collaboration
between pupils. From this perspective, entrepreneurship was viewed as a threat
to traditional school values and principles, such as collaboration, solidarity,
equality, security, and communal care.
In short, entrepreneurship in the corporate setting produces positive business
outcomes not in isolation, but instead in the everyday practical activities between
individual organizational actors. The position of individuals as autonomous
practitioners of CE within existing structural arrangements can be supported
and promoted by proactiveness, which invites one to collaborate. However,
their position can be undermined if top management allows or even encourages
internal competitive aggressiveness. From the perspective of institutional
entrepreneurship, the present fndings raise an intriguing question about the
conceptual nature of autonomy in the concept of EO, in particular its relationship
to innovativeness considered to be the core of CE. For instance, does any form of
autonomy contribute to the level of EO even if unconnected to innovativeness or
the processes of generating innovations? Or is it specifcally the innovativeness-
enhancing type of autonomy that should be considered relevant in the case of
EO? Consequently, the theoretical and empirical formulations of CE should focus
more attention on the institutional aspects of CE by exploring how autonomy
links to the other EO dimensions and supports innovative activities.
6.2 The relational nature of corporate entrepreneurship
The present section answers to the research question 6 (see Section 3) by
underscoring CE as a subtle relational and communicative phenomenon
manifested in everyday organizational interactions. The analyses illustrated that
a frm’s internal and external relationships are interdependent on each other
in successfully leveraging CE into new economic activity. The study therefore
highlights the importance of relationships not only among colleagues within
Discussion 49
frms (see also De Clercq et al., 2013), but also between organizational actors
and actors in the market (see Vesala, 2005; 1996 on the meaning and social
nature of entrepreneurs’ relationships with the market). The internal relations
link to collective negotiations about decisions, plans, and practical applications
related to CE, whereas external relations highlight the importance of clients in
effectively actualizing these plans.
6.2.1 JOINTLY NEGOTIATING ENTREPRENEURIAL DECISIONS AND
PRACTICES
The theoretical and empirical literature on entrepreneurial decision-making
aims to determine, which criteria are emphasized when making decisions about
entrepreneurial projects and how individuals weight these criteria differently
(Shepherd, 2011). Studies can address criteria such as intrinsic and extrinsic
motivation, entrepreneurial experience, gain and loss situations, and high and
low time pressure. This dissertation conceptualizes entrepreneurial decision-
making from quite another perspective. Instead of underscoring optimal criteria
and situation variables to reach the best possible decisions on entrepreneurial
projects, Studies III and IV embed entrepreneurial decision-making in internal
organizational interaction and collective efforts in order to effect change in
organizations.
More specifcally, in the light of Studies III and IV, entrepreneurial decision-
making emerges in meeting interaction between organizational actors. In the
present studies, the question was not about straightforwardly or unproblematically
defning the meaning of entrepreneurship for the case frms, but instead about
subtle collective negotiations that extended over a longer sequence of meetings
(cf. Pyysiäinen, 2011). The management group members of Study III were
involved in negotiation sequences in which the meaning and purpose of CE for
the frm entailed making collective decisions about new entrepreneurial practices
in selling. In addition, the management group members of Study IV negotiated
in their meetings the strategy renewal process to improve the frm’s longer-term
position in the market. As the managing director explained, top management
collectively took part in analyzing the present situation of the frm, defning what
ought to be done to improve the situation and executing the required change.
The management group members in Study III failed to commit to the proposed
new practices, whereas the retrospective narrative account in Study IV described
jointly agreed-upon strategy renewal actions that management group members
decided on and put into practice together.
The tactful task of negotiation underscores the relational nature of CE as
a joint decision-making process between relevant organizational actors and
50 Discussion
the need to maintain productive internal working relationships during the
process. Participants in negotiations about CE must manage two specifc
issues about their relationships. First, as Study III indicates, they must attend
to their mutual relationships in the interaction situation itself by, for instance,
carefully formulating and re-formulating their proposals. Second, this type of
conversational subtlety can also be seen as constructing common ground for
future collective negotiations of CE and how these joint negotiations can be
managed in upcoming events. In fact, inviting organizational actors to participate
in discussions which defne the details of desired entrepreneurial behavior may
be a useful vehicle for CE to actually take effect. For example, the dilemmatic
dimensions of CE, such as autonomy (see Section 6.1.2), may need to be discussed
together before any joint decisions can be reached.
Proposals may be particularly relevant to participation because they, frst,
initiate processes that lead to collectively-made decisions and, second, place
all participants on equal footing to evaluate and commit to the suggested
entrepreneurial action (Stevanovic, 2012; Stevanovic & Peräkylä, 2012).
Proposals also typically promote something that benefts all participants,
not just the person who put the proposal forward (Stevanovic, 2013). In the
present study, the proposed actions were constructed to beneft both individual
organizational actors and the entire frm. In the corporate setting, proposals
and their subsequent versions about entrepreneurial behavior may include
suggestions about the exact content and targets of entrepreneurial behavior,
the resources for and costs of this behavior (such as mutual collaboration and
proftability), and those individual organizational actors who should eventually
act according to the proposed entrepreneurial behavior. In this type of discussion,
some participants may assume the position of defning the desired behavior
while others co-participate by agreeing, rejecting, assessing, contesting, and
reformulating this behavior, and actively steering the proposal towards a
decision. Most essentially, permitting and encouraging competing perspectives
and subsequent versions of current and future states as well as proposals to
emerge may help organizations fnd wider acceptance and support for CE.
In short, instead of continuing to overemphasize the explication of decision-
making criteria and individual differences in the weighing of these criteria, this
study suggests that scholars should better understand the relational nature of
the entrepreneurial decision-making process and how it plays out in internal
interaction within organizations.
6.2.2 TARGETING CLIENTS WITH ENTREPRENEURIAL BEHAVIOR
Theoretically, the concept of EO defnes the entrepreneurial behavior of frms
in relation to the market. This is evident in the M/C&S measure (1983/1989,
Discussion 51
Appendix B), which treats the notion of market in three senses. First, the market
is seen as the target of a frm’s innovative efforts (i.e., an arena into which the
frm’s new products or services are launched). Second, the nature of the market
is treated as an environmental force that impacts the risk-level of decisions
frms make to reach their objectives. Third, the market is conceptualized as
a collection of competitors that an entrepreneurial frm should be ahead of
and beat. The measure explicates specifc competitive moves that represent
the actions of entrepreneurial frms towards their competition. However, if the
market is viewed in its entirety as a place where buying and selling transactions
traditionally occur, the M/C&S measure fails to take into account the buying
activities in the market or the perspective of the client.
One the other hand, even though the EO measure does not take into
consideration the buying activities in the market, the role of clients has been
present in EO research most often in settings that address EO and its interaction
with market orientation (MO) (Wales et al., 2013a). Some researchers claim
that MO helps frms to create outstanding value for their clients by generating
information about current and future client needs and by producing new
products and services to meet these needs (Jaworski & Kohli, 1993; Kohli &
Jaworski, 1990; Narver & Slater, 1990). MO is believed to enhance the positive
business outcomes of EO which might, without explicit information of clients,
prove to be insuffcient for superior fnancial performance (Wales et al., 2013a;
see also Atuahene-Gima & Ko, 2001). Previous research has also laid out the
importance of relational support, such as the reputation of client organizations
and the quality of communicating with them, to entrepreneurs’ willingness to
invest in cultivating long-term relationships with existing or prospective client
organizations (e.g., De Clercq & Rangarajan, 2008; De Clercq & Sapienza, 2006;
Yli-Renko et al., 2001).
The importance of clients to the success of CE was also evident in Studies II
and IV. Study II illustrated, frst of all, that the practical micro-level behaviors
that frms engage in as part of their EO should be adjusted according to the
targets of this behavior (i.e., both clients and competitors). These context-specifc
practical applications translate EO into concrete practices that frms can utilize
in their pursuit of new economic activity. Further, the pursuit of clients should
be conducted on the basis of assumed future proftability. Proftability, one of
the most widely-used effciency indicators of EO (Wales et al., 2013a), served as
a strong argument against haphazard, ill-directed competitive activities. Study
IV, for its part, demonstrated that frms need clients with equally ambitious
business objectives in order to successfully execute their CE strategies. Superior
performance as an outcome of CE takes place when client organizations also act
according to the ideals of CE or at least strive for outstanding business results
that the service provider can help the client to achieve.
52 Discussion
The fndings highlight the bilateral and results-oriented aspects of nurturing
long-term client relationships on the basis of CE. First, CE did not appear to be a
unilateral behavioral construct that would self-evidently produce results as long
as the frm were simply to launch new innovative products and services on the
market. Instead, in the business services context of this study, the results required
proactive moves from salespeople towards their business clients. Because clients
can obviously also resist any new ideas presented to them, the salespersons’ role
in understanding and explicating how these ideas eventually meet their clients’
current or future needs seems crucial.
Further, the results indicated that the primary goal of mutually supportive, CE-
based relationships between service provider frms and their client organizations
is to provide positive business performance through the introduction of new
products, services, and ideas. Even though extensive information about client
needs and well-functioning mutual collaboration may indeed enhance the success
of CE, client organizations ultimately expect positive business results that, in
turn, positively enhance the business outcomes of the service provider as well.
Economic indicators, in particular future proftability, regulate the relationships
when deciding, for example, which clients to keep and which ones to hand over
to competitors. These observations bring us back to the original idea of CE as
an results-oriented behavioral concept. The optimal business results of CE are
therefore obtained when both parties strive for business excellence.
In short, one could rightfully ask whether the role of clients as relevant actors
in the market should in fact be explicitly taken into account in, for instance,
EO measures. These measures already explicate what kind of behavior the
entrepreneurial frm is typically seen as taking towards its competitors but the
direct role of clients or other external relations has thus far been neglected.
6.3 Legitimizing and institutionalizing corporate
entrepreneurship
According to Burr’s (2003) macro and micro social constructionist views, when
a certain version of reality becomes a legitimate way of viewing and making
sense of the world, it encourages and sustains particular types of behavior and
excludes other types of actions. Corporate entrepreneurship can be viewed as one
version of organizational reality that, from the organization’s perspective, should
gain the status of a legitimate discourse that guides the behavior of individual
organizational actors and produces desired business results. Individual actors
should view CE as an internalized ideal according to which they organize, adjust,
and carry out their daily intra- and inter-frm activities. The normative standards
of frm-level CE therefore control and structure individual behavior for the beneft
of the entire frm (see Burr, 2003). The autonomy dimension in the concept of
Discussion 53
EO appears to entail just such controlling and structuring aspects (see Lumpkin
et al., 2009 in Appendix B). It lays out general explicit guiding principles, frst,
for individual organizational actors, detailing how they should promote CE in
their daily work, and, second, for top management, describing what type of
autonomous behavior they should encourage and retain in their organization.
For instance, instead of non-entrepreneurial, conservative actions, individual
organizational actors should take the initiative to instigate change and growth
in the organization.
On the other hand, individuals might not be aware of the control effects of the
CE discourse to which they are submitted, but instead willingly accept it (Burr,
2003). According to this view, discourse constructs individual organizational
actors as agents that serve the frm, yet may believe to act on their own behalf
(Vesala, 2013). Nevertheless, however controlling the prevailing discourse may
appear, individual actors still have the agency to defend, legitimize, and justify
their own actions and opinions against it, and to deliberate which principals to
serve or resist (Vesala, 2013). Therefore, individual organizational actors can
also take up the position to modify the prevailing CE discourse to their own
advantage and resist those versions that other organizational actors, such as
top management, have formulated.
In this study, the research participants displayed their agency by adopting
the perspective of individual organizational actors in the CE discourse. They
both accepted and contested the theoretically motivated entrepreneurial ideals
presented to them, evaluated individual EO-related actions from the perspective
of the overall business interests of the frm, and legitimized their interpretations
by adopting the perspective of the entire frm. The research participants also
constructed their versions of CE for different functions. These functions included
negotiating personal entrepreneurial orientations (Studies I and II, in which
research participants argued for and against the dimensions of EO in very
specifc ways), utilizing the CE discourse for argumentative purposes (Study
III, in which participants steered the conversation away from delicate issues and
avoided addressing complaints by applying the CE discourse), and constructing
entrepreneurial processes in order to solve specifc problems, such as declining
sales or strategy renewal and execution (Studies III and IV).
In response to research question 7 (see Section 3), CE represented a legitimate
discourse that the research participants of this study could effortlessly use and
orient themselves to. From the perspective of joint decision-making, the
participants seemed to have easy access to the general notion of CE, so there was
no need to build common ground for the overall acceptance of entrepreneurial
ideals. The autonomy dimension of CE, however, was an exception. Despite the
general controlling elements included in the autonomy measure (see Appendix
B), the legitimacy of the CE discourse seems to hinge on how the autonomy
dimension is treated in organizations on the practical level of frm operations.
54 Discussion
To fully tap into the entrepreneurial potential of individual organizational actors,
frms should link autonomy to the proactiveness dimension that underscores
collaborative efforts and avoid any manifestations of internal competitive
aggressiveness that result in nonfunctional internal relationships and undermine
collective efforts to reach organizational objectives.
In order to institutionalize CE, the construction of practical everyday details
of CE may require and be founded on a continuous line of collective decisions in
which organizational actors negotiate concrete details of CE and try to convince
themselves of their utility. However, the ideal decision-making process may not
always actualize from proposals, access, and agreement to a fnal commitment
(Stevanovic, 2013). This may occur at junctures between the different stages
of the process when other participants, for instance, do not take up proposals
presented to them or when they implicitly or explicitly steer the conversation to
a non-decision (see Stevanovic, 2012), as in, for instance, collectively deciding
not to pursue entrepreneurial practices in the frst place. As this study indicated,
organizational actors may possess easy access to shared understandings of the
ideals of CE, and even relatively effortlessly acknowledge and agree on the content
and benefts of CE. The joint decision-making process can, however, be blocked
at the fnal commitment stage. These observations can be especially important
in complex organizational phenomena such as CE. They may also represent
one reason why CE is considered a long-term orientation that may take longer
periods of time to take full economic effect (see, e.g., Ireland et al., 2009).
In short, CE is implemented by individual organizational actors who may
view the entrepreneurial ideals proposed to them quite differently and therefore
construct differing versions of them to better suit their own responsibilities,
interests, and work tasks. Consequently, how these individual actors interpret
and evaluate the entrepreneurial vision of top management is relevant. The
theoretical literature depicts CE as the dominant discourse in which all frms
must participate in order to grow and survive (see, e.g., Kuratko, 2009). The
adoption of such a discourse, however, even when considered legitimate, is
not a straightforward or uncontested process among individual organizational
actors. As this study demonstrated, the institutionalization of CE seems to require
the more active participation of individual organizational actors than what the
research practices informed by the concept of CE thus far suggest.
6.4 Limitations of the study
Epistemologically, the fndings of this dissertation represent a sample of the
variety of local, micro-level understandings that different actors serving different
organizational functions constructed to interpret and evaluate CE in the selling
Discussion 55
context. Because the fndings rely on research material drawn from three case
frms, they obviously cannot offer an exhaustive description of other opinions
or structural processes that managing directors, management group members,
or salespeople in other business service organizations may hold or construct of
CE. Therefore, generalization of the present fndings cannot follow the logic of
statistical generalization. Rather, the fndings from the case frms demonstrate
possibilities which may also be relevant for other business service organizations
with similar interaction-based selling activities. The generalizability of possibilities
is a view that social scientists generally adopt to explain the validity of qualitative
research in social interaction (Peräkylä, 2004).
Because the present study examined CE by focusing on the autonomy,
proactiveness, and competitive aggressiveness dimensions in the selling context,
the fndings obviously do not address entrepreneurship in the organizational
context in its entirety. Even though some conclusions on the level of entire
conceptualizations were reached, clarifying other interpretations and processes
remains a task for future CE studies.
6.5 Suggestions for future research
The present dissertation points out that the conventional functionalist premises
of CE studies may unnecessarily limit the development of the theoretical concept
of CE and the understanding of its practical applications (see also Anderson et al.,
2012; Lindgren & Packendorff, 2009). An important avenue for future research
therefore resides in the application of fne-grained, contextually sensitive, and
interpretivist methods for studies that aim to further explicate the multifaceted,
socially embedded, and relational nature of CE. These studies could focus on
describing how the processes of enacting, legitimizing, and institutionalizing CE
unfold in organizations across hierarchy levels, business units, and functional
areas (see also Wales et al., 2011).
The qualitative attitude approach simulates well the controversial nature of
CE-related issues. The approach is therefore well suited to make analytically
visible the multifaceted variation that immediate commentary on the dimensions
of CE produces. This could be particularly valuable when studying the
institutional aspects of CE and clarifying the contextual relationships between
innovativeness and the other dimensions of EO. Because innovativeness
typically characterizes the core of CE, future studies could explicate what forms
of autonomy, proactiveness, and risk-taking foster or hinder innovativeness
in organizations. Once the analyses have established the differing individual
opinions on these issues, this qualitative variation can thereafter be utilized
to contest traditional, taken-for-granted, and often unilateral theoretical
56 Discussion
understandings of CE. These new insights could, for instance, offer critical
contributions to the future development of EO measures. In fact, Covin and
Wales (2012) claim that the development of EO assessment saw practically no
progress during the past decade.
Narrative approaches in entrepreneurship studies in general have drawn
increasing attention (e.g., Watson, 2009; Down & Warren, 2008; Downing,
2005; Johansson, 2004; Hjorth, 2007; Jack & Anderson, 2002) and could
continue to offer a longitudinal and retrospective perspective of the empirical
process dynamics of CE (Busenitz et al., 2003). To contribute to establishing
a comprehensive model of the entrepreneurial process (see Larty & Hamilton,
2011), narrative methods could focus on exploring the structural processes of
change embedded in narratives of organizational actors on different organizational
levels. Thereafter, these narrative structures could be interpreted in the light of
the theoretical concepts of CE and combined to form a comprehensive narrative
about organizational change in selected case frms. Specifc attention could focus
on understanding the actions of individual organizational actors in relation to
the entire frm and its overall objectives.
Scholars interested in explicating more deeply the socially-embedded
entrepreneurial decision-making process might want to study meeting
interaction and how commitment that was lacking from the research material
of this study emerges during the negotiation process. Obviously, decision-making
related to CE may also entail other aspects besides deciding about entrepreneurial
practices. These aspects can include assessing and deciding on new opportunities,
competitive moves, high-risk projects, and new products or services, as current
EO measures (Appendix B) suggest.
6.6 Practical implications
This dissertation demonstrated that entrepreneurship is a multifaceted, socially
embedded, and relational phenomenon in the organizational context. Firms that
choose to engage in CE or are interested in developing their existing CE strategies
might gain from paying attention to these aspects in their intra- and inter-frm
activities. This could be especially worthwhile in those business service frms
where independent actors, teams, and business units are expected to collaborate
to anticipate and meet client needs.
The frst step for practitioners to implement and manage CE is to understand
what the multiple and potentially controversial viewpoints towards it actually are
within their organizations, and how organizational actors justify these views for
themselves and for the entire frm. Awareness of all types of views may provide
frms with better tools to manage their applications of CE, compared to a situation
Discussion 57
in which, for instance, the downsides of CE fail to emerge. Therefore, allowing
organizational actors to participate in negotiating concrete, everyday practices
based on top management’s vision of CE may prove crucial for new economic
activity and other desired business outcomes to emerge. Participation may make
explicit use of the structural process of joint decision-making that proceeds
from proposals to constructing common access to the CE-related ideal on which
the proposal is grounded and thereafter to negotiations of collective agreement
and commitment. However, frms may wish to bear in mind that negotiation
processes require particular conversational subtlety in order to implement CE
in practical frm operations.
Firms may also beneft from considering carefully what kind of requirements of
proactiveness, collaboration, and knowledge exchange they set for organizational
actors who hold the responsibility to construct practical applications of CE for
implementation in their daily work tasks across teams and business units. As it
is crucial for entrepreneurship in the corporate setting that individual actions be
constructed as a frm-level issue, frms should at least ensure that these actions
do not override ultimate frm-level objectives, but serve as a means towards
reaching collective goals.
Instead of waiting for major external shocks before launching CE strategies,
frms should cultivate CE on an ongoing basis by creating their own business
opportunities and not merely waiting for clients to provide orders to fulfll.
Because the outcomes of CE tend to be impermanent and uncertain, frms
should continuously experiment with proactive suggestions to their existing
and potential clients. However, as previous studies also suggest, poorly accepted
suggestions should be terminated early in order not to sacrifce proftability
(Wiklund & Shepherd, 2011). Firms may also need to enhance their internal
collaborative routines to produce viable suggestions with the minimum
consumption of resources.
A frm’s external environment impacts the success of the frm’s CE strategy,
especially through its clients. Therefore, in order to leverage CE strategies in
practice, frms may need to demonstrate innovativeness in choosing clients with
equally ambitious business targets or outside conventional interest domains. The
key question is to defne which clients best suit the frm’s CE strategy or, on the
other hand, forestall the frm’s growth by clinging to past ways of doing business
or yielding future proftability that falls below minimum levels. Even though
the best results emerge from collaborating with demanding clients, longer-term
success may nevertheless depend on the frm’s overall ability to cater to its clients
58 Discussion
in innovative ways and with matching levels of ambition, irrespective of whether
the client acknowledges the service provider frm’s entrepreneurial efforts.
Finally, client organizations that receive proactive suggestions from their
service provider frms might gain from developing their ability to identify
potential opportunities that these suggestions may entail for them. Because
service providers that act according to the ideals of CE strive to anticipate
future needs and trends, their proactive suggestions may not, at frst glance,
appear valid or interesting. The challenge for client organizations is therefore to
understand whether these suggestions (or certain elements included in them)
may in fact beneft them either immediately or in a longer range. To enhance
their opportunity identifcation, clients may wish to require and actively establish
collaborative knowledge exchange practices with their service providers. Within
these practices, both parties may jointly construct and regularly review a proactive
service proposal portfolio that includes both actualized ideas and proposals that
have been shelved for future development. Clients may also want to explicitly
ensure that their existing service providers have relevant business information
at their disposal in order for the service provider to proactively anticipate their
needs and to create innovative solutions to meet these needs.
6.7 Concluding remarks
This dissertation has not questioned the importance of entrepreneurship in the
organizational context. On the contrary, based on the research participants’
argumentation, it has acknowledged the potential usefulness and relevance of CE
in solving organizational problems and leading frms to new economic activity.
However, this study has contested the unilateral view that the current theoretical
formulations hold of the phenomenon of frm-level entrepreneurship in the
corporate setting. In the pursuit to reach the status of legitimate, hegemonic,
and self-evident discourse, corporate entrepreneurship has neglected to explicate
the position of individual organizational actors as practitioners of CE within the
social context of practical frm operations. This study therefore introduced the
perspective of individual organizational actors to these frm-level concepts and
offered individual actors the opportunity to construct their own versions of CE
in the context of their day-to-day activities.
The present study highlights CE as a socially embedded phenomenon that
does not unproblematically become grafted into practical frm operations
or self-evidently fit into established organizational arrangements. The
study further indicates that CE is a concrete, observable phenomenon in
organizations, not merely an abstract characteristic of frms or a behavioral
concept that produces change and growth in isolation. Instead, CE is a process
Discussion 59
that individual organizational actors collectively bring about and shape in their
everyday organizational interaction. In other words, individual organizational
actors implement CE in their daily work tasks when discussing the ideals of
CE and how they could apply these ideals to achieve their goals. Individual
actors contribute to their frms’ entrepreneurial endeavors by jointly negotiating
contextually sensitive and target-specifc practical applications of CE, and
establish intra- and inter-frm relationships that are necessary to sustain long-
term economic behavior. However, not all negotiations necessarily lead to a
uniform commitment to these applications.
This dissertation further suggests that CE cannot be regarded as a permanent
characteristic of frms, but is instead a process that requires continuous
maintainance. The nature and practices of CE must be updated and renewed
regularly as contexts and target groups in the business environment change.
Organizations can support the position of individual actors in actualizing these
efforts through proactiveness that invites collaboration. However, institutional
problems in implementing CE may emerge if top management permits internal
competitive aggressiveness and the related short-term maximization of profts to
undermine the ability of organizational actors to fully realize their entrepreneurial
potential.
The micro social constructionist and interpretivist research approach of
this study served to present a new, different perspective of CE. In addition
to what the functionalist research paradigm has already established about
the relationship between CE and business performance, this study painted a
context-specifc, relational, and socially embedded picture of CE. Because CE
is also a subtle communicative phenomenon between organizational actors and
those in the market, the long-term maintenance of these relationships may
critically contribute to how successfully frms are eventually able to legitimize
and institutionalize CE for their beneft.
60 References
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Appendixes 71
APPENDIXES
Appendix A: Transcription symbols
Symbol Explanation
[ the point of overlap onset
(.) a micropause
(1.2) silence timed in seconds
?yes rising intonation
?yes falling intonation
ye:s lengthening of the sound
ye- cut off
YES increased volume
°yes° especially soft sounds relative to the surrounding talk
yes emphasis
#yes# different voice quality relative to the surrounding talk
<yes> slower speech
y(h)es laughing voice
£yes£ smiling voice
heh heh laugh
.hh audible intake of breath
( ) dubious hearings
(( )) transcriber’s comments
72 Appendixes
Appendix B: Entrepreneurial orientation measures
EO dimension
EO: Innovativeness, proactiveness, and risk-taking
The M/C&S scale (Miller, 1983; Covin & Slevin, 1989)
Entrepreneurial ?rms Non-entrepreneurial ?rms
Innovativeness In general, the top managers of my ?rm
favor:
• A strong emphasis on R&D,
technological leadership, and
innovations
How many new lines of products or services
has your ?rm marketed in the past 5 years
(or since its establishment)?
• Very many new lines of products or
services
• Changes in product or service lines
have usually been quite dramatic
In general, the top managers of my ?rm
favor:
• A strong emphasis on the marketing
of tried-and-true products or services
How many new lines of products or services
has your ?rm marketed in the past 5 years
(or since its establishment)?
• No new lines of products or services
• Changes in product or service
lines have been mostly of a minor
nature
Proactiveness In dealing with its competitors, my ?rm:
• Typically initiates actions to which
competitors then respond
• Is very often the ?rst business to
introduce new products/services,
administrative techniques, operating
technologies, etc.
• Typically adopts a very competitive,
“undo-the-competitors” posture
In dealing with its competitors, my ?rm:
• Typically responds to action which
competitors initiate
• Is very seldom the ?rst business to
introduce new products/services,
administrative techniques, operating
technologies, etc.
• Typically seeks to avoid competitive
clashes, preferring a “live-and-let-live”
posture
Risk-taking In general, the top managers of my ?rm
have:
• A strong proclivity for high-risk
projects (with chances of very high
returns)
In general, the top managers of my ?rm
believe that:
• Owing to the nature of the
environment, bold, wide-ranging acts
are necessary to achieve the ?rm’s
objectives
When confronted with decision-making
situations involving uncertainty, my ?rm:
• Typically adopts a bold, aggressive
posture in order to maximize the
probability of exploiting potential
opportunities
In general, the top managers of my ?rm
have:
• A strong proclivity for low-risk
projects (with normal and certain
rates of return)
In general, the top managers of my ?rm
believe that:
• Owing to the nature of the
environment, it is best to explore it
gradually via cautious, incremental
behavior
When confronted with decision- making
situations involving uncertainty, my ?rm:
• Typically adopts a cautious, “wait-
and-see” posture in order to minimize
the probability of making costly
decisions
Appendixes 73
EO dimension
EO: Proactiveness and competitive aggressiveness
Lumpkin & Dess, 2001
Entrepreneurial ?rms Non-entrepreneurial ?rms
Proactiveness In dealing with its competitors, my ?rm:
• Typically initiates actions to which
competitors then respond
• Is very often the ?rst business to
introduce new products/services,
administrative techniques, operating
technologies, etc.
In general, the top managers of my ?rm
have:
• A strong tendency to be ahead of
other competitors in introducing novel
ideas or products
In dealing with its competitors, my ?rm:
• Typically responds to action which
competitors initiate
• Is very seldom the ?rst business to
introduce new products/services,
administrative techniques, operating
technologies, etc.
In general, the top managers of my ?rm
have:
• A strong tendency to “follow the
leader” in introducing new products
or ideas
Competitive
aggressiveness
In dealing with its competitors, my ?rm:
• Typically adopts a very competitive,
‘undo-the-competitors’ posture
• My ?rm is very aggressive and
intensely competitive
In dealing with its competitors, my ?rm:
• Typically seeks to avoid competitive
clashes, preferring a “live-and-let-live”
posture
• My ?rm makes no special effort to
take business from the competition
EO dimension
EO: Autonomy
Lumpkin, Cogliser, & Schneider, 2009
Entrepreneurial ?rms Non-entrepreneurial ?rms
Autonomy My ?rm:
• Supports the efforts of individuals
and/or teams that work
autonomously.
In general, the top managers of my ?rm
believe that:
• The best results occur when
individuals and/or teams
decide for themselves what business
opportunities to pursue.
In my ?rm:
• Individuals and/or teams pursuing
business opportunities make decisions
on their own without constantly
referring to their supervisor(s).
• Employee initiatives and input play a
major role in identifying and selecting
the entrepreneurial opportunities my
?rm pursues.
My ?rm:
• Requires individuals or teams to rely
on senior managers to guide their
work.
In general, the top managers of my ?rm
believe that:
• The best results occur when
individuals the CEO and top managers
provide the primary impetus for
pursuing business opportunities.
In my ?rm:
• Individuals and/or teams pursuing
business opportunities are expected
to obtain approval from their
supervisor(s) before making decisions.
• The CEO and top management
team play a major role in identifying
and selecting the entrepreneurial
opportunities my ?rm pursues.
74 Appendixes
Appendix C: Interview statements
Study Interviewees EO dimension Prompt statement in English Prompt statement in Finnish
I Management
group members
Autonomy Each salesperson is an
autonomous entrepreneur.
Jokainen myyjä on
itsenäinen yrittäjä.
II Salespersons
and sales group
directors
Proactiveness We anticipate clients’ needs
before our competitors.
Ennakoimme asiakkaiden
tarpeet ennen kilpailijoi-
tamme.
II Salespersons
and sales group
directors
Competitive
aggressiveness
We compete aggressively in
selling.
Kilpailemme myyntityössä
aggressiivisesti.
Appendix D: Summary of the management group meeting
recordings
Meeting Duration Participants
1 1 h 28 min 5 participants, two of whom left after 30 min
2 2 h 29 min 6 participants, two of whom left after 1 h 23 min
3 4 h 38 min 6 participants
4 2 h 16 min 3 participants
5 1 h 49 min 4 participants
Total 12 h 40 min
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