Making It Happen: Beyond Theories of the Firm to Theories of Firm Design

Current theories of the firm provide no explanation for entrepreneurial success except in terms of firm success. Even when the focus is on the entrepreneur, s/he is entirely cast as a bundle of traits/behaviors or heuristics/biases that serves to explain firm performance. In this article, I suggest putting the entrepreneur center stage, adopting an instrumental view of the firm. Drawing upon the work of Simon in symbolic cognition and Lakoff in semantic cognition, I explore how we can go beyond explanations based on economic forces and evolutionary adaptation to entrepreneurial effectuation; I end with specific research questions pertaining to firm design.

[1]  William J. Baumol,et al.  Entrepreneurship, Management, and the Structure of Payoffs , 1994 .

[2]  S. Sarasvathy.  Causation and Effectuation: Toward a Theoretical Shift from Economic Inevitability to Entrepreneurial Contingency , 2001 .

[3]  Herbert A. Simon,et al.  The Sciences of the Artificial , 1970 .

[4]  Theresa K. Lant,et al.  Information Cuesand Decision Making , 2002 .

[5]  Leonard Talmy,et al.  How Language Structures Space , 1983 .

[6]  J. March.  The Technology of Foolishness , 2020 .

[7]  C. Marlene Fiol,et al.  Capitalizing on Paradox: The Role of Language in Transforming Organizational Identities , 2002, Organ. Sci..

[8]  K. Weick.  The social psychology of organizing , 1969 .

[9]  R. Baron.  Cognitive mechanisms in entrepreneurship: Why and when enterpreneurs think differently than other people , 1998 .

[10]  James G. March,et al.  A primer on decision making : how decisions happen , 1994 .

[11]  Carolyn Y. Woo,et al.  Survival of the Fittest? Entrepreneurial Human Capital and the Persistence of Underperforming Firms , 1997 .

[12]  S. Sarasvathy.  Entrepreneurship as a science of the artificial , 2003, Effectuation.

[13]  Jessica C. Flack,et al.  Monkey Business and Business Ethics: Evolution Origins of Human Morality , 2004 .

[14]  P. Todd,et al.  Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart , 1999 .

[15]  Lowell W. Busenitz,et al.  Differences between entrepreneurs and managers in large organizations: Biases and heuristics in strategic decision-making , 1997 .

[16]  R. Langacker.  Foundations of cognitive grammar , 1983 .

[17]  Herbert A. Simon,et al.  Altruism and Economics , 1992 .

[18]  D. Teece,et al.  Fundamental Issues in Strategy: A Research Agenda , 1994 .

[19]  Rita Gunther McGrath.  Falling Forward: Real Options Reasoning and Entrepreneurial Failure , 1999 .

[20]  Jonathon E. Mote.  The Architecture of Markets: An Economic Sociology of Twenty-First Century Capitalist Societies , 2003 .

[21]  F. Knight.  The economic nature of the firm: From Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit , 2009 .

[22]  Saras D. Sarasvathy,et al.  EFFECTUAL REASONING IN ENTREPRENEURIAL DECISION MAKING: EXISTENCE AND BOUNDS. , 2001 .

[23]  Celia V. Harquail,et al.  Organizational images and member identification. , 1994 .

[24]  M. Douglas,et al.  The World of Goods , 2021 .

[25]  M. Lounsbury.  Cultural Entrepreneurship: Stories, Legitimacy and the Acquisition of Resources , 2001 .

[26]  M. Glynn.  Innovative Genius: A Framework for Relating Individual and Organizational Intelligences to Innovation , 1996 .

[27]  H. Simon,et al.  Rational Decision Making in Business Organizations , 1978 .

[28]  S. Sarasvathy,et al.  FAILING FIRMS AND SUCCESSFUL ENTREPRENEURS: SERIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP AS A SIMPLE MACHINE , 2002 .

[29]  Ronald W. Langacker,et al.  Space Grammar, Analysability, and the English Passive. , 1982 .

[30]  G. Lakoff,et al.  Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind , 1988 .

[31]  M. Moschandreas,et al.  The Role of Opportunism in Transaction Cost Economics , 1997 .

[32]  G. Lakoff.  Embodied Minds and Meanings , 1996 .

[33]  Neil Fligstein.  The Architecture of Markets: An Economic Sociology of Twenty-First-Century Capitalist Societies , 2001 .