ABSTRACT

In this chapter, I describe my five-decades-long journey from sociology graduate student to small business researcher to, finally, a scholar of entrepreneurship. I begin with my four years at the University of Michigan, where I learned the craft of sociological research from the masters of the trade, and then cover briefly my early years as an assistant professor at Cornell University. My early work on studies of business succession in the United States and England heavily imprinted my subsequent work on organizational foundings and disbandings, and I describe how I got involved in that research. The 1970s were a critical era for organizational theory, and I review the major influences that shaped my thinking during that time, particularly with regard to the evolutionary perspective and resource dependence theory with which I came to be associated. My awakening as an entrepreneurship scholar occurred quite by accident, and I review the circumstances that catalyzed that identity. Collaboration with graduate students and like-minded colleagues has played a major role in all of my projects, and so I acknowledge some of these contributors as well. Finally, I conclude by offering a few words of advice to junior scholars still considering whether they want to make entrepreneurship research their life’s work.