In Defense of Common Sense in Entrepreneurship Theory: Beyond Philosophical Extremities and Linguistic Abuses

Abstract

Whether entrepreneurial opportunities are discovered or created is a long-standing dilemma in the study of entrepreneurship. In our recent article (Ramoglou & Tsang, 2016), we framed this dilemma as false. Opportunities are neither discovered nor created. They are objectively existing propensities to be creatively actualized. Central to our analysis has been the ontological rectification of the mode of existence of opportunities. Whereas opportunities are systematically mistreated as actualized entities triggering successful entrepreneurial action when empirically discovered, we clarified that they exist as the non-actualized market conditions making possible the emergence of desirable outcomes. The actualization framework endeavors to bring conceptual clarity and order in a discourse characterized by growing confusion. Alvarez, Barney, McBride and Wuebker (2017), Berglund and Korsgaard (2017), and Foss and Klein (2017) take issue with several parts of our framework. The comments provide us a valuable opportunity to further advance the discourse into the very intellectual foundation of entrepreneurship theory. We refute critiques, caution against the philosophical extremities of empiricist and idealist assumptions, and debunk “opportunity creation” as a philosophically and linguistically problematic approach. We show that the actualization approach embraces common sense and is free from the fatal flaws associated with the discovery and creation approaches.