Narrative entrepreneurship: bringing (his)story back to entrepreneurship

Abstract

Narrative entrepreneurship is the study of the spread and dynamics of popular narratives and stories focusing on the role and impact of entrepreneurs (stories of human interest and emotions), and how these change through time, to understand variation and heterogeneity in entrepreneurial activities across time and space. The term ‘narrative’ refers to a simple story or expressed explanation of events that many people want to bring up in conversation or on the news or social media because it can be used to stimulate the concerns or emotions of others and/or because it appears to advance self-interest. The field of entrepreneurship should be expanded to include serious quantitative study of changing popular narratives (theory development, experiments and econometric regressions). Narrative entrepreneurship is not only a product of reverse causality, from the outcomes to the narrative, but also from the narrative to the outcome (as we know from other fields such as marketing, philanthropy or education). The goal of this paper is to distil what we know, and should know, about narratives and stories to consider reasons to expect that stories and narratives might be thought of as important in the field of entrepreneurship and to stimulate future research to apply the concept of narrative into the field of entrepreneurship for both theory building and empirical analysis.