Entrepreneurs as Organizational Products Revisited

Macro studies of entrepreneurship emphasize how environmental conditions—social, economic, and political—facilitate the creation of new organizations. Examples include how periods of political turbulence create favorable conditions for the emergence of new organizations (e.g., Delacroix & Carroll, 1983), how market concentration driven by the movement of generalist organizations favors the emergence of specialist organizations (e.g., Carroll, Dobrev, & Swaminathan, 2002), and how dissolutions of organizations influence the emergence of new ones (e.g., Delacroix & Carroll, 1983). Because individuals rather than local conditions actually create organizations, this perspective is often criticized for lacking a theory of agency (e.g., Shane, Locke, & Collins, 2003; Thornton, 1999). However, in recent years, a strand of macro research has emerged that promises to address, at least in part, this problem and offers stronger links to micro research on entrepreneurship. This body of work focuses on organizations as key components of the environment and proposes that organizations are social contexts within which individuals acquire many of the critical psychological and social resources necessary to create new organizations (e.g. Aldrich & Wiedenmayer, 1993; Freeman, 1986; Romanelli, 1989; Sorenson & Audia, 2000). To use Freeman’s (1986) felicitous expression, the key idea underlying this line of work is that entrepreneurs often are organizational products. The origins of this idea can be traced in the organizational literature to Stinchcombe’s (1965) seminal piece on social structure and organizations,