Abstract:

This proposal responds to the notable absence in the literature by isolating and examining a group of people who abandoned progressive wage-and-salary careers in order to found new ventures. Protean Career Theory will aid in assessing the individual backgrounds and motives of those undertaking the transition to entrepreneurship, while the Boundaryless Career Perspective will guide analysis of the forms of career mobility (e.g., Briscoe and Hall, 2006; Gubler, Arnold, and Coombs, 2014). This study adopts a qualitative, microhistorical research design to examine how individuals with established wage‑and‑salary careers reinterpret their careers as they transition into entrepreneurship.

This research also answers the call to integrate historical methods and theory development (Clark and Rowlinson, 2004; Maclean et al., 2016). The potential of historical methods for organizational theory has been long acknowledged, as has the failure to realize this promise (Rowlinson et al., 2014; Vaara and Lamberg, 2016). The point applies directly to the entrepreneurship literature (Vinnell and Hamilton, 1999). The challenges of using historical analysis relate to fostering theory development (Kipping and Usdiken, 2014), to the place of narratives in research (Rowlinson et al., 2014), and to the incommensurability of various philosophical perspectives (Vaara and Lamberg, 2016). These challenges, however, can be overcome (Maclean et al., 2016).

Please choose your submission type: Developmental Paper

Primary Track: Management and Business History

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Dr. Gerry Kerr