Anthropomorphizing for Entrepreneurial Theorizing

AbstractDespite admonishments that anthropomorphizing represents a serious error in scientific thinking, we show that anthropomorphizing has been a critically important tool for developing influential theories in entrepreneurship. Analyzing the literatures related to an organization’s entrepreneurial orientationand organizational knowledge reveals how scholars build on their rich and highly accessible understanding of humans (i.e., the self and others) to (1) make guesses and sense of entrepreneurial anomalies at the organizational level, (2) articulate theoretical mechanisms to build more robust entrepreneurship theories, and (3) create plausible stories that facilitate sensegiving to editors, reviewers, and other audiences. However, anthropomorphizing does not always lead to such positive outcomes. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of the conditions under which entrepreneurship scholars’ anthropomorphizing will be more or less effective.