Power and entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship research has benefited from embracing three economic sociology lenses—networks, cognition, and institutions—but has treated power mainly implicitly. This paper pioneers how the concept of power can advance research into entrepreneurship. We illustrate how state actors, legacy firms, and entrepreneurs variously exert coercive, persuasive, and authoritative forms of power over entrepreneurial opportunities or exercise power to pursue them as free actors. We explicitly link context and opportunity-development processes through a power lens and show how power’s interaction-focused and episodic nature that can transcend geographical and institutional boundaries might enrich entrepreneurship research.