Entrepreneurship and small business research in French-speaking countries: an introduction

Citation

Fayolle, A. (2011), "Entrepreneurship and small business research in French-speaking countries: an introduction", Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development, Vol. 18 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/jsbed.2011.27118baa.001

Entrepreneurship and small business research in French-speaking countries: an introduction

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development, Volume 18, Issue 2

In this introductory article, we will first highlight some of the characteristics and specificities of entrepreneurship and small business research in French-speaking countries, before presenting the contributions that make up this special issue.

Francophone research on small business and entrepreneurship

Providing a comprehensive (qualitative and quantitative) overview of Francophone research on small business and entrepreneurship is a difficult task due to a lack of reliable data. Therefore, our purpose here is, more modestly, to give international scholars a general overview of the main trends and underpinnings of small business and entrepreneurship research in French-speaking countries.

In his foreword to a recent book, William Gartner noted that there was a long-standing tradition of intellectual and academic interest in entrepreneurship in France (Fayolle, 2007). He added that the word “entrepreneur” originated in France, where it was first used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to refer to high-risk business initiatives and activities. Yet, in spite of its history, entrepreneurship as an economic and social phenomenon does not seem to be, at least from an international view point, a popular topic among French-speaking scholars. Nevertheless, according to William Gartner, French researchers’ contributions are far from negligible:

French scholars have been involved in a deep and wide-ranging discussion of this topic [entrepreneurship], and this conversation brings to the forefront important new perspectives on the nature of entrepreneurship (Gartner’s foreword in Fayolle, 2007, p. xii).

However, he acknowledges the language barrier, by adding:

The inability to read French has become for many of the “only English” readers, then, a barrier to grasping a more nuanced view of entrepreneurship (Gartner’s foreword, in Fayolle, 2007, p. xii).

In what follows, we outline the broad characteristics of Francophone research on small business and entrepreneurship, then we turn our attention to doctoral research, before concluding this overview with research outcomes such as conference papers and journal articles.

A general overview

We consider small business and entrepreneurship as two distinct but interconnected academic fields. Each one has its own association and journal: the Association Internationale de Recherche sur les PME (AIREPME – International Association for Small Business Research) and the Revue Internationale PME (RIPME – International Journal of Small Business), and the Académie de l’Entrepreneuriat (Academy of Entrepreneurship) and the Revue de l’Entrepreneuriat (Entrepreneurship Journal), respectively. Each association holds a conference every two years. Interconnectedness between the fields stems from researchers knowing one another and meeting regularly, and also from the fact that some participate in both conferences and/or publish in both journals. However, the Académie de l’Entrepreneuriat is the only institution recognised by the Fondation Nationale pour l’Enseignement de la Gestion des Entreprises (FNEGE – National Foundation for the Teaching of Enterprise Management) and qualified to deliver, under supervision of the foundation, the annual award for the best PhD in entrepreneurship.

In the French-speaking world, entrepreneurship, and SMEs to a lesser extent, are still young and relatively immature fields of research: the AIREPME was created in 1996 and the Académie de l’Entrepreneuriat in 1998. Both research communities remain small and involve around 100-150 researchers.

Doctoral research in entrepreneurship

According to Torres (2007) and Messeghem and Verstraete (2009), 23 PhDs in the entrepreneurship domain were completed in France between 1985 and 1999. Since the beginning of the third millennium, however, entrepreneurship research has witnessed a surge in popularity, and this figure doubled over the nine-year period between 2000 and 2008: 54 PhDs were completed in the field of entrepreneurship. From 1986 to 2000, 227 PhDs in small business research were completed, compared to 66 between 2001 and 2005 (Torres, 2007). Since the beginning of the 1980s, around ten doctorates have been completed each year in the field of SMEs, except for the period from 1996 to 2000 during which there were twice as many. Although doctoral interest in small business seems relatively stable over the years, growing interest in the field of entrepreneurship over the last decade has re-established the balance of power between both fields.

From a content point of view, small business and entrepreneurship doctoral research concentrates on qualitative and exploratory studies, with a great variety of objects and methods used (Torres, 2007; Lasch and Yami, 2008; Messeghem and Verstraete, 2009).

Scientific outcomes

Scientific outcomes may be assessed through the various contributions published in the conference proceedings of the Académie de l’Entrepreneuriat and the AIREPME, as well as in the specialised journals, the Revue de l’Entrepreneuriat and the RIPME. In their inventory work, Lasch and Yami (2008) give the following figures: in the period between 1996 and 2005, 70 research papers on entrepreneurship and 242 on small business were presented at the AIREPME conferences. During the same period, 136 research papers were presented at the conferences organised by the Académie de l’Entrepreneuriat. Concerning published articles in specialised journals, for the same period (1996-2005), 17 papers were published by the Revue de l’Entrepreneuriat (launched in 2001), and 153 appeared in the RIPME (30 of which were concerned with entrepreneurship and 123 with SMEs). Since 2006, 27 articles have been published by the Revue de l’Entrepreneuriat. As is the case for PhDs, the increasing output in the field of entrepreneurship is noticeable. It should be noted that the data presented here do not include communications on small business and entrepreneurship made by researchers at French-speaking conferences organised by other research associations in neighbouring disciplines such as strategy, marketing, finance or human resources. Similarly, publications by small business and entrepreneurship researchers in other journals such as the Revue Française de Gestion, M@n@gement, Management International, Finance, Contrôle et Stratégie or Gestion 2000 were not taken into account. Nor have we included the special issues edited by small business and entrepreneurship researchers in several of these academic journals (Gestion 2000, Revue Française de Gestion, Management International, Management & Avenir).

Lasch and Yami (2008) mention the limited visibility of French researchers at the international level: around ten articles were published in the “big five” (JBV, ET&P, JSBM, E&RD, SBE) between 1995 and 2005. The last few years have seen a positive evolution, with a more significant number of articles accepted in top-ranking journals and with the publication of special issues edited by French researchers in other leading international journals, such as the International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation and the Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development.

Presentation of the special issue

The objective of this special issue is twofold. We aim, first, to present the distinctiveness of French-speaking small business and entrepreneurship research, including its specificities in terms of conceptual approaches, the objects studied, the theories and methods used, findings, and disciplinary and cultural references. Second, this special issue is an opportunity for French-speaking researchers to disseminate their work and ideas to reach a more global audience.

Following a year-long evaluation and selection process, we have retained 11 contributions (eight articles and three research notes). A call for papers was first issued inviting researchers of the concerned research communities to submit their contributions. A total of 40 abstracts were thus received. Following an initial evaluation, 18 authors and teams were invited to submit their work. The eight articles finally accepted in this issue address in equal proportions SMEs and entrepreneurship. We will first present the papers concerned with entrepreneurship.

In their article, Mahamadou Biga Diambeidou and Benoît Gailly investigate the initial growth stages of Belgian startups. Their main contribution is a taxonomy which identifies four types of growth trajectories adopted by the firms in their sample. In a completely different context, Olivier Basso and Véronique Bouchard use a conceptual approach to explore the links between two constructs of organisational entrepreneurship literature, entrepreneurial orientation and intrapreneurship in the context of SMEs. Faced with the paucity of knowledge on the subject, they come up with several research propositions aimed at fostering new research avenues. The two subsequent articles move further upstream and address growth and continuing entrepreneurship issues. Servane Delanoë focuses upon nascent entrepreneurs and the new venture creation process. Few studies have examined in detail the impact of new venture creation processes and entrepreneurship support structures on individuals. This work aims to provide indicators to measure their impact in the French context, which is characterised by a high density of support and facilitation programmes for nascent entrepreneurs. In order to conclude this series of articles more specifically dedicated to entrepreneurship, Jean-Michel Degeorge and Alain Fayolle explore the triggering factors that lead French engineers to set up or take over firms. They aim to better understand the role and influence of the factors identified in the literature such as intention and displacement. It emerges that, in most cases, it takes a subtle combination of factors to lead engineers, who benefit from valuable human and social capital in the French context, to engage in entrepreneurial processes.

This special issue also includes four contributions that are more specifically concerned with small businesses. These research papers offer perspectives on SMEs in various configurations and contexts. Nada Rejeb-Khachlouf, Lassaâd Mezghani and Bertrand Quélin focus on the impact of owner-managers’ personal networks on knowledge and know-how transfer. Rather than investigating the direct effects of these networks, the authors posit that intermediary mechanisms such as access to strategic resources and individuals’ absorptive capacity could play a key role. Philippe Hermel and Imane Khayat’s article examines the internationalisation process of micro-firms. Based on various archetypes of micro-enterprises, the authors try to identify and analyse the type of resources and capacities that discriminate these firms’ behaviours and internationalisation processes. Raluca Mogos Descotes and Björn Walliser also take an international perspective and compare the processes by which French and Romanian firms acquire and use export information. Using the framework of absorptive capacity, the authors examine the mediating effects of the French and Romanian institutional contexts. In the final paper on SMEs, André Cyr, Olivier Meier and Jean-Claude Pacitto focus on very small enterprises. They deal more specifically with the deep-rooted reasons that orient, in practice, the managerial and entrepreneurial behaviours of very small firms’ owner-managers, whose behaviour seems to resist mainstream trends and models and are often grounded in common sense beliefs. This research may be paralleled with Sarasvathy’s work (2001), which shows that entrepreneurial behaviour tends to be action oriented, based on short-term goals rather than long-term planning. In sum, owner-managers of very small firms, like nascent entrepreneurs, see sophisticated management practices (mainstream models and rational planning) as counter-productive.

Finally, the present issue concludes with three research notes. Two of which really belong to this category of research notes. They present interesting research findings that need further refinement. The third one offers a personal outlook on 50 years of small business research. The author of this last contribution is Michel Marchesnay, a pioneer in French-speaking small business research who has done a great deal towards structuring and legitimising the field.

The first research note is proposed by Yifan Wang and Caroline Verzat. They examine entrepreneurial courses in the French Grandes Ecoles d’Ingénieurs. By focusing on two very different schools in terms of their history and curriculum, the authors assess the effects of entrepreneurship teaching on the students’ intentions and career orientations. Their emergent results show that the school model (entrepreneurial vs traditional), in the particular context of the French education system, plays a great role in the students’ choice of career. In the second note, Bénédicte Branchet, Bernard Augier, Jean-Pierre Boissin and Bertrand Quere develop a typology of SMEs based on their business models, in order to identify the types of firms that are the most likely to benefit from state and government aids. Initial results seem to indicate that the typology contrasts with traditional growth models and that firm age is not a relevant criterion for allocating resources. Finally, Michel Marchesnay’s note will provide the non French-speaking reader with an overview of how French research on entrepreneurship has emerged and developed over a period of 50 years. The author shows that, in a country like France, which does not have a strong entrepreneurial culture, small business research has evolved differently depending on the periods and contexts under consideration. Recently, the fields of small business and entrepreneurship are growing steadily and developing institutional structures. Sizeable research teams (ten active specialised researchers at least) operate in the field of small business research in Montpellier (ERFI laboratory), and in the field of entrepreneurship, in Lyon (Centre for Research in Entrepreneurship, EM Lyon Business School) and Bordeaux (entrepreneurship research team, Université Bordeaux 4). However, questions have yet to be resolved, in particular those related to the status and the boundaries of these fields, what distinguishes them from other, more institutionalised scientific disciplines. Clearly, a great deal remains to be done in order to make the fields of small business and entrepreneurship scientific disciplines in their own right in the French research landscape.

Alain FayolleGuest Editor