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This chapter follows two previous chapters on the nature of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship scholarship that have been presented in this book series (Davidsson, 2003; Venkataraman, 1997). Both of these chapters are key works in the field, and they both provide critical contributions to our understanding of what entrepreneurship is, as a focus of scholarship, and how entrepreneurship should be studied. My intention for this chapter, therefore, is to offer some thoughts that, I believe, are complementary to the insights offered by my colleagues. My approach to considering the questions of “What is entrepreneurship?” and “How might entrepreneurship be studied?” is to offer some thoughts about the “community of practice” (Latour, 1987, 1999; Sargent, 1997; Wenger, 1998) that currently exists in the academic field of entrepreneurship, and to propose some suggestions for how academics might practice different ways of entrepreneurship scholarship. (This will beg the question of whether a “community of practice” can remain a community, if the practice, itself, changes).

In recent years, the topic of entrepreneurship has attracted increasing attention from academics and policy makers. Although much of the debate has taken place in business schools, its protagonists are sociologists, psychologists, organization theorists, and, of course, economists. The purpose of this paper is to take stock of this debate and of what we have learned so far about entrepreneurship. Using Kirzner’s theory as the starting point and unifying theme, the paper reviews works about entrepreneurs and what they do, the socio-economic factors influencing entrepreneurial decisions, the relationship between entrepreneurship and organizations, and the possible links between entrepreneurial activity and economic growth.

Although the literature addressing entrepreneurial networking is reaching a fairly high degree of sophistication and scope, there are certain critical areas where important questions remain unanswered. Specifically, research into the processes of entrepreneurial networking has been hindered by a paucity of longitudinal studies. Thus, the consideration of change over time is de facto limited. Moreover, accounts of how individuals actually use networks to learn about entrepreneurship, its practices and processes remain sparse. Yet, we know that learning is a social process, so the research gap lies in relating networks, as social contexts to the entrepreneurial learning process. Furthermore, since social relations are fundamental to everyone's life, and emerge, develop and change throughout their life course, people are embedded in social situations that put them in touch with others (Kim & Aldrich, 2005). Consequently, learning is often “located in the relations among actors” (Uzzi & Lancaster, 2003, p. 398). As well as direct learning through network contacts, network transitivity also facilitates learning by one embedded network member, through the knowledge held by a second member, about a third, as shown in Uzzi and Gillespie's (2002) study. Accordingly, in many ways how entrepreneurs go about using their networks and with whom they network may be critical for entrepreneurship and thus warrants investigation. It is to this end that we now consider the shape, content and process of entrepreneurial networking.