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Prior research has theorised that entrepreneurs use deliberate practice (DP) in the start-up process to improve their competences and achieve new venture success. However, does DP truly lead to an increase in entrepreneurial expertise? This article advances the understanding of DP for entrepreneurship scholars by answering the following question: to what extent does DP influence the formation of entrepreneurial expertise amongst business founders?

The study employs a sample of founders of limited-liability firms. Data were collected mainly through a web-based survey designed specifically for this research. Regression analysis was used to investigate the relationship between DP and entrepreneurial expertise amongst business founders.

The results show that DP is positively associated with entrepreneurial expertise, which provides us with an improved understanding of DP and expertise in the entrepreneurship context.

The article offers empirical evidence linking DP to the achievement of entrepreneurial expertise. Further, the article emphasises DP as key to experiential learning, representing a predominant mode by which entrepreneurs’ experiences are transformed into expertise. Finally, the article highlights the important role of learning through DP in opportunity development.

Choosing Varieties of Capitalism as the title of their 2001 edited volume, Peter Hall and David Soskice monopolized a label that was much too broad for the project they were actually reporting. Their project was in line with a style of research, which may be called “bringing yet another factor back in”. That term stems from another pioneering edited volume emerging – like Hall and Soskice's volume – from the Harvard circuit: Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol's (1985) Bringing the State Back In. Following that volume, a number of other factors were “brought back in”: classes, geopolitics, finance and so on.

Shalev's third suggested path for progress consists of using tables, graphs, and tree diagrams to examine causal hierarchy and complexity and to identify cases meriting more in-depth scrutiny. This should be viewed not as (or at least not solely as) a substitute for regression but rather as a critical component of regression analysis. All of us were (I hope) taught in our first regression course that it is not enough to simply get the data, estimate some regression equations, and then draw conclusions. It also is necessary to get a feel for the data, in large part by examining descriptive statistics and looking at bivariate and/or multivariate patterns. Too many macro-comparativists, I suspect, either do not do this at all or do not do it sufficiently carefully.

Michael Shalev has turned his attention, once again, to the bad methodological habits that social scientists – like myself – often adopt. As always, he presents us with thoughtful, rigorous, and penetrating criticism, but also with a generous dose of constructive prescription. His target is the widespread use of regression techniques in cross-national comparative research. The gist of the argument is that multiple regression (MR) is a far too blunt instrument if our aim is to arrive at a robust identification of crucial causal mechanisms. MR, as he puts it (p. 42), renders the cases invisible and, hence, precludes researchers from having any dialogue with them. The case becomes a set of scores; the causal mechanisms are reduced to correlation coefficients. As a result, analytical power is sacrificed rather than gained. Shalev advocates simpler ‘low-tech’ approaches such as tabular representations, tree diagrams, or clustering techniques either as substitutes for, or as companions to, regression analysis.

I am grateful to the editors of this journal to be given the possibility to comment on Michael Shalev's article. Although I have some minor disagreement with his general argument, I am also grateful to Michael Shalev for taking up what I think is an important question in comparative social science. I find myself in the curious position of being a target of a general critique that I mostly agree upon, namely that too much energy is going into sophisticated methodological techniques at the expense of substantive knowledge about individual cases and theoretical reasoning about causality. However, and probably not surprisingly, I find Shalev's critique of my particular venture into this area far from convincing.

For comments on a previous draft, I wish to thank Mary O’Sullivan, Michael Shalev and Bruce Western.

In their well-known contribution to the “varieties of capitalism” debate, Peter Hall and David Soskice (2001, Ch. 1) highlight the distinction between a “coordinated market economy” as exemplified by Germany and a “liberal market economy” as exemplified by the United States. Under the heading, “Liberal Market Economies: The American Case”, Hall and Soskice (2001, p. 27), argue:Liberal market economies can secure levels of overall economic performance as high as those of coordinated market economies, but they do so quite differently. In LMEs, firms rely more heavily on market relations to resolve the coordination problems that firms in CMEs address more often via forms of non-market coordination that entail collaboration and strategic interaction. In each of the major spheres of firm endeavor, competitive markets are more robust and there is less institutional support for non-market forms of coordination.