Places are not like people : the perils of anthropomorphism within entrepreneurial ecosystems research
Abstract
The concept of entrepreneurial ecosystems (EEs) has quickly established itself as a major focus within regional development research. A key conceptual framing commonly adopted by scholars theorising about the growth and evolutionary dynamics of EEs is via anthropomorphised life-cycle models. In this debate article we offer a critique and argumentation as to why the validity of this approach is spurious and contestable. Arguably, life-cycle based models overly simplify these complex spatial entrepreneurial phenomena and convey the temporal evolution of EEs as a simplistic, linear, deterministic and path dependent process. Despite the seductively simplistic appeal of life-cycle models, places are not like people and the uncritical adoption of such crude anthropomorphic framings potentially weakens this research field, at the same time running the risk of mis-informing policy makers.
Citation
Brown , R , Mawson , S & Rocha , A 2023 , ' Places are not like people : the perils of anthropomorphism within entrepreneurial ecosystems research ' , Regional Studies , vol. 57 , no. 2 , pp. 384-396 . https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2022.2135698
Publication
Regional Studies
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0034-3404Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Description
Funding: The authors wish to acknowledge InGAME: Innovation for Games and Media Enterprise, part of the AHRC Creative Industries Clusters Programme (AH/S002871/10), for funding the time of one of the co-authors.Collections
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