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Entrepreneurship is a phenomenon that is difficult to describe with terms of static reality so it must be treated as a dynamic process. With this in mind, the use of the movement metaphor with its well-known aporias is also relevant. In fact, viewing the entrepreneurial process as a manifestation of movement of economy underlies the most prominent twentieth century achievements in comprehending both entrepreneurship and economics as a whole.
Considered metaphorically, movement means communication of the present and future. The entrepreneur causes a new reality to emerge. This reality represents a modification of the former reality performed by selecting and implementing one of the numerous opportunities. Most definitions of entrepreneurship aimed at capturing the essence of entrepreneurial movement are confined to revealing these alternatives. The essential divergences in authors’ views are found in their approaches to identifying the nature of opportunities and the mechanism of communication of the present reality with the future reality, which is created as a result of employing one of the opportunities.
Two basic concepts have been developed to address the nature of opportunities, viz. the objectivist and subjectivist concepts. Advocates of the objectivist concept claim that the role of the entrepreneur is to reveal the available but still unnoticed opportunities (Shane & Venkataraman 2000, p. 220), which is possible due to the entrepreneur’s distinctive feature, i.e. alertness (Kirtzner, 1973, p. 67; Foss & Klein, 2010). Representatives of the subjectivist concept are focused on the subjective nature of opportunities, which are created by the entrepreneur (Alvarez & Barney, 2007).
The issue of connection of the future and present realities is raised with two essentially different approaches (Burrell & Morgan, 1979, pp. 10-20), which can be defined as constructivist and regulative approaches. According to the constructivist approach, the image of the future is exogenous in relation to the present. It is obvious that creation of such future requires searching for relevant resources. In this context, an objective, which determines the process of resource supply and impact the process as a cause, emerges. S. Sarasvathy employs the term “causation” to define this type of relation (2001).
In fact, causation is typical of the bureaucratized mechanism of business planning that functions and reproduces itself in a certain institutional environment of corporate capitalism. However, the logic is also inherent to entrepreneurs, especially those of them who developed in such an environment. This situation confirms the principles of institutional isomorphism (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983).
The logic of causation is based on “…fantasy that entrepreneurship — and, more broadly, creativity — can be systematized... that success in the startup game can be not only taught but rationalized, made predictable…” (Lewis-Kraus & Gideon, 2014).
In this paper, we do not provide a detailed analysis of the technological, social, economic, and political conditions that justify and facilitate the emergence and distribution of the stated logic; however, we should emphasize the fact that in the framework of this logic, opportunities are secondary in relation to a particular objective embodied in a project of obviously constructivist nature.
Another logic, i.e. the regulative approach is endogenous in relation to the present reality and driven by abstract idea (viz. the idea of profit that is made from what is available at the moment) rather than by particularly imagery of the desirable future. In this case, any new properties of the available resources or new properties of the available elements of the external environment metamorphose into opportunities. If the focusing on discovery of new properties of capital facilitated the achievements of the modern Austrian economic theory followers, then focusing on market environment is typical of both early Austrians and most of entrepreneurial theories that consider capital as an inherent market economy phenomenon. The marketing practical orientation of economics also permeate the works of sociologists whose studies lie in the framework of the environmentalist and especially populationist approach (Hannan & Freeman, 1977).