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  • Accepted Manuscript: Skewed Opportunities: How the Distribution of Entrepreneurial Inputs and Outcomes Reconceptualizes a Research Domain
Title: Skewed Opportunities: How the Distribution of Entrepreneurial Inputs and Outcomes Reconceptualizes a Research Domain
Over the last four decades, Academy of Management Review has devoted a great deal of attention to the scholarly debate about the theoretical nature of entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurial opportunities. Most recently, an entire Dialogue section of the journal was devoted to four articles that provided alternative ontological, epistemological, and philosophical views of “opportunity.” Inasmuch as the domain appreciates the effort to advance entrepreneurship theory, these arguments appear to constitute what past AMR editor-in-chief, Roy Suddaby, termed “fetishism,” where “theory becomes an exercise in writing and interpretation but is detached from the empirical world” (2014: 408). That reality was demonstrated in the Crawford, Aguinis, Lichtenstein, Davidsson, & McKelvey (2015) study, which discovered highly skewed power law distributions in all of the domain’s theoretically relevant input variables and all generalizable outcome measures. The significant number of outliers in these distributions provide necessary and sufficient cause for a paradigm shift in the domain. In response, this paper uses the empirical reality of power law distributed phenomena for 1) developing historical and empirical justification for the difficulties in building theory about opportunities and entrepreneurship, 2) identifying how the seemingly antithetical perspectives of discovery and creation theories can be synthesized, and 3) proposing a more » generalizable framework—of Endowments, Expectations, Engagement, and Environments—around which new entrepreneurship theory can be developed. « less
Authors:
Award ID(s):
1734567 1853586
Publication Date:
NSF-PAR ID:
10058144
Journal Name:
Proceedings - Academy of Management
ISSN:
0065-0668
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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  1. ( , Annual Conference of the American Psychology-Law Society.)
    Abstract: Jury notetaking can be controversial despite evidence suggesting benefits for recall and understanding. Research on note taking has historically focused on the deliberation process. Yet, little research explores the notes themselves. We developed a 10-item coding guide to explore what jurors take notes on (e.g., simple vs. complex evidence) and how they take notes (e.g., gist vs. specific representation). In general, jurors made gist representations of simple and complex information in their notes. This finding is consistent with Fuzzy Trace Theory (Reyna & Brainerd, 1995) and suggests notes may serve as a general memory aid, rather than verbatim representation. Summary: The practice of jury notetaking in the courtroom is often contested. Some states allow it (e.g., Nebraska: State v. Kipf, 1990), while others forbid it (e.g., Louisiana: La. Code of Crim. Proc., Art. 793). Some argue notes may serve as a memory aid, increase juror confidence during deliberation, and help jurors engage in the trial (Hannaford & Munsterman, 2001; Heuer & Penrod, 1988, 1994). Others argue notetaking may distract jurors from listening to evidence, that juror notes may be given undue weight, and that those who took notes may dictate the deliberation process (Dann, Hans, & Kaye, 2005). Whilemore »research has evaluated the efficacy of juror notes on evidence comprehension, little work has explored the specific content of juror notes. In a similar project on which we build, Dann, Hans, and Kaye (2005) found jurors took on average 270 words of notes each with 85% including references to jury instructions in their notes. In the present study we use a content analysis approach to examine how jurors take notes about simple and complex evidence. We were particularly interested in how jurors captured gist and specific (verbatim) information in their notes as they have different implications for information recall during deliberation. According to Fuzzy Trace Theory (Reyna & Brainerd, 1995), people extract “gist” or qualitative meaning from information, and also exact, verbatim representations. Although both are important for helping people make well-informed judgments, gist-based understandings are purported to be even more important than verbatim understanding (Reyna, 2008; Reyna & Brainer, 2007). As such, it could be useful to examine how laypeople represent information in their notes during deliberation of evidence. Methods Prior to watching a 45-minute mock bank robbery trial, jurors were given a pen and notepad and instructed they were permitted to take notes. The evidence included testimony from the defendant, witnesses, and expert witnesses from prosecution and defense. Expert testimony described complex mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) evidence. The present analysis consists of pilot data representing 2,733 lines of notes from 52 randomly-selected jurors across 41 mock juries. Our final sample for presentation at AP-LS will consist of all 391 juror notes in our dataset. Based on previous research exploring jury note taking as well as our specific interest in gist vs. specific encoding of information, we developed a coding guide to quantify juror note-taking behaviors. Four researchers independently coded a subset of notes. Coders achieved acceptable interrater reliability [(Cronbach’s Alpha = .80-.92) on all variables across 20% of cases]. Prior to AP-LS, we will link juror notes with how they discuss scientific and non-scientific evidence during jury deliberation. Coding Note length. Before coding for content, coders counted lines of text. Each notepad line with at minimum one complete word was coded as a line of text. 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