Theory Development (jbv-theory-development)

When to trigger

• Your "hypotheses" are descriptive ("A relates to B in startups") with no entrepreneurial mechanism
• You need to choose the disciplinary engine — agency/real-options (economics), cognition/affect (psychology), networks/legitimacy (sociology)
• A handling editor or reviewer says the theory "could be about any organization, not entrepreneurship"
• You are deciding whether to write a deductive model or a narrative/interpretive theory

JBV's theory bar

JBV elevates "theories, narratives, and interpretations" of the antecedents, mechanisms, and consequences of entrepreneurship. Two legitimate paths:

• Hypothetico-deductive: derive testable hypotheses from an explicit mechanism. The mechanism must be about the entrepreneurial phenomenon — opportunity, judgment under Knightian uncertainty, resource assembly under resource constraints, legitimacy of the new and unknown (liability of newness), founder identity, etc. — not a generic organizational process.
• Narrative / interpretive: build an interesting, internally coherent account or process theory of how entrepreneurial action unfolds. JBV's stance is broader than the strict deductive template of many top management journals — a compelling reconceptualization can be the contribution.

Pick the disciplinary engine (and combine deliberately)

JBV is multidisciplinary by design. Make the lens explicit and consider integrating two: