r Academy of Management Review

2022, Vol. 47, No. 1, 75–92.

https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2017.0451

SOCIAL OBJECTIVITY AND ENTREPRENEURIAL

OPPORTUNITIES
RUSS MCBRIDE
University of California, Merced

ROBERT WUEBKER
University of Utah

An important conversation in entrepreneurship focuses on the question of whether

entrepreneurial opportunities are objective or subjective. The discovery view suggests
that they are objective. The creation view suggests they are subjective. Resolving the
debate requires first understanding what objectivity is for any social phenomenon. The
debate can then be disaggregated into two questions: Are entrepreneurial opportunities
ontologically subjective, and can they be epistemologically objective? The answer to both
questions is “yes.” Transforming a completely subjective opportunity into an epistemo-
logically objective opportunity requires changing beliefs—of consumers, employees, gov-
ernments, and other stakeholders—along with the rights and responsibilities of these
stakeholders vis-
a-vis the entity created to exploit an opportunity. This view of opportu-
nities has important implications for social science research more broadly, as well as
management and entrepreneurship, specifically.

If there is any moral … this may be it: facts in the
social sciences are grounded differently than are
those of the natural sciences. Compared to the social
sciences, the ontology of natural science is a walk in
the park. (Epstein, 2015: 163)
In addition to the field editor, Sharon Alvarez, and vari-
ous anonymous referees, the authors are grateful for the
following people who provided detailed feedback and
engaged in extensive discussions on previous versions of
this manuscript: Jay Barney, Paul Godfrey, Brian Gordon,
Joep Cornelissen, Todd Zenger, and Randy Westgren. Ver-
sions of this paper were presented at the Academy of Man-
agement social ontology professional development
workshops; the Entrepreneurship Exemplars Conference
at the Ohio State University; the Entrepreneurship Exem-
plars Conference in Keystone, CO; University of California
Berkeley Social Ontology Research Group; the University
of Utah Entrepreneurship & Strategy Department; the Utah
Social Ontology Research Group; the University of Oslo;
University College, Bergen; China Europe International
Business School; Ernest & Julio Gallo Management Pro-
gram at the University of California, Merced; the Univer-
sity of Eindhoven; Tsinghua University School of
Economics and Management; SKEMA Knowledge and
Technology Organization Group; the University of St. Gal-
len; IESE Business School; SASIN Management School;
the University of Klagenfurt; Vienna University; and
Anglia Ruskin University.
75
Copyright of the Academy of Management, all rights reserved. Contents may not be copied, emailed, posted to a listserv, or otherwise transmitted without the copyright holder's express
written permission. Users may print, download, or email articles for individual use only.
How entrepreneurial opportunities are formed
and exploited has attracted interest from researchers
(Alvarez & Barney, 2007, 2010, 2013, 2019; Braver &
Danneels, 2018; Davidsson, 2015; Dimov, 2007,
2011; Ramoglou & Tsang, 2016, 2017, 2018; Shane &
Venkataraman, 2000), and two approaches to analyz-
ing opportunities have emerged in the literature.
The first, building on the work of Kirzner (1973) on
entrepreneurial arbitrage, has argued that opportuni-
ties are formed by exogenous shocks to established
markets or industries and are discovered by individ-
uals with unusual alertness operating under condi-
tions of risk (Kirzner, 1973, 1979; Shane &
Venkataraman, 2000). The second has suggested that
opportunities are created endogenously by the
actions of entrepreneurs themselves operating under
conditions of Knightian uncertainty (Alvarez & Bar-
ney, 2007; Knight, 1921). Some have argued that
these two ways of thinking about opportunity forma-
tion and exploitation are complementary (Alvarez &
Barney, 2007, 2010; Dimov, 2011; Foss & Klein,
2017; Kirzner, 2009), and others have argued that
they are mutually exclusive (Gaglio & Katz, 2001;
Ramoglou & Tsang, 2016; Shane, 2003; Shane & Eck-
hardt, 2003); thus, one or the other must logically
dominate research in the field of entrepreneurship.
Debates over the importance of these two models
have continued for some time (Alvarez, Barney,
McBride, & Wuebker, 2014, 2017; Braver & Danneels,
76 Academy of Management Review
2018; Cornelissen & Clarke, 2010; Davidsson, 2015;
Eckhardt & Shane, 2012, 2013; Foss & Klein, 2017,
2018; McMullen & Shepherd, 2006; Ramoglou &
Tsang, 2016, 2017, 2018; Shane, 2012; Venkatara-
man, Sarasvathy, Dew, & Forster, 2012; Wood &
McKinley, 2010, 2017, 2018). However, these
debates are unlikely to be resolved until a more fun-
damental issue about entrepreneurial opportunities
has been addressed—are opportunities objective or
subjective? If they are objective (or mostly objec-
tive), then the older discovery approach that recom-
mends searching for preexisting opportunities is
more appropriate; if they are subjective (or mostly
subjective), then the creation approach is more
appropriate.
The purpose of this paper is to address the ques-
tion regarding whether entrepreneurial opportuni-
ties are objective. Answering this question requires
first determining criteria for what counts as objec-
tive or subjective for any socioeconomic phenom-
ena, and this requires taking a deeper look at the
structure of social reality. We find that entrepre-
neurial opportunities are ontologically subjective,
like all social phenomena, but can be epistemologi-
cally objective if the criteria are met. These two dif-
ferent dimensions of objectivity have often been
overlooked.
The paper then addresses an important follow-up
question: What implications does the answer to the
debate about the objectivity of entrepreneurial op-
portunities and an understanding of the nature of
social reality have for the evolution of the fields of
entrepreneurship, management, and the broader
social sciences? First, everything we study, reflect
upon, and theorize about in entrepreneurship and
management involves social entities, so it is criti-
cally important to understand what constitutes a
social entity to make it real and objective. Second,
social phenomena are distinct from physical phe-
nomena, and what makes a social phenomenon
objective is different from what makes a physical
object objective. Conflating the two has historically
led to confusion in the social sciences, and eliminat-
ing this confusion will clear the way for significant
progress to be made. Third, a clear understanding of
social entities offers a new lens through which to
view a diverse range of activities within firms and
ventures—activities that fundamentally involve the
difficult labor of forging beliefs and duties among
those who can help advance the organization to
become increasingly real and objective. This lens
serves as a tool that scholars can use to analyze the
objects of their work from this novel perspective.
January
DEFINING KEY TERMS
There are several terms that are central to the argu-
ments developed in this paper. These terms are
defined in this section.
Entrepreneurial Opportunity
There have been many definitions of the concept
of opportunity, but among the core participants in
the debate there has been broad agreement about
what exactly constitutes an entrepreneurial opportu-
nity. An opportunity is a situation “in which new
goods, services, raw materials, and organizing meth-
ods can be introduced and sold at greater than their
cost of production” (Shane & Venkataraman, 2000:
220) or a situation “in which new goods, services,
raw materials, markets and organizing methods
can be introduced through the formation of new
means, ends, or means-ends relationships” (Eck-
hardt & Shane, 2003: 336) and sold for more than
their cost of production.
Alvarez and Barney (2010) have agreed, noting
that there is “growing consensus about the definition
of what constitutes an opportunity in the entrepre-
neurship literature: ‘An opportunity exists when-
ever there are competitive imperfections in a factor
or product market’” (Alvarez & Barney, 2010: 559).
Since they consider an “imperfection” to just be situ-
ation in which goods and services can be introduced
and sold for more than their cost of production, these
definitions are effectively equivalent. Interestingly,
though, consensus about the definition has not
resolved the debate about whether opportunities are
objective.
Subjectivity versus Objectivity
Discussions of criteria for determining objectivity
are longstanding, but one straightforward approach
(Searle, 1995, 2010) has grounded the distinction
between subjectivity and objectivity as the differ-
ence between that which is observer independent
(i.e., mind independent) and that which is observer
relative (i.e., mind dependent). Mind-independent
objects or facts do not depend upon any observer for
their existence and are thus objective, while mind-
dependent objects or facts do, and so they are subjec-
tive. For example, a hydrogen atom exists regardless
of what anyone thinks about it. It is mind indepen-
dent. Similarly, the fact that a hydrogen atom has
one proton is true regardless of whether any humans
are alive to confirm it or what they think about it,
and so it is an objective fact. Although the discovery
2022
of that fact required human minds, the atom itself
still exists independently of such minds and the dis-
covery process.
In contrast, a corporation (e.g., IBM) only exists
because a diverse collection of people believe that
it does (federal and state governments, the depart-
ment of corporations, shareholders, customers,
employees, partners, contractors, media pundits,
etc.). If no one believed that IBM existed then it
would no longer exist, which makes it mind de-
pendent and therefore subjective.1 Similarly, the
fact that Paris is the capital of France is only a fact
because some people decided at some point in his-
tory that Paris would be the capital of France. If
everyone awoke with the new belief that Marseilles
was the capital, then it would become the capital
of France. It is a mind-dependent fact and therefore
subjective.
The Physical and Social Worlds
There are then two types of objects: physical
objects and social objects. Examples of physical
objects include a tree, Mt. Everest, and a hydrogen
atom. Examples of social objects include a corpora-
tion, a capital city, and product or factor markets.
This difference between physical and social objects
highlights a critical distinction between those fields
that study mind-independent phenomena (physics,
chemistry, biology, etc.) and those that study mind-
dependent phenomena (management, sociology,
anthropology, social psychology, economics, legal
studies, strategy, political science, etc.). The objects
of study in the physical sciences, like hydrogen
atoms, are mind independent and therefore objec-
tive. On the other hand, the core objects of study in
the social sciences, like governments or IBM, are
mind dependent and therefore subjective.2
1 independent of every human mind. A social object is
Its physical property would still exist but no longer be
owned by IBM since IBM would no longer exist.
2 cally objective precisely because of the stable beliefs
Social phenomena are a subset of the larger category of
mind-dependent phenomena. This means that all social
phenomena are mind dependent, but not all mind-
dependent phenomena are social. For example, the cogni-
tive activity of an individual is mind dependent in that it
depends on the mind of the individual who is engaged in
that activity, but not all of that activity brings about, consti-
tutes, or affects social phenomena. One might be day-
dreaming alone in one’s office about climbing a tree, for
example, which is a cognitive activity that does not relate
to anything social.
McBride and Wuebker 77
Ontology and Epistemology
Ontology is the study of what something is,
whereas epistemology is the study of what we think
or believe about that something. The physical scien-
ces study ontologically objective physical objects.
Psychology, cognitive science, and the social scien-
ces study people’s thoughts and beliefs about
things—in other words, people’s epistemic states
(and the behavior and effects driven by those episte-
mic states). Physical objects and facts are essentially
ontological and objective because they are mind
independent, while social objects and facts are
essentially epistemological and subjective because
they are dependent upon what people think and
believe.
Ontological Objectivity and Epistemological
Objectivity
This leads to an important question. Similar to
physical objects, some social objects are indepen-
dent of us and relatively stable (like IBM, the capital
of France, or the Canadian government), yet they are
obviously not ontologically objective physical
objects. Where, then, does the objectivity of such
social objects come from? Social objects and facts are
epistemological, and so their objectivity comes from
epistemological objectivity. Where does epistemo-
logical objectivity come from? It comes from stable
cognitive states (Boghossian, 2007; Bratman, 1987,
2014; Gilbert, 1992, 2015; Hart, 1961; Hume, 1740/
1978; Lawson, Latsis, & Martins, 2013; Ludwig,
2016, 2017; Searle, 1995, 2010; Tuomela, 2002,
2007, 2013), specifically beliefs and rights and obli-
gations—which are referred to as “deontics”—as
well as the behaviors that flow from them, upon
which social objects depend for their existence.
Thus, there are two kinds of objectivity. A physi-
cal object is ontologically objective because it is
ontologically subjective but can be epistemologi-
and stable deontics of human minds. These are
completely distinct dimensions of objectivity. These
two dimensions have often been conflated.
THE DEBATE
With these definitions in place, it is now possible
to address the question of whether entrepreneurial
opportunities are objective.
78 Academy of Management Review
Positions in the Debate
According to Shane and Venkataraman (2000:
219), entrepreneurial opportunities are objective:
“To have entrepreneurship, you must first have
entrepreneurial opportunities … the opportunities
themselves are objective phenomena.”3 In this view,
opportunities are formed by exogenous shocks that
disrupt market equilibrium. These shocks can be
caused by (among other things) technological advan-
ces, changes in the political or regulatory environ-
ment, evolving consumer tastes, and social and
demographic trends (Shane, 2003). A straightfor-
ward program of research has followed from this per-
spective. How does one search for and identify
shocks to the socioeconomic landscape, and how
and why do some individuals and not others identify
and exploit them?
In contrast to the opportunity objectivists, the sub-
jectivists have asserted that opportunities are
socially constructed (e.g., Alvarez, Barney, & Ander-
son, 2013; Baker & Nelson, 2005; Sarasvathy, 2001;
Wood & McKinley, 2010, 2017, 2018). This perspec-
tive proposes that opportunities are formed through
entrepreneurial action rather than discovered and
that the creation process often involves utilizing
resources in unexpected ways and integrating them
into existing institutions in unpredictable (i.e., non-
objective) ways (Baker & Nelson, 2005; Dimov, 2007;
Luksha, 2008; Sarasvathy, 2001; Wood & McKinley,
2010, 2017). Because the agent subjectively con-
ceives and acts to create a new product or service,
and creation itself is a subjective process, propo-
nents have argued that opportunity is subjective as
well. In this view, entrepreneurs create the imperfec-
tions in product or factor markets and then exploit
the very imperfection they create.4
3 similarity of the social and physical sciences” (Scott,
The source of the idea that opportunity is objective
goes back to Kirzner (1973, 1979), but as Kirzner (2009)
later noted, his notion of “seeing” opportunities was only
metaphorical. For Kirzner, the concept of opportunity was
intended as a placeholder for an economic function. Shane
and Venkataraman (2000) took it and reified it into a full-
blown objectively real phenomenon, one that could be the
target of a search, discovered, exploited, and studied like a
physical object.
4
Another branch of subjectivism based on the
“judgment approach” (Casson, 1982; Foss, Klein, Kor, &
Mahoney, 2008; Klein, 2008) has also found that opportu-
nities are subjective but has emphasized the role of thought
and imagination to arrive at this position. Advocates of the
judgment approach have viewed opportunities as subjec-
tive because they are judgments in the minds of
January
The First Argument for the Objectivity of
Opportunities
The first argument for the objectivity of entrepre-
neurial opportunities is as follows: Opportunities are
physical objects, and physical objects are objective;
therefore, opportunities are objective. Ramoglou and
Tsang (2016: 410) have made this argument, suggest-
ing that opportunities are “propensities,” and (quot-
ing Popper): “we live in a world of propensities …
[propensities] are not mere possibilities but are phys-
ical realities.”
Limitations to the first argument for the objectiv-
ity of opportunities. Physical objects (like a hydro-
gen atom or a mountain) are objective since their
existence does not depend on human minds, but it is
difficult to see how an opportunity could be a kind
of physical object. Indeed, to hold this position,
Ramoglou and Tsang (2016) relied upon an abstruse
construct from Popper: “propensity” (a concept that
never gained much traction in the philosophy
of science).
Suggesting that opportunities are physical is even
more problematic because it conflates the socioeco-
nomic world with the physical world. This is a
century-old mistake made by some of the most
respected social theorists. This idea that the physical
and the social are similar underpins many founda-
tional theories of social structure and many theories
of entrepreneurial opportunity that draw from them.
Durkheim (1901/2013: 146) sometimes suggested
that social phenomena “must be treated as natural
[i.e., physical] phenomena, subject to necessary
laws,” and that social phenomena are physical phe-
nomena, “only distinguishable from other phenom-
ena by virtue of their greater complexity” (102).
Scott (2014) and others (e.g., Alexander, 1983) have
held positions that emphasize “the fundamental
2014: 76).
In contrast, the claim advanced in this paper is
that the social world and the physical world are fun-
damentally dissimilar. If this is correct, then Dur-
kheim’s “similarity thesis,” repeated by Ramoglou
and Tsang, Scott, Alexander, and others is precisely
the wrong conceptual foundation upon which to
build any theory of the social world or understand
entrepreneurs who imagine different and often unexpected
uses or combinations of scarce resources which determine
objective gains (or losses). Advocates of a judgment-based
view have tended to view the opportunity debate as a dis-
tracting sideshow (e.g., Foss & Klein, 2017).
2022 McBride and Wuebker
any component of that world, including entrepreneur-
ial opportunity. It fails to discriminate mind-indepen-
dent physical phenomena from mind-dependent
social phenomena.
Most social scientists are sensitive to the fact that
the laws of physics are categorically distinct from
the “laws” of their field. Economists typically recog-
nize that their laws are not “inexorable laws” (Tay-
lor, 1929: 20), but they tend to “compare their field
to physics” (Thaler, 2015: 5), and some even think of
them as inexorable, immutable, and identical to the
natural laws of physics (e.g., Mueller, 2016).5 Yet the
social sciences are not the physical sciences, and
social “laws” are not physical laws.
The Second Argument for the Objectivity of
Opportunities
The second argument for the objectivity of oppor-
tunities states that the market imperfection that
defines the opportunity exists independently of the
actor that exploits it; therefore, the opportunity is
objective. A technical revolution (e.g., the invention
of 3D printing, as in Shane, 2000) can offer opportu-
nities that did not previously exist, and an entrepre-
neurial agent can take advantage of the objective
changes in the external, objective, socioeconomic,
and technological landscape.
Limitations to the second argument for the
objectivity of opportunities. The argument most
often advanced by discovery theorists (Eckhardt &
Ciuchta, 2008; Shane, 2003; Shane & Eckhardt, 2003;
Shane & Venkataraman, 2000) contains an important
insight—that the market conditions within which an
agent operates are often independent and outside of
the control of that agent. But true ontological objec-
tive independence—that which a hydrogen atom or
Mt. Everest possesses—is objective because its exis-
tence is independent of every human mind. A mar-
ket imperfection is only independent of the mind of
the entrepreneurial agent (and even then, it is not if
the agent happens to be the one who caused the
imperfection—Schumpeter, 1942). The thoughts
and behaviors of many people are what cause shocks
5
See also this quote from Graeber (2014: 44): “Above
all, [Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations] was an attempt to
establish the newfound discipline of economics as a sci-
ence. This meant that not only did economics have its own
peculiar domain of study … but that this economy oper-
ated according to the laws of much the same sort as Sir
Isaac Newton had so recently identified as governing the
physical world.”
79
to the market or lead to the technological advance-
ment. Neither event is independent of them—rather,
the opposite is true: they are only independent of
some other actor reacting to that shock that they cre-
ated. This is an example of socioeconomic epistemic
objectivity, not physical ontological objectivity.
The Argument Against the Creation Account of
Opportunity
A frequent refrain among those who have argued
for the objectivity of opportunities is that the crea-
tion approach is a kind of postmodern relativism
where “anything goes.” Accepting that opportunities
are endogenously formed, they have argued, results
in a state of affairs where no objectivity of any kind
is possible. But social constructionism need not
entail extreme “anything goes” relativism (Baghra-
mian & Carter, 2015; Montuschi, 2007). This unwar-
ranted linkage is often a critical part of the argument
against accounts of entrepreneurial creation. Fleet-
wood and Ackroyd (2004: 1), for example, impugned
the “social constructionist ontology [from] which
postmodernist or poststructuralist oriented analysis
is rooted.” Ramoglou and Tsang (2016) have also
hitched postmodern relativism to social construc-
tionism, arguing that for social constructivists:
the idea of an objective world is an illusion. Reality is
ultimately reducible to social constructions. There is
no single way the world is or can be. Agents can will-
ingly create their own realities so long as they regard
them as real. (p. 413)
This is one reasonable definition of postmodern
relativism, but agents cannot willingly create their
own reality at will; we are subject to the “iron cage”
of both ontologically objective physical reality and
epistemologically objective social reality. As Durk-
heim (1895: 70) argued, “a [social] thing is princi-
pally recognizable by virtue of not being capable of
modification through a mere act of will … . Far from
being a product of our will [social facts] determine it
from without.”6
These kinds of “anything goes” attacks (e.g., Fleet-
wood, 2005; Reed, 2005) are common, justified
complaints against postmodern relativism, but they
do not apply to the many institutional theorists,
social ontologists (Boghossian, 2007; Ludwig, 2016,
2017; Tuomela, 2007, 2013), social constructivists
6
Durkheim has overstated his case here, since not all
social phenomena are independent and objective. This is
an important point we will discuss in detail below.
80 Academy of Management Review
(Alvarez & Barney, 2010, 2013; Alvarez et al., 2014,
2017; Berger & Luckmann, 1967; Wood & McKinley,
2010, 2017, 2018), or even critical realists, like Sayer
(2000)—all of whom have acknowledged the socially
constructed nature of social phenomena.
Why then does constructivism so often get lumped
together with postmodern relativism? The root of the
problem, correctly identified by the objectivists, is
that there is a glaring lack of explanation for social
objectivity within traditional social construction-
ism. This makes it difficult to understand how schol-
ars can objectively study phenomena that are
inherently socially constructed. Sayer (2000: 32), for
example, observed that “if the social world is
socially constructed … how can it be treated as inde-
pendent of the researcher’s knowledge?” Klein
(2008) has also suggested that constructivism does
not allow for such objectivity:
The creation approach is grounded in a social con-
structivist view of action … . It holds that the market
itself is a social construction, and that realized gains
and losses are, in part, subjective. [In my] … approach
described here … realized gains and losses are objec-
tive and quantifiable. (p. 183)
The motivation for the conflation of constructiv-
ism with postmodern relativism is understandable
since constructivists do not have an explanation for
socioeconomic objectivity. Objectivists do proffer an
answer to this problem—any objective socioeco-
nomic phenomenon, like money, is objective
because it is physical, and physical objects are objec-
tive. Therefore, one side (social constructivism) has
no explanation for objectivity.7 The other side
(objectivism) mistakenly concludes that social phe-
nomena are objective in the same way as a hydrogen
atom or a rock.
Some social facts and objects are objective. A bank
account balance is an objective fact that can be tested
by attempting to convince a bank manager that the
account’s balance should be ten times larger than the
one reflected on the statement. But money is not
only physical coins or paper, as credit cards and Bit-
coin demonstrate. The physical electrons in a com-
puter representing a bank balance are also not
money. Entire village economies run perfectly well
with shopkeepers who keep nothing more than men-
tal tallies of debits and credits (which are just quanti-
fied duties and rights) without any physical tokens
7
Or at least the answers from the constructivists (e.g.,
Berger & Luckmann, 1967) are answers that the objectivists
do not find plausible.
January
(Graeber, 2014; Martin, 2015). Money is ontologi-
cally subjective, like all socioeconomic phenomena
(Searle, 1995, 2010), yet like many social institu-
tions, money is also objective because it exists inde-
pendently of the sole control of any individual—just
like markets, bank account balances, organizations,
and regulatory agencies. How does this work? It
works because real socioeconomic phenomena are
epistemologically objective.
The Dual Problems of Objectivity and
Postmodernism
We have demonstrated that the argument that
opportunities are objective because they are physical
objects does not make sense; it commits the age-old
error of conflating mind-dependent social phenom-
ena with mind-independent physical phenomena.
Neither does it work to say that market conditions
are objective because they are independent of all
humans. Humans create such market conditions.
We have also presented two sides of the same
error. The first is committed by objectivists who sug-
gest that everything—even socioeconomic phenom-
ena—is really physical, and so everything is
objective and mind independent. The second error
is committed by postmodern relativists who suggest
that everything—even a physical object—is really
social, and thus socially constructed, subjective, and
mind dependent. These are just different ways of
conflating the social world with the physical world.
These are the flip sides of the same mistake—a dual-
ity (Awodey, 2010).
The objectivists have offered a critically important
insight, however, by pointing to an important gap in
constructivist theory and asking how one explains
social and socioeconomic objectivity, like bank
account balances and corporations. Where could
such objective phenomena come from if not from the
objectivity of the physical world? If advocates of
opportunity creation agree that some socioeconomic
phenomena are as real as a “brick wall” (Alvarez &
Barney, 2013), then an explanation of how objectiv-
ity works in the mind-dependent social world is
needed. This is what we will try to do next.
THE OBJECTIVITY OF SOCIAL PHENOMENA
If Santa Claus and IBM are both socially con-
structed objects that exist only because we believe
that they exist, but only IBM is objectively real, what
is the difference? How can any social phenomenon
be objective if it is not physically objective? The
2022 McBride and Wuebker
similarity across physical and social things when
they are both “real” is that they are both independent
of us and often orthogonal to our desires and wishes.
But therein ends the similarity.
The answer to the puzzle is that Paris is the capital
of France because we believe and act as if it is. It is
epistemologically objective. IBM exists because we
believe and act as if it is. If no one believed that IBM
existed, it would no longer exist. And if social enti-
ties constitute cognitive states and the decisions,
behaviors, habits, and routines dependent upon
such states, then the only possible source for the
independent objectivity of any social entity must be
grounded in those same cognitive states. The reality
of any social phenomenon stems from the very struc-
ture that constitutes it—the stable beliefs of people;
in other words, its epistemology. This view is coher-
ent with social constructionism, which is the major-
ity view in philosophy and arguably the most
common position found across a diverse set of per-
spectives in social theory (e.g., Berger & Luckmann,
1967; Boghossian, 2007; DiMaggio & Powell, 1983;
Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Sayer, 2000; Searle, 1995,
2010; Weick, 1979).
The problem of how to explain social (epistemo-
logical) objectivity is explored in the fields of social
ontology and collective intentionality (e.g., Bratman,
1987, 2014; Epstein, 2015; Gilbert, 1992, 2015;
Searle, 1995, 2010; Tuomela, 2002, 2007, 2013).
How can a social entity be both constituted by peo-
ple’s cognitive states but at the same time objective
and independent of them? Because not every belief
matters equally, and not every belief matters all the
time, a social entity is real when there is some con-
sensus about its reality by those that implicitly or
explicitly behave in ways that assume it exists or
enable its existence. This is true of a game, an
exchange relationship, a market, a contract, a firm,
or an entrepreneurial venture. A social entity is
objectively real precisely because people (in the rele-
vant positions) believe it is real and treat it as such.
By contrast, a physical object is real because it exists
independently of how anyone treats it or what any-
one believes. These are two different and distinct
sources of objectivity.
Though distinct, it is important to note that the
physical world and the social world are not mutually
exclusive. The human imagination is capable of flu-
idly integrating the invented social world and the
physical world. Just as we might imagine that Thor
is the source of real thunder and lightning, so too can
we imagine that a nation state has boundaries on real
geography, that a university owns real buildings and
81
chalkboards (Epstein, 2015), and that a company can
own and mine a real copper mountain. If we are col-
lectively committed to the belief that a social entity,
like a town, contains a forest, then a fire that deci-
mates the forest has decimated part of the town.
A social entity can own, interact with, cause, and
be affected by objective, physical entities. But,
again, this is only possible because we are commit-
ted to the beliefs that Thor, the university, and the
town are related in those ways to those physical
phenomena.
IF OPPORTUNITIES ARE ONTOLOGICALLY
SUBJECTIVE, CAN WE STILL DO SCIENCE?
If opportunities are subjective and only made pos-
sible by mind-dependent cognitive states, how can
they be studied scientifically? Of course, epistemo-
logical fields already exist that study ontologically
subjective phenomena. The trick is focusing more
precisely on the critical components that make pos-
sible socioeconomic phenomena, and opportunities,
specifically.
The Core of Social Objectivity
Though there is much that has been said, and can
be debated, about the specific mechanics of social
objectivity, there is a “center of gravity” of such
efforts. Hume (1740/1978) and Berger and Luck-
mann (1967) emphasized the habits and behaviors
that establish social reality. March and Simon (1993)
emphasized rules (duties) and routines. Bratman
(1987, 2014) emphasized the intentions of individu-
als in small teams that determine team behavior.
Searle (1995, 2010) emphasized beliefs about what
he called “status functions”—meaning rights and
duties—established through a declarative speech
act. Gilbert (1992, 2015) highlighted the commit-
ments and the obligations (duties) necessary.
Although there are a diversity of approaches and def-
initions, there is broad agreement about the crucial
importance of cognitive states (broadly construed)
and the behaviors, habits, routines, and dispositions
that flow from those cognitive states. It therefore
seems reasonable to focus on the cognitive states first
and foremost since they determine the downstream
behavioral effects. Within the various discussions of
specific cognitive mechanics, and sometimes using
different terminology, work has orbited around two
cognitive phenomena specifically—beliefs on the
one hand, and deontics (rights and duties) on the
other—and almost every scholar that has studied
82 Academy of Management Review
the structure of social reality has relied upon both. A
reasonable generalization then, suggests that beliefs
and deontics are the core cognitive features that
make social phenomena objective. This is taken to
be “the standard model” in social ontology (Epstein,
2015; Guala, 2007).
Beliefs are cognitive representations that depict
some state of the world. Deontics are duties and
rights. Duties are the obligations that some individ-
ual or party has; rights are the permissible actions
that some individual or party can perform. Deontics
have often been described as a particular set of cogni-
tive beliefs (Gilbert, 1992, 2015; Ludwig, 2016, 2017;
Searle, 1995, 2010) or cognitive-behavioral phenom-
ena (Berger & Luckmann, 1967; Wood & McKinley,
2017). In what is arguably the dominant view (Gil-
bert, 1992, 2015; Ludwig, 2016, 2017; Searle, 1995,
2010), just as physical particles are the fundamental
building blocks of physical objects, beliefs and
deontics are the fundamental building blocks of
social entities. When a social entity like a marriage
or a role in an organization is created, these actions
bring duties and rights into existence. For example,
a married couple in the United States has rights to
certain tax deductions with both the state and fede-
ral governments, and they have the duty to make
medical decisions for one another. They have the
right to one another’s joint assets and a range of less
explicit, culturally determined rights and duties.
Similarly, a member of a board of directors might
have the duty to provide advice at board meetings
and the right to compensation as part of that
position.
Duties and rights exist when enough people (in
the right positions) believe and act as if they exist.
This is what brings a marriage, a board position, a
cofounder relationship, or a Delaware C-corporation
into existence. The stability and continuation of
those beliefs and deontics establish and maintain
this epistemological objectivity (i.e., the reality of
that social entity). Beliefs and deontics are the funda-
mental pieces that constitute and shape the objectiv-
ity of any social entity (Gilbert, 1992, 2015; Gordon
& McBride, 2018; Ludwig, 2016, 2017; Searle, 1995,
2010), and focusing on their roles allows us to com-
ment on how exactly this works.
Beliefs
We are almost always interested in collections
(i.e., aggregations) of beliefs. If we think of the kinds
of beliefs agents can entertain about a corporation,
for example, they might all possess the same belief,
January
such as “Apple makes the iPhone.” This implies the
belief that Apple exists and reinforces Apple’s exis-
tence. These are aggregative convergent beliefs—
beliefs where people converge on the same thought.
There are also aggregative coherent beliefs. For exam-
ple, Person A believes that “Apple makes the
iPhone,” Person B believes that “Apple has the larg-
est market capitalization,” and Person C believes
something else about Apple. These too imply that
Apple, as a social entity, exists, and so these too rein-
force its existence to some degree. Finally, there are
aggregative divergent beliefs. These are diverse but
contradictory. For example, Person A believes that
“Apple is secretly working on a smart car” while Per-
son B believes that “Apple is not secretly working on
a smart car.” Both sides of the contradiction make the
same presupposition about Apple’s existence. We
can refer to these categories more simply as conver-
gent beliefs, coherent beliefs, and divergent beliefs.
However, it should be noted that aggregations of
beliefs are not equally weighted. For example, deter-
mining the winner of a gymnastics event in the
Olympics depends on the beliefs of the judges more
than the spectators. The beliefs of Apple’s board of
directors that Steve Jobs should have been fired (and
eventually rehired) counted more than the share-
holders’ (or anyone else’s) beliefs. And Google’s
founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page’s beliefs about
their nascent search engine technology counted for
more than their Stanford advisor’s beliefs about the
project. Why do some people’s beliefs count more
than others? Typically, because some people hold
deontic roles that establish their right to influence an
associated social phenomenon more than others.
Deontics
Deontics are necessary to shape and establish the
epistemic objective existence of a social entity. It’s
not just that we believe money can be used for trans-
actions, we also believe that it confers upon the pos-
sessor certain rights and duties. You have the right to
use it as “legal tender for all debts, public and
private.” You also (at least in the United States) have
the duty not to burn or otherwise destroy it. You
might believe that the son of the tribal chief is the
rightful successor to the throne, but you also have
the right to complain if he is not chosen and the duty
to obey him. The cornerstone of civilization, the
agreement, and the formal version—the contract—is
simply the enumeration of rights and duties that
describe the permissible behavior of each party. A
founder that files articles of incorporation with the
2022 McBride and Wuebker
Department of Corporations is establishing their
legal right to operate, establishing both beliefs and
rights from the department, the state, and the federal
government. The incorporated entity now has the
duty to pay taxes as a legal entity, the right to open
bank accounts in the entity’s name, sign contracts on
behalf of the firm, and so on.
Although deontic relationships can be divided
into several types, the most relevant to consider for
our purposes here are whether the deontics exist in
the service of a common goal, a transactive goal, or
are imposed. Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald
Wayne came together and formed agreements among
themselves as the founders of Apple Computer Com-
pany (now Apple). These deontics were established
under the broader common goal of building a suc-
cessful firm (after they failed to sell their startup).
Apple has an agreement with Samsung to manufac-
ture touchscreens for Apple’s products. The con-
tractual agreement operates under a transactive
relationship, a situation where each derives benefits
from the exchange and enters into the agreement to
achieve different goals—for Samsung, the goal is to
receive capital, and for Apple, the goal is to receive
the needed parts. Common goal and transactive goal
agreements are voluntary agreements, but many of
the deontics within which we are entangled are
instead imposed upon people without their volun-
tary acceptance. As individuals, we are subject to an
enormous collection of duties, like civil and criminal
codes that govern the part of the world we happen to
be in, regardless of whether we want these imposed
obligations (see McBride, 2021, for a more extensive
discussion about the three core types of deontics—
imposed, voluntary, and autogenic/entrepreneurial).
Determining the Objectivity of Social Entities
The epistemic objectivity of any specific social
entity can be determined by looking at whether there
are aggregative (convergent, coherent, or divergent)
beliefs about it and whether there are deontics (com-
mon, transactive, or imposed). The application of
these principles can be abbreviated to a process
where, for any given social entity, we simply look
for a broad collection of beliefs and deontics. Apple
is an objective social entity because there are an
extraordinary number of diverse beliefs about it
from both inside and outside the organization, rang-
ing from beliefs held by governments, partners,
employees, customers, suppliers, and more (Padgett
& Powell, 2012). Many of these are identical
beliefs and convergent, many are different but
83
coherent, and some are contradictory and divergent.
On the deontic side, Apple has a wide variety of rela-
tionships with diverse agents and other social enti-
ties in the form of software license agreements and
supplier and employee contracts. Although deontics
are often structured under some kind of transactive
goal, many deontic relationships, especially those
internal to the firm, have extensive common goal
structures (firm objectives) under the background of
expected compensation (transactive relationships).
However, there are many different social entities
and few are so extremely objective. Imagine a “Bird
of the Week Bird-watching Club” that meets once
and might in the future conduct a bird-watching
field trip. Is the club an objective social entity?
Unless there are a wide variety of beliefs and
deontics associated with the club, the answer is no.
Only the organizer and a few people have even
thought about it, and the organizer has only one
vague self-imposed duty (to perhaps organize the
field trip). No one else has formed any belief, much
less a deontic agreement with the organizer or the
club. Many early startups are much closer to this
bird-watching club than to Apple.
The Spectrum of Social Objectivity in
Opportunities
It is clear then that the objectivity of social entities
spans a spectrum, from nonexistent and utterly sub-
jective (like the barely existing bird-watching club)
all the way up to a fully objective social entity like
Apple or the Canadian government. The greater the
number and the more diverse the beliefs and
deontics, the further toward the objective end of the
scale the social entity sits.
How do we assess the objectivity of an opportu-
nity? The same way that all social phenomena are
assessed—we examine whether the beliefs that con-
stitute the opportunity are widespread and diverse
and whether the deontics necessary for that opportu-
nity are widespread and exist among diverse parties.
If both hold, then it is an epistemically objective
opportunity. If both fail to hold, then it is an episte-
mically subjective opportunity. If both exist to some
moderate degree, then the opportunity falls some-
where along the spectrum.
Opportunities differ in how much agreement there
is about their viability, as noted by Sarasvathy, Dew,
Velamuri, and Venkataraman (2003) and others.
They differ in how much objective data exists in sup-
port of them, they differ in how far along the entre-
preneurs are in their effort to acquire such data, they
84 Academy of Management Review
differ in how many objective market conditions exist
to facilitate the realization of the opportunity, and
they differ in how “realized” (i.e., how integrated)
the opportunity already is into other deontic facets of
the socioeconomic environment. For example, a
profitable, stable 30-year-old franchise for sale
affords an opportunity of a sort. The knowledge that
comprises the purchase, running, and sale of the fran-
chise is well-known. There are 30 years of existing
sales data and a well-established operational infra-
structure. There is an extensive and well-established
collection of beliefs that comprise that vetted knowl-
edge and an extensive and well-established collec-
tion of deontic relationships including the franchise
owner, the franchisee, customers, and suppliers. The
opportunity is, in other words, an objective opportu-
nity. Contrast that with the origins of many technol-
ogy startups that often begin as nothing more than
a few beliefs about which there is often no wider
consensus and none of the deontic relationships
necessary to exercise the opportunity.
The fact that social phenomena, including opportu-
nities, fall on an epistemic spectrum is an important
point. It implies that there is no categorical answer to
the question about an opportunity’s epistemological
objectivity. The epistemic question, unlike the onto-
logical version, does not have a simple “yes” or “no”
categorical answer. All entrepreneurial opportuni-
ties, like all social phenomena, are ontologically sub-
jective, but we must look at each specific case and
examine whether there is a significant aggregation of
beliefs (convergent, coherent, and divergent) and
deontics (common goal, transactive goal, or imposed)
to determine its degree of epistemic objectivity.
IMPLICATIONS FOR ENTREPRENEURSHIP
AND MANAGEMENT
These arguments have a variety of implications for
entrepreneurship and management and for the social
sciences more broadly. Some of these implications
are discussed in this section.
Broader Implications
This paper offers an answer to the question: What
is social objectivity? The answer has three implica-
tions. It untangles the opportunity debate because
there are now criteria for what makes an opportunity
(or any social phenomena) objective, it clarifies a
critical divide between the physical sciences and the
social sciences, and it describes the “atomic parti-
cles” of any social phenomena.
January
The ontology–epistemology distinction decom-
posed the question “Are opportunities objective?”
into two separate questions, the first of which was
answered quickly: “No.” Opportunities are always
ontologically subjective. The more interesting ques-
tion was the second, epistemological one. But social
(epistemological) objectivity cannot be derived from
its physical objectivity. It is derived from the stable,
consistent beliefs and deontics in the minds of
people.
Part of what motivated the constructionist view
that opportunities are subjective was the belief that
the entire socioeconomic environment is socially
constructed. It is because it is mind dependent and
thereby ontologically subjective. What motivated
the discovery theorists was the fact that some oppor-
tunities are the result of real, objective imperfections
of the socioeconomic environment. This is also cor-
rect, but there is no contradiction. The socioeco-
nomic environment is both objective and subjective
in the sense that it is ontologically subjective but
often epistemologically objective. These are differ-
ent dimensions of objectivity, ones that are often
conflated.
Other than an interesting diversion into a question
about entrepreneurial opportunity, a tough-minded
management scholar might ask: “Who cares?” We
care because the fundamental structure that shapes
an opportunity shapes the entire socioeconomic
world and all the social phenomena that we study. It
is no exaggeration to say that finding the answer to
the question about what makes any social phenom-
ena objective might be the single most important
piece of the foundation for the future success of the
social sciences. Neither is it an exaggeration to say
that the failure to definitively answer this question
has caused innumerable problems and confusions,
including hindering advances in entrepreneurship
theory.
The opportunity debate is merely one instance of
the much larger question of how to understand
objectivity. Unfortunately, past attempts have often
privileged the physical world over the social world,
to suggest that everything is objectively real, physi-
cal, and mind independent (which must be false), or
they have made the postmodern error of privileging
the social world over the physical world, making
everything social, subjective, and mind dependent
(which must also be false). Physical objects are mind
independent. Social entities are mind dependent.
The physical is frequently conflated with the
social, and physical objectivity is frequently con-
flated with social objectivity. The temptation to
2022 McBride and Wuebker
lump everything under one of these two extremes is
the central hazard of social theorizing.
Pedagogical Implications
Taking the endogenous formation of opportunity
seriously implies that we should not instruct bud-
ding entrepreneurs to search for an opportunity like
they are searching for a hidden treasure, as discovery
theory suggests. Training students to search for a
“hidden” opportunity is less useful than coaching
them to develop the skills required to evaluate the
beliefs that form the opportunity idea and calibrating
those beliefs against estimates about the specific
deontics needed to execute that idea. It is critical to
learn how to propagate the beliefs that define the
idea and how to craft the relevant beliefs and
deontics among stakeholders that lead them to
assume obligations on behalf of the organization and
lead customers to engage in (deontic) transactions to
purchase goods or services from it.
Unfortunately, years of inculcating students in the
practice of information acquisition and assimilation
and years of suggesting that any budding entrepre-
neur should be able to answer profit projection ques-
tions ex ante (questions that are often unanswerable)
has taken the focus away from more important train-
ing involving hands-on practice in creating and shap-
ing social entities. Taking the implications of social
ontology seriously implies that the generation of arti-
facts (such as plans, business model specifications,
and pitch decks) and even some entrepreneurial
actions (like experimentation) are not always ends
but can also be the means with which to shape the
social world (Shelef, Wuebker, & Barney, 2019). Early
lived experience (and university courses) tends to
subtly reinforce the lesson that the social world is
fixed and that altering it is incredibly difficult, even
dangerous. Entrepreneurship requires unlearning
this. Until a student experiences the social world as
malleable, learns exactly what the levers of malleabil-
ity are, and then accumulates practice creating and
altering social reality, there is little hope that he will
magically do so while building a large organization,
dexterously assembling all the deontics necessary to
design a social vehicle that exercises the opportunity.
The Goal of Transforming Subjective Into
Objective Opportunities
An opportunity and the entity that exploits it are
distinct but intertwined. Both start somewhere along
the spectrum between epistemically subjective and
85
epistemically objective, but they do not remain
there. Typically, the goal of a team that exploits the
opportunity is to become, like any successful busi-
ness, tied into a network of collective beliefs and
deontics that promote its existence and persistence.
In other words, the goal is to turn a subjective oppor-
tunity into an objective opportunity.
To accomplish this goal, one must construct deon-
tic relationships (Dimov, 2011) which entails build-
ing production or distribution partnerships, forming
relationships with suppliers, attracting customers,
opening bank accounts, hiring attorneys to write
agreements, complying with local and federal regu-
lations, paying taxes to government entities, entering
agreements to get electricity in offices, and so on.
Each action is an additional deontic line tethering
that organization more firmly into an existing web of
social structures. The revealed core task of the entre-
preneur is to push an idea, theory, or plan from
something that might be merely epistemically sub-
jective into the realm of epistemic objectivity.
But the early-stage opportunity is often delicate,
with few beliefs about its viability and few deontic
agreements in place to establish the initial strands of
objectivity. As noted by Wood and McKinley (2017),
these small strands must be continually reproduced
through consensus among stakeholders about the
opportunity’s viability. The loss of these beliefs and
deontics leads to a dissolution and loss of the oppor-
tunity itself.
A Different View of the Entrepreneurial Firm
Several strands of conceptual and empirical work
offer explanations as to why firms exist. Two ration-
ales for the firm common to these explanations are
(a) establishing who has the right to make what kinds
of decisions and (b) how to determine the various
claims for the residual cash flows for the value the
firm creates and captures (Alvarez & Barney, 2005;
Barney, 2018; Gibbons, 2005). Entrepreneurship has
historically had an uneasy relationship with tradi-
tional theories of the firm, in part because entrepre-
neurs often must make choices about decision rights
and residual claims long before the economic value
of those choices can be known, even probabilisti-
cally (Alvarez & Barney, 2005; Garrouste & Saussier,
2005). When these traditional explanations of eco-
nomic organization are extended to innovative or
entrepreneurial settings, their utility becomes much
less clear.
While this paper connects and contributes to other
theories of the entrepreneurial firm that focus on
86 Academy of Management Review
asset ownership (Foss & Klein, 2012), resource coor-
dination (Alvarez & Barney, 2004; Nickerson &
Zenger, 2004), contracting and residual control (Van
Den Steen, 2010), and charismatic authority (Lan-
glois, 2007), it offers an alternative view of entrepre-
neurial organization grounded in the identification,
generation, and eventual distribution of beliefs and
deontic structures (Dimov, 2011).
In this view, organization building involves build-
ing a web of deontics (often in the form of agree-
ments) with cofounders, employees, customers,
investors, partners, stakeholders, regulatory agen-
cies, and others that establish the rights and duties of
the participants in those relationships (Barney,
2018). This view is coherent with, and provides an
expansion of, the nexus of contracts view (Jensen &
Meckling, 1976), in that any organization can be
seen as a web of agreements, but those agreements
can be analyzed in more precise detail in terms of
their deontics—the rights and duties that comprise
them.
Establishing Beliefs, Rights, and Duties
Entrepreneurial action, then, is not necessarily
about manifesting the cognitive biases “appropriate
for an entrepreneur” (Baron, 2004; Mitchell, Buse-
nitz, Lant, McDougall, Morse, & Smith, 2004; Saras-
vathy, 2001), discovering customers (Blank, 2012),
validating a business model (Zott, Amit, & Massa,
2011), catalyzing passion (Cardon, Wincent, Singh,
& Drnovsek, 2009), crafting a compelling narrative
(Lounsbury & Glynn, 2001), leveraging one’s net-
work of prior relationships (Stuart & Sorenson,
2007), writing a business plan, or filing a legal
entity—though all of those are relevant tools in the
right circumstances. It is, at a deeper level, about
establishing beliefs and crafting the deontics that
escalate the entrepreneurial team toward epistemic
objectivity and success.
Telling a compelling story, for example, is only
useful and relevant if that story succeeds in estab-
lishing a belief and compelling a stakeholder to
assume an obligation that benefits the effort (e.g.,
compels an investor to part with needed capital or a
manufacturer to extend advantageous credit terms,
or the customers to buy the product). Inexpensive
experimentation and learning by doing is only useful
if the results of that experiment calibrate the found-
ers’ beliefs so that they can more effectively find a
model for economic profit.
If entrepreneurial opportunities are essentially
social, and social phenomena are dependent on the
January
beliefs of others for their existence, then the critical
task of the entrepreneur is crafting beliefs and
deontics. Marketing is about shaping beliefs in
potential customers that might change deontic
behavior. Pitching is about shaping the beliefs of
potential stakeholders. Recruiting is about persuad-
ing the most qualified candidates that accepting a
position is in their best interest. The fundamental
activity of any opportunity exploitation, which con-
tinues as the opportunity matures into a durable and
sustainable economic entity, is the (endless) work of
shaping the beliefs and deontics both within the
organization and in those individuals and social
entities within the socioeconomic context that the
opportunity-exploiting vehicles need to grow.
Of course, the importance of shaping beliefs in
entrepreneurial settings is not a new idea (e.g., Gart-
ner, 1985). What is new here is the suggestion that
doing so is what establishes the reality of the entre-
preneurial effort and as such is the core entrepre-
neurial task. At first, entrepreneurs envision those
structures, and each action they take—building
production or distribution partnerships, forming
relationships with suppliers, transacting with cus-
tomers, complying with local and federal regula-
tions, paying taxes to government entities—tether
their nascent social structure more firmly into the
web of extant social structures. In this view, the core
task of the entrepreneur and the heart of entrepre-
neurial action is the identification, ordering, and dis-
semination of rights and duties that push an idea,
theory, or plan from something epistemically subjec-
tive into the realm of the epistemically objective.
Who are Entrepreneurs?
Within the theoretical framework developed here,
entrepreneurs can be thought of as individuals with
beliefs about how a particular bundle of resources
can generate economic value (Alvarez & Barney,
2007; Barney, 1986; Felin & Zenger, 2017; Foss &
Klein, 2012) who subsequently enroll stakeholders
to assist in the realization of their idea (Alvarez,
Young, & Woolley, 2015; Barney, 2018) through their
absorption of deontics. Early-stage efforts typically
operate under conditions of uncertainty where there
is little empirical support for their pivotal assump-
tions (e.g., that people will be willing to exchange
money for a “pet rock”). It is the job of the entrepre-
neur—the “first believer”—to propagate their beliefs
in others, building consensus around beliefs that are
often impossible to justify.
2022 McBride and Wuebker
The discovery view takes value as a given, and
many scholars working at the intersection of entre-
preneurship and organization theory (e.g., Alvarez &
Barney, 2004; 2005; Foss and Klein, 2012; Klein,
2008) have noted that this assumption has made it
difficult to theorize about why firms come into exis-
tence and the role that the firm itself might play in
the search for or creation of new value. It also
obscures the need for stakeholder enrollment in the
first place (Barney, 2018; Shelef et al., 2019).
The creation view has implications for entrepre-
neurial action and organizational theory. There is a
growing body of work exploring the specific organi-
zational challenges facing actors creating value
under conditions of Knightian uncertainty (e.g.,
Alvarez, Young, & Woolley, 2018; Burns et al., 2016;
Engel, Kaandorp, & Elfring, 2017; Mauer, Wuebker,
& Brettel, 2018; Shelef, Wuebker, & Barney, 2020;
Shelef et al., 2019). For example, stakeholders have
rights and responsibilities for the entrepreneurial
effort—some of which might include working for the
firm, but not necessarily. When stakeholders are ver-
tically integrated, they have one set of rights and
responsibilities; when they are not vertically inte-
grated, they have another set of rights and responsi-
bilities. Either way, they possess rights and
responsibilities on behalf of the effort.
There are opportunities for future work exploring
a new set of entrepreneurial traits—those associated
with the instantiation of beliefs and deontics. Some
have argued that the research on distinctive entre-
preneurial traits (e.g., Åstebro, Herz, Nanda, &
Weber, 2014; Low & McMillan, 1998) “appears to
have reached a dead end” (Aldrich, 1999: 76), but
this conclusion may be premature. Perhaps distinc-
tive traits have not been found because scholars are
looking in the wrong place. Entrepreneurship theory
might benefit from looking at the specific traits that
enable agents to propagate beliefs and deontics in
those around them. This work may draw inspiration
from work in entrepreneurship on social compe-
tence (e.g., Baron & Markman, 2003), entrepreneurial
empathy (McMullen, 2015), and narrative construc-
tion (Lounsbury & Glynn, 2001), or draw on related
insights from marketing (e.g., Cialdini, 1984), negoti-
ation, and relationship building.
Missing Beliefs and Missing Deontics Block the
Execution of an Opportunity
Beliefs and deontics constitute both the opportu-
nity idea and the organization that executes the idea,
so they are the core components crafted by the
87
entrepreneur toward the end of securing economic
profit. This means that lacking the relevant beliefs
and lacking the relevant deontics will block the for-
mation of the opportunity idea and its exercise.
Other entrepreneurs did not build Uber or Airbnb
(in part) because they did not possess the beliefs that
constitute those ideas. Such beliefs were also miss-
ing from the wider socioeconomic environment, so
they could not be discovered (Chesky, 2015; Wilson,
2011). Such an omission from the landscape does
not prevent the re-creation of the idea or the execu-
tion of it, but being forced to regenerate the idea sui
generis is nontrivial. Even once regenerated, a team
still faces the detailed, laborious work of building
out a huge web of deontic agreements that constitute
an organization honed to exercise that vision.
The collection of beliefs about an entrepreneurial
effort are shaped through careful thinking and imagi-
nation. There are pieces critical to the opportunity
without which the idea can never come to fruition.
The entrepreneurs behind ride-sharing platforms,
for example, held two beliefs: first, that millions of
private vehicles were an enormous untapped re-
source; and second, that it would be possible to
change society’s perspective on riding in a stranger’s
private vehicle. The more that the critical beliefs are
missing, “distant,” or impossible, the bigger the bar-
rier to forming the idea. The more elaborate and dif-
ficult the deontic framework required for building
the organization needed to exercise the opportunity,
the greater the barrier to building it.
Thiel and Masters (2014: 5–6) asked, “What
important truth do very few people agree with you
on?” and answered: “A good answer will take the fol-
lowing form: ‘Most people believe in x, but the truth
is the opposite of x.’” Put another way, Thiel and
Masters referred to a belief that is missing from the
general landscape (i.e., is not widely believed) that,
if combined with the relevant deontic relationships,
would generate profits. Heterogeneous beliefs, along
with heterogeneous ability in establishing and main-
taining appropriate deontic relationships, are mech-
anisms that enable economic profits to be created
and sustained.
You Cannot Search for and Discover What Does
Not Exist
When it comes to subjective opportunities—very
novel, innovative, ambitious, or very early-stage
opportunities—there is a reason why the discovery
theorist’s “treasure hunt model” fails: there is noth-
ing there to discover. It is not just that an opportunity
88 Academy of Management Review
is not a physical object but that there is no object of
any sort there. Beliefs constitute the idea for an
opportunity but there is no aggregation of beliefs or
deontics in a truly subjective opportunity by defini-
tion, so there is no noticeable collection of beliefs
that could be discovered.
Before Airbnb catalyzed a widespread change in
people’s beliefs about the viability of treating the
spare room in their home as a source of revenue,
beliefs and deontic agreements to do so simply did
not exist (in any noticeable number). In fact, that
aspect of Airbnb’s model was roundly rejected as
implausible by the venture capital firms the found-
ers attempted to enroll (Chesky, 2015). Arguing that
it would have been feasible to “discover” the Airbnb
model like a treasure in the forest is to suggest that
entrepreneurs somehow search the landscape for a
currently nonexistent, invisible belief and miracu-
lously point to something that does not exist.
Attempting an “entrepreneurial search” by running
revenue models of socioeconomic worlds with
“unrealistic” and endless missing belief premises is
an impossible prescription and does not match
observational accounts of what entrepreneurs do in
practice (e.g., Alvarez et al., 2015, 2018; Sarasvathy,
2001).
CONCLUSION
Management scholars are interested in a par-
ticular class of socioeconomic objects and activities.
Although the interests of our field span topics, levels
of analysis, and units of analysis, what unites
management scholars is our common interest in
mind-dependent social phenomena and the social-
organizational structures that facilitate the develop-
ment and exploitation of economic value.
Once the question about opportunity’s objectivity
is divided into an ontological and an epistemological
question, the debate is resolved, and we see that that
all social phenomena, including opportunities, are
ontologically subjective but vary on the continuum
of epistemic objectivity. Taking seriously the core
result—that any social phenomenon is made possi-
ble by beliefs and deontics—made it clear that any
opportunity, and any social structure built to exploit
it, must consist of beliefs and deontics, the greater
the number and diversity of which increases its (epi-
stemic) objectivity. Subjective opportunities involve
implausible, nonexistent, or “lone” beliefs. Objec-
tive opportunities and the entities built to exploit
them on the other end of the scale are grounded in
January
known and proven beliefs and already-existing
deontic relationships.
This work supplements social constructionist
views of entrepreneurial opportunity and describes a
new path toward an understanding of how economic
value—and social phenomena more broadly— are
created. The ontology of the social world is far more
complex than the ontology of the physical world,
and so the resultant confusions are understandable.
However, we have made progress on a basic frame-
work that renders some of this complexity approach-
able. Understanding that social phenomena are
mind dependent and physical phenomena are mind
independent will help avoid conflations of the two
in the future. Much more remains to be said, how-
ever. We invite others to join us in exploring new
applications of this perspective in entrepreneurship
specifically and management and all the social sci-
ences generally.
REFERENCES
Aldrich, H. 1999. Organizations evolving. Newbury Park,
CA: Sage.
Alexander, J. 1983. Theoretical logic in sociology, vol.
1–4. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Alvarez, S. A., & Barney, J. B. 2004. Organizing rent genera-
tion and appropriation: Toward a theory of the entre-
preneurial firm. Journal of Business Venturing, 19:
621–635.
Alvarez, S. A., & Barney, J. B. 2005. How do entrepreneurs
organize firms under conditions of uncertainty? Jour-
nal of Management, 31: 776–793.
Alvarez, S. A., & Barney, J. B. 2007. Discovery and crea-
tion: Alternative theories of entrepreneurial action.
Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, 1: 11–26.
Alvarez, S. A., & Barney, J. B. 2010. Entrepreneurship and
epistemology: The philosophical underpinnings of
the study of entrepreneurial opportunities. Academy
of Management Annals, 4: 557–583.
Alvarez, S. A., & Barney, J. B. 2013. Epistemology, oppor-
tunities, and entrepreneurship: Comments on Venka-
taraman, et al., (2012) and Shane (2012). Academy of
Management Review, 38: 154–157.
Alvarez, S. A., & Barney, J. B. 2019. Has the concept of
opportunities been fruitful in the field of entrepre-
neurship? Academy of Management Perspectives.
doi: 10.5465/amp.2018.0014
Alvarez, S. A., Barney, J. B., & Anderson, P. 2013. Perspec-
tive—forming and exploiting opportunities: The
implications of discovery and creation processes for
entrepreneurial and organizational research. Organi-
zation Science, 24: 301–317.
2022 McBride and Wuebker
Alvarez, S. A., Barney, J. B., McBride, R., & Wuebker, R.
2014. Realism in the study of entrepreneurship. Acad-
emy of Management Review, 39: 227–231.
Alvarez, S. A., Young, S. L., & Woolley, J. L. 2015. Oppor-
tunities and institutions: A co-creation story of the
king crab industry. Journal of Business Venturing,
30: 95–112.
Alvarez, S. A., Young, S. L., & Woolley, J. L. 2018. Creating
the world’s deadliest catch: The process of enrolling
stakeholders in an uncertain endeavor. Business &
Society, 59: 287–321.
Åstebro, T., Herz, H., Nanda, R., & Weber, R. A. 2014. Seek-
ing the roots of entrepreneurship: Insights from behav-
ioral economics. Journal of Economic Perspectives,
28: 49–70.
Awodey, S. 2010. Category theory. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford
University Press.
Baghramian, M., & Carter, A. 2015. Relativism. In E. N.
Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philoso-
phy. Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/
archives/win2015/entries/relativism/.
Baker, T., & Nelson, R. E. 2005. Creating something from
nothing: Resource construction through entrepreneur-
ial bricolage. Administrative Science Quarterly, 50:
329–366.
Barney, J. B. 1986. Strategic factor markets: Expectations,
luck, and business strategy. Management Science,
10: 1231–1241.
Barney, J. B. 2018. Why resource-based theory’s model of
profit appropriation must incorporate a stakeholder
perspective. Strategic Management Journal, 39:
3305–3325.
Baron, R. A. 2004. The cognitive perspective: A valuable tool
for answering entrepreneurship’s basic “why” questions.
Journal of Business Venturing, 19: 221–239.
Baron, R. A., & Markman, G. D. 2003. Beyond social capi-
tal: How social skills can enhance entrepreneurs’ suc-
cess. Academy of Management Executive, 14: 41–60.
Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. 1967. The social construc-
tion of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowl-
edge. New York, NY: Anchor.
Blank, S., & Dorf, B. 2020. The startup owner's manual:
The step-by-step guide for building a great com-
pany. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
Boghossian, P. 2007. Fear of knowledge: Against relativ-
ism and constructivism. Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon
Press.
Bratman, M. 1987. Intentions, plans, and practical rea-
son. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bratman, M. 2014. Shared agency: A planning theory of
acting together. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University
Press.
89
Braver, L., & Danneels, E. 2018. Propensities return us to
the discovery-creation debate about entrepreneurial
opportunities. Academy of Management Review, 43:
812–815.
Burns, B. L., Barney, J. B., Angus, R. W., & Herrick, H. N.
2015. Enrolling stakeholders under conditions of risk
and uncertainty. Strategic Entrepreneurship Jour-
nal, 10: 97–106.
Cardon, M. S., Wincent, J., Singh, J., & Drnovsek, M. 2009.
The nature and experience of entrepreneurial passion.
Academy of Management Review, 34: 511–532.
Casson, M. 1982. The entrepreneur: An economic theory.
Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Chesky, B. 2015, June 26. 7 rejections. Medium. Retrieved
from https://medium.com/@bchesky/7-rejections-
7d894cbaa084
Cialdini, R. B. 1984. Influence: The psychology of persua-
sion. New York, NY: Harper Collins.
Cornelissen, J. P., & Clarke, J. S. 2010. Imagining and ratio-
nalizing opportunities: Inductive reasoning and the
creation and justification of new ventures. Academy
of Management Review, 35: 539–557.
Davidsson, P. 2015. Entrepreneurial opportunities and the
entrepreneurship nexus: A re-conceptualization. Jour-
nal of Business Venturing, 30: 674–695.
DiMaggio, P. J., & Powell, W. W. 1983. The iron cage revis-
ited: Institutional isomorphism and collective ratio-
nality in organizational fields. American Sociological
Review, 48: 147–160.
Dimov, D. 2007. Beyond the single-person, single-insight
attribution in understanding entrepreneurial opportu-
nities. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 31:
713–731.
Dimov, D. 2011. Grappling with the unbearable elusive-
ness of entrepreneurial opportunities. Entrepreneur-
ship Theory and Practice, 35: 57–81.
Durkkeim, E. 1895/1982. The rules of sociological
method. S. Lukes (Ed.). New York, NY: The Free
Press.
Eckhardt, J. T., & Ciuchta, M. P. 2008. Selected variation:
The population-level implications of multistage selec-
tion in entrepreneurship. Strategic Entrepreneurship
Journal, 2: 209–224.
Eckhardt, J. T., & Shane, S. A. 2003. Opportunities and entre-
preneurship. Journal of Management, 29: 333–349.
Eckhardt, J. T., & Shane, S. A. 2012. Response to the com-
mentaries: The IO nexus integrates objective and sub-
jective aspects of entrepreneurship. Academy of
Management Review, 38: 160–163.
Eckhardt, J. T., & Shane, S. A. 2013. Response to the com-
mentaries: The individual-opportunity (IO) nexus
integrates objective and subjective aspects of
90 Academy of Management Review
entrepreneurship. Academy of Management Review,
38: 160–163.
Engel, Y., Kaandorp, M., & Elfring, T. 2017. Toward a
dynamic process model of entrepreneurial networking
under uncertainty. Journal of Business Venturing,
32: 35–51.
Epstein, B. 2015. The ant trap: Rebuilding the founda-
tions of the social sciences. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Felin, T., & Zenger, T. R. 2017. The theory-based view:
Economic actors as theorists. Strategy Science, 2:
258–271.
Fleetwood, S. 2005. Ontology in organization and manage-
ment studies: A critical realist perspective. Organiza-
tion, 12: 197–222.
Fleetwood, S., & Ackroyd, S. 2004. Critical realist appli-
cations in organization and management studies.
Hove, U.K.: Psychology Press.
Foss, N. J., & Klein, P. G. 2012. Organizing entrepreneur-
ial judgment: A new approach to the firm. Cam-
bridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
Foss, N. J., & Klein, P. G. 2017. Entrepreneurial discovery
or creation? In search of the middle ground. Academy
of Management Review, 42: 733–736.
Foss, N. J., & Klein, P. G. 2018. Entrepreneurial opportuni-
ties: Who needs them? Academy of Management
Perspectives, 34: 366–377.
Foss, N. J., Klein, P. G., Kor, Y. Y., & Mahoney, J. T. 2008.
Entrepreneurship, subjectivism, and the resource-
based view: Toward a new synthesis. Strategic Entre-
preneurship Journal, 2: 73–94.
Gaglio, C. M., & Katz, J. A. 2001. The psychological basis of
opportunity identification: Entrepreneurial alertness.
Small Business Economics, 16: 95–111.
Garrouste, P., & Saussier, S. 2005. Looking for a theory of
the firm: Future challenges. Journal of Economic
Behavior & Organization, 58: 178–199.
Gartner, W. B. 1985. A conceptual framework for describ-
ing the phenomenon of new venture creation. Acad-
emy of Management Review, 10: 696–706.
Gibbons, R. 2005. Four formal(izable) theories of the firm?
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 58:
200–245.
Gilbert, M. 1992. On social facts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Gilbert, M. 2015. Joint commitment: How we make the
social world. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press.
Gordon, B., & McBride, R. 2018. Toward a unified account
of the firm: Deontic architecture. In A. Fayolle, S.
Ramoglou, M. Karatas-Ozkan, & K. Nicolopoulou
January
(Eds.), Philosophical reflexivity and entrepreneur-
ship research: 265–361 (ebook numbering). London,
U.K.: Routledge.
Graeber, D. 2014. Debt: The first 5000 years. Brooklyn,
NY: Nelville House Publishing.
Guala, F. 2007. The philosophy of social science:
Metaphysical and empirical. Philosophy Compass, 2:
954–980.
Hart, H. L. A. 1961. The concept of law. Oxford, U.K.:
Clarendon.
Hume, D. 1978. A treatise of human nature, 2nd ed. New
York, NY: Oxford University Press. (Original work
published 1740.)
Jensen, M. C., & Meckling, W. H. 1976. Theory of the
firm: Managerial behavior, agency costs and owner-
ship structure. Journal of Financial Economics, 3:
305–360.
Kirzner, I. M. 1973. Entrepreneurship and competition.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Kirzner, I. M. 1979. Perception, opportunity and profit:
Studies in the theory of entrepreneurship. Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press.
Kirzner, I. M. 2009. The alert and creative entrepreneur:
A clarification. Small Business Economics, 32: 145–152.
Klein, P. 2008. Opportunity discovery, entrepreneurial
action, and economic organization. Strategic Man-
agement Journal, 2: 175–190.
Knight, F. 1921. Risk, uncertainty, and profit. Boston,
MA: Hart, Schaffner & Marx.
Langlois, R. N. 2007. The entrepreneurial theory of the
firm and the theory of the entrepreneurial firm. Jour-
nal of Management Studies, 44: 1107–1124.
Lawson, C., Latsis, J. S., & Martins, N. (Eds.) 2013. Contri-
butions to social ontology. London, U.K.: Routledge.
Lounsbury, M., & Glynn, M. A. 2001. Cultural entrepre-
neurship: Stories, legitimacy, and the acquisition
of resources. Strategic Management Journal, 22:
545–564.
Low, M. B., & MacMillan, I. C. 1988. Entrepreneurship:
Past research and future challenges. Journal of Man-
agement, 14: 139–161.
Ludwig, K. 2016. Understanding collective action: From
individual to plural agency: Collective action 1.
Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press.
Ludwig, K. 2017. Understanding collective action: From
plural to institutional agency: Collective action 2,
Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press.
Luksha, P. 2008. Niche construction: The process of oppor-
tunity creation in the environment. Strategic Entre-
preneurship Journal, 2: 269–283.
2022 McBride and Wuebker
March, J. G., & Simon, H. A. 1993. Organizations (2nd
ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
Martin, F. 2015. Money: The unauthorized biography
from coinage to cryptocurrencies. New York, NY:
Vintage.
Mauer, R., Wuebker, R., Schl€
uter, J., & Brettel, M. 2018.
Prediction and control: An agent-based simulation of
search processes in the entrepreneurial problem
space. Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, 12:
237–260.
McBride, R. 2021. Deontic binding: imposed, voluntary,
and autogenic. Social Epistemology. doi: 10.1080/
02691728.2021.1996657
McMullen, J. S., & Shepherd, D. A. 2006. Entrepreneurial
action and the role of uncertainty in the theory of the
entrepreneur. Academy of Management Review, 31:
132–152.
Meyer, J. W., & Rowan, B. 1977. Institutionalized organiza-
tions: Formal structure as myth and ceremony. Ameri-
can Journal of Sociology, 83: 340–363.
Mitchell, R. K., Busenitz, L., Lant, T., McDougall, P. P.,
Morse, E. A., & Smith, J. B. 2004. The distinctive and
inclusive domain of entrepreneurial cognition
research. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 28:
505–518.
Montuschi, E. 2007. Real, invented or applied? Some
reflections on scientific objectivity and social ontol-
ogy. Contributions to Social Ontology, 15: 177–191.
Mueller, A. 2016, December 20. Ten fundamental laws of
economics. Mises Institute. Retrieved from https://
mises.org/wire/ten-fundamental-laws-economics.
Nickerson, J. A., & Zenger, T. R. 2004. A knowledge-based
theory of the firm—The problem-solving perspective.
Organization Science, 15: 617–632.
Padgett, J. F., & Powell, W. W. 2012. The emergence of
organizations and markets. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Ramoglou, S., & Tsang, E. W. K. 2016. A realist per-
spective of entrepreneurship: Opportunities as pro-
pensities. Academy of Management Review, 41:
410–434.
Ramoglou, S., & Tsang, E. W. K. 2017. In defense of com-
mon sense in entrepreneurship theory: Beyond philo-
sophical extremities and linguistic abuses. Academy
of Management Review, 42: 736–744.
Ramoglou, S., & Tsang, E. W. K. 2018. Opportunities lie in
the demand side: Transcending the discovery-
creation debate. Academy of Management Review,
43: 815–818.
Reed, M. 2005. Reflections on the “realist turn” in organi-
zation and management studies. Journal of Manage-
ment Studies, 42: 1621–1644.
91
Sarasvathy, S. 2001. Causation and effectuation: Toward a
theoretical shift from economic inevitability to entre-
preneurial contingency. Academy of Management
Review, 26: 243–263.
Sarasvathy, S. D., Dew, N., Velamuri, S. R., & Venkatara-
man, S. 2003. Three views of entrepreneurial opportu-
nity. In Z. J. Acs & D. B. Audretsch (Eds.), Handbook
of entrepreneurship research: 141–160. Boston, MA:
Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Sayer, A. 2000. Realism and social science. London, U.K.:
Sage.
Schumpeter, J. A. 1942. Capitalism, socialism, and
democracy. New York, NY: Harper and Brothers.
Scott, R. W. 2014. Institutions and organizations. London,
U.K.: Sage Publications.
Searle, J. R. 1969. Speech acts: An essay in the philoso-
phy of language. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Searle, J. R. 1995. Construction of social reality. New
York, NY: Free Press.
Searle, J. R. 2010. Making the social world: The structure
of human civilization. New York, NY: Oxford Univer-
sity Press.
Shane, S. 2000. Prior knowledge and the discovery of
entrepreneurial opportunities. Organization Science,
11: 448–469.
Shane, S. 2003. A general theory of entrepreneurship:
The individual-opportunity nexus. Northampton,
MA: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Shane, S. 2012. Reflections on the 2010 AMR decade
award: Delivering on the promise of entrepreneurship
as a field of research. Academy of Management
Review, 37: 10–20.
Shane, S., & Eckhardt, J. 2003. The individual-opportunity
nexus. In Z. J. Acs & D. B. Audretsch (Eds.), Hand-
book of entrepreneurship research: 161–191. Bos-
ton, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Shane, S., & Venkataraman, S. 2000. The promise of entre-
preneurship as a field of research. Academy of Man-
agement Review, 25: 217–226.
Shelef, O., Wuebker, R, & Barney, J. B. 2020. Heisenberg
effects in experiments on business ideas. 2020. Avail-
able at SSRN: http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3581255.
Stuart, T. E., & Sorenson, O. 2007. Strategic networks and
entrepreneurial ventures. Strategic Entrepreneur-
ship Journal, 1: 211–227.
Taylor, O. H. 1929. Economics and the idea of natural
laws. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 44: 1–39.
Thaler, R. H. 2015. Misbehaving: The making of behav-
ioral economics. New York, NY: W.W. Norton &
Company.
92 Academy of Management Review
Thiel, P. A., & Masters, B. 2014. Zero to one: Notes on
startups, or how to build the future. New York, NY:
Broadway Business.
Tuomela, R. 2002. The philosophy of social practices: A
collective acceptance view. Cambridge, U.K.: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Tuomela, R. 2007. The philosophy of sociality. Oxford,
U.K.: Oxford University Press.
Tuomela, R. 2013. Social ontology: Collective intention-
ality and group agents. New York, NY: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Van den Steen, E. 2010. Interpersonal authority in a theory
of the firm. American Economic Review, 100:
466–490.
Venkataraman, S., Sarasvathy, S. D., Dew, N., & Forster,
W. R. 2012. Reflections on the 2010 AMR decade
award: Whither the promise? Moving forward with
entrepreneurship as a science of the artificial. Acad-
emy of Management Review, 37: 21–33.
Weick, K. E. 1979. The social psychology of organizing.
New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
Wilson, F. 2011, March 16. Airbnb. Retrieved from
https://avc.com/2011/03/airbnb/.
Wood, M. S., & McKinley, W. 2010. The production of entre-
preneurial opportunity: A constructivist perspective.
Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, 4: 66–84.
January
Wood, M. S., & McKinley, W. 2017. After the venture: The
reproduction and destruction of entrepreneurial
opportunity. Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal,
11: 18–35.
Wood, M. S., & McKinley, W. 2018. The entrepreneurial
opportunity construct: Dislodge or leverage? Acad-
emy of Management Perspectives, 34: 352–365.
Zott, C., Amit, R., & Massa, L. 2011. The business model:
Recent developments and future research. Journal of
Management, 37: 1019–1042.
Russ McBride (russ.mcbride@ucmerced.edu) is an Assis-
tant Professor at the University of California, Merced, in
the Department of the Management of Complex Systems
and a Visiting Professor the Entrepreneurship & Strategy
Department at the University of Utah. He received his
PhD from UC Berkeley in philosophy under John Searle
and George Lakoff.
Robert Wuebker (Robert.Wuebker@eccles.utah.edu) is an
Assistant Professor in the Department of Entrepreneur-
ship and Strategy, David Eccles School of Business, Uni-
versity of Utah.