Enacting entrepreneurship research in a pioneering,provocative and participative way: on the work of Bengt Johannisson

Bengt Johannisson received the International Award for Entrepreneurship and Small Business Research in 2008. In this essay we present and evaluate his work over the last four decades in three of its dimensions: pioneering, provocative and participative. While his research interests and themes range widely, early on he resisted the individualization of entrepreneurship studies and instead emphasized that entrepreneurship is a social practice that must be contextualized, localized and situated. In so doing, he uses such concepts as networks, industrial districts, regions and local communities. Making interpretive studies possible in a European context, his conceptual and methodological approach documents how future studies of entrepreneurship can be enacted as a reflexive, participative practice where methods of research, intervention and debate become blurred.