A few years later another set of scholars (Bygrave & Hoffer 1991; Gaglio 1997; Kirzner 1997; Venkataraman 1997; Eckhardt & Shane 2003; Shane & Venkataraman 2000; Shane 2000, 2003; Gaglio & Katz 2001; Van Gelderen 2004) engaged in a second entrepreneurial act attempting to define the subject of entrepreneurial study. Gartner (1990) previously suggested entrepreneurship is inherently at odds with distinct definition and that such attempts often miss the most intense and variable moments, but, nonetheless, these other theorists insisted on positioning a unique analytical construct at the centre of entrepreneurial study. They suggested other disciplines of management and organizational study overlapped into studies of entrepreneurship and in doing so questioned the legitimacy, precision and imitability of scholars' commitment to the study of entrepreneurial behaviour and psychological characteristics (Shane & Venkataraman 2000). Subsequently, there has been a Porteresque formalising of disciplinary boundaries around the
27 inimitable construct of 'entrepreneurial opportunities'. This is significant because before the new organization Gartner speaks of actors imagining ‘as if’ these other authors assume there already exists a ready-made opportunity to organize it that exists independently of actors' experience. Suddenly, then, the analytical gaze abstracts away from experiences of organizational creativity again and is retrained upon explaining entrepreneurship through determinations inherent in the make-up of entrepreneurs and their relationship to existing market interstices.
The most visible proponents in this setting of grounds was Scott Shane and Sankaran
Venkataraman (Shane 1997; Shane & Venkataraman 2000; Shane 2000, 2003), associated most immediately with strategic management (Barney 1991). They retrained attention upon the subjective life circumstances of individuals and how they cohere with opportunities held in markets. The 'Individual-Opportunity nexus' (ION), they presented posed entrepreneurship as the “study of sources of opportunities; the processes of discovery, evaluation, and exploitation of opportunities; and the set of individuals who discover, evaluate, and exploit them” (Shane & Venkataraman 2000:218, original emphasis).
Dig into this and opportunities are assumed to be new 'means-ends' relationships whereby services, goods and practices are introduced to market at higher price than their assembling cost (Shane & Venkataraman 2000). Actors commit uncritically to business for the sake of profit, finding new means-ends relationships through adapting their business and personal
configurations to the request of gaps perceived to be ready-made and face them as an objective organizational presence found in markets (Shane 1997; Shane 2000; Shane & Venkataraman 2000). Normative why's are attributed to particular cases (Berglund 2011:5), and actors fit (Dimov 2007b; Sarasvathy 2008:42) their subjective life circumstances with their market settings. They play a jigsaw solving role as the strong willed rational homo economicus able to identify correct opportunity information (itself rationalistic in that superior kinds exist).
The ION goes on to suggest there is no entrepreneurship without opportunities (Shane 2000:220), yet insists there are opportunities without actors. It has opportunities existing as independent entitative, objective spaces emerging exogenously in markets that actors have to correctly decipher (Shane 1997, 2000; Shane & Venkataraman 2000; Kirzner 1979; Casson
28 1982). Opportunities are teleological, goal oriented, “concrete and real” (Gartner 2003:108), and necessarily edged in competitive interest because they are assumed to exist 'out there' and set actors at odds with one another over rival resources and market openings. The upshot of this is that the ION seems to jump ahead of Gartner's interest in the organizational creativity and how opportunities for new organization are lifted from circumstance in the lives of actors themselves to instead retrospectively conjecture as to their source in markets and marvel at their unfolding from the point that successful organization has presence. Actors in turn are distinguished by their miraculous abilities to transcend opportunity experience and perceive openings for
organizational creativity before practice has composed them. Rather than opportunities emerging endogenously within practice as Gartner suggests, then, because the ION has opportunities somehow separate from actors' lives, the view ignores experience the instant opportunities are discovered.
To recognize opportunities actors have the unenviable task of being alert (Kirzner 1979) to informational disequilibrium (Casson 1982) between themselves and competitors; the more alert they are the more 'correct' their description of the opportunity is (Shane & Venkataraman 2000; Kirzner 1979, 1997). The ION therefore commits actors to specific modes of action and
environmental representations (Busenitz et al 2003; Alvarez & Barney 2007; Short et al 2010) in which they grope around for correct information through audits of Knightian risk, searching for ready-made opportunities and bundling psychological, cognitive, and business-oriented resources for pre-defined orthodox ends (interest in profit and status). Alertness varies and is distributed amongst actors and therefore determines performance (Shane 1997, 2000; Shane &
Venkataraman 2000; Kirzner 1997). It is subjective to the degree that the residue of historical advantage won, risk calculations, resources bundled and genetic and psychological make-up cohere and correctly map onto futuristic commercial possibilities embedded in markets (Shane 1997; 2000). Context matters only as a stubborn, realist environment actors either describe correctly or incorrectly, depending on the requisite composition of their history. The upshot of this is that attention turns again to the particular nature of particular kinds of entrepreneurial actors (McMullen 2007), 'outside' appears quantitative, divisible, geometric and predictable (Alvarez & Barney 2007; Busenitz et al 2003), and the isomorphic impress of 'outside' appears to
29 'educate' actors about their possibilities and pose them in at odds in their competitive dexterity to discover, evaluate and exploit opportunities.
Significantly, while the opportunity construct is then positioned centrally in the discipline (Shane & Venkataraman 2000; Shane 2000; Short et al 2010; McMullen et al 2007; Alvarez & Barney 2007; Busenitz et al 2003; Plummer et al 2007; Sarasvathy et al 2010), the nature of
entrepreneurial opportunities is assumed at the expense of understanding organizational creativity and the nature of entrepreneurial opportunities from the perspective of actors
themselves. Through opportunity being posed as an analytical construct always at an adjunct to actors’ lives, how opportunity emerges or is recognised is very difficult to study in vivo, and conjecture toward contextual determinations and forces already inherent in practice must be made retrospectively or through prediction. This suggests that this so-called ‘discovery
perspective’ and the equilibrium approaches it is based upon precludes entrepreneurial creativity pre-empting the emergence of entrepreneurial opportunity. The construct of entrepreneurial opportunity reproduces the analytical distinction between actors and their settings, as
opportunities are found exogenously with instant presence, configured with normative business interests, and are exploited through particular action scripts favoured by certain heroic
individuals (Busenitz et al 2003; Alvarez & Barney 2007; McMullen et al 2007; Short et al 2010). Variable intentions, different ways of relating to circumstance, peculiar modes of action, and the significance of time and occasion are omitted, and interest focused upon how
possibilities are lifted from circumstance in the lives of actors themselves cannot be studied. Instead, analyses are still driven to explain performance, why actors respond to opportunities in particular ways, and those who are likely to respond. Yet opportunity recognition implicates an actor or group of actors experiencing the emergence and creation of possibilities from their surroundings, which suggests that, because the ION poses these possibilities as existing distinct from life, animating the experience of opportunity recognition is very difficult. Studies interested in processes of organizational creativity are given new constructs and concepts able to unify the domain, yet if opportunity is iconic of potential organizational creativity then how such
possibilities emerge other than through mystical movements of industries and economies is made difficult to study.
30 Suddenly, potential study is thrown back into a similar impasse Gartner paused upon; either there is an inescapable institutional impress actors are thrown about in and are, therefore, not worth the study, or actors are somehow able to miraculously transcend the experience, travel outside themselves through time, find opportunity as a ready-made form of successful organization, and bring it back, which makes them seem rare inimitable types again. The epistemological
assumption is that actors somehow capture information about organizational success that does not yet exist. Business is uncritically engaged with, and practice emerges from immutable and homogeneous motivations and interests shared equally across actors. 'Ends' stay the same through time and hold across all entrepreneurial groups, entrepreneurship merely discovers new paths to the same time old destination. The practical homo economicus engages in withdrawn rationalistic quests for opportunity information, and neutrally processes precise and objective data to retrieve opportunity from logically ordered entrepreneurial environments.
Others have already responded to these issues, leading to division in the field (Berglund 2007; Busenitz et al 2003; Dimov 2007a, 2007b, 2011; Hansen et al 2011; Plummer et al 2007; Short et al 2010; Alvarez et al 2007; Sarasvathy et al 2010) between arguments in the opportunity recognition literature that propose opportunities are discovered (Kirzner 1979, 1997; Shane 2000; Shane & Venkataraman 2000) and arguments that suggest opportunities are created (Hills, Shrader & Lumpkin 1999; Weick 1979; Gartner 1993, 2007; Gartner et al 2003; Ardichvili, Cardozo & Ray 2003; Fletcher 2003). In the vein of Gartner and Weick, scholars having opportunities as created suggest analyses of opportunity recognition relate to specific academic and business territories, and suggest that opportunities are iconic of organization-in-creation within the experience of actors themselves. Opportunities are always coupled to social
experience through being related to something before and something else 'outside', and whether deemed discovered or created it is “the culture, society and the institutions (of capitalism, family, market, economy, enterprise discourse) in which the are reproduced” that texture them and how actors become entrepreneurial (Fletcher 2004:434). Specific entrepreneurial spaces, actors, practices, times, intentions, and language all shape the phenomena but are shaped by opportunity too (Short et al 2010; Busenitz et al 2003; Gartner et al 2003; Berglund 2011; McMullen et al 2007; Alvarez & Barney 2007; Fletcher 2004; Ireland & Webb 2007). In response invitations are issued to study organizational creativity through opportunities that emerge over time during
31 ordinary practice and can involve multiple ways of relating to commercial setting and inherited practice (Busenitz et al 2003; Alvarez & Barney 2007; Dimov 2007a, 2007b, 2011; Gartner et al 2003; Gartner 2007, 2011; McMullen et al 2007; Short et al 2010; Berglund 2007, 2011). There is more than just an opening to reinsert important personal and situational elements often
obscured by the normative scholarly gaze here- the invitation being to engage with experiences of opportunity themselves, which are conceived as being embedded in commercial setting yet somehow lifting possibilities for organizational creativity and taking to business to create new organization. In doing so, the heroism of the distinct entrepreneurial self, the fatalism of
determination by context, and the problematic notion of opportunity as distinct from experience fall away, and actors are observed working imaginatively with their settings, struggling, and having to connect and articulate their personal visions via a deeply social experience. This maintains the authority of the opportunity construct for entrepreneurial study, but only through intervening in such studies so that rather than simply being an analytical construct
entrepreneurial opportunity can be approached and studied as organization-in-creation in the lives of actors themselves.