The intersection of entrepreneurship and selling : an interdisciplinary review, framework, and future research agenda

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Matthews, Russell S. and Chalmers, Dominic M. and Fraser, Simon S. (2018) The intersection of entrepreneurship and selling : an interdisciplinary review, framework, and future research agenda. Journal of Business Venturing, 33 (6). pp. 691-719. ISSN 0883-9026 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusvent.2018.04.008)

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Abstract

Selling is integral to entrepreneurship, yet it has rarely been a focal topic of analysis for entrepreneurship scholars. To address this, we undertake a broad-ranging systematic literature review of research that in some way explores selling within entrepreneurial contexts. We inductively develop a framework that orders extant research into selling antecedents, activities, contexts, and outcomes. Then, drawing on these entrepreneurship-selling intersections, we suggest opportunity theory can be extended by integrating critical insights from selling literatures. In particular, we address ego-centric views of entrepreneurship which prioritize entrepreneurial agency, and advocate for the incorporation of customer agency into synchronized processes of opportunity identification, refinement, and exploitation. The article concludes that a promising avenue for future theory development resides in the study of situated sales interactions, which can serve as an empirical vista to the underexplored entrepreneur-customer nexus.

ORCID iDs

Matthews, Russell S. ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5172-0409, Chalmers, Dominic M. ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5626-3692 and Fraser, Simon S.;
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)