دانلود رایگان مقاله دانش به عنوان منبع فرصت

Abstract

In this paper, we show how Davidson's theory of knowledge can be used to elaborate the objective, intersubjective and subjective components of knowledge. Departing from Hayek's core insights about the dispersion of knowledge in society, we reiterate that opportunities involve subjective knowledge such as judgment and imagination, intersubjective knowledge of the social and institutional context, as well as knowledge about objective realities “out there”.

3. Implications

Above, we have outlined how it is possible to bypass some of the ontological troubles of the debate on opportunities by using Davidson's tripod of knowledge to help us understand the objective, intersubjective and subjective elements of opportunities. Instead of considering opportunity as an ontological category, we suggest that opportunities are composed of three types of knowledge that are weaved together in the entrepreneurial process. An opportunity proper thus contains three forms of knowledge. Notably, this introduces an important processual and temporal dimension to entrepreneurship (Korsgaard et al., 2016; McMullen and Dimov, 2013), as the collection of these knowledge components takes time. Also, entrepreneurs may need different techniques and approaches to obtain the knowledge in question. Objective knowledge may thus oftentimes best be obtained through research intensive analytical approaches, while intersubjective knowledge may best be obtained through experimenting and collaborative efforts. Subjective knowledge oftentimes resides in processes which are difficult to manage and depend to some extent on serendipity and highly idiosyncratic factors. Following this line of thinking, entrepreneurial processes are processes of knowledge creation and collection. And dependent on the ordering and priorities of the different types of knowledge, entrepreneurial processes likely will unfold in many different ways. Tracking and understanding the knowledge creation and collection of entrepreneurs thus becomes a vital task, and perhaps our research time is better spent doing this, as opposed to discussing at length the ontological refineries of opportunity as a concept (Crawford et al., 2016).