The Social Structure of Entrepreneurial Education as a Scientific Field

Entrepreneurial education as a scientific field can be regarded as an emerging and growing area of research. In this study we pay particular attention to the community of scholars involved in entrepreneurial education. The aim of the paper is to explore how scholars within the field have integrated into larger scholarly communities. Based on a unique database and web-based responses from 313 entrepreneurial education scholars, we demonstrate that scholars within the field exhibit great variety in their scientific outlooks and appreciation of communication systems. However, we find that the field consists of four scholarly communities characterized by a specific combination of scholarly inspirations, favorite meeting places, and publication channels, of which three clusters are anchored in the field of entrepreneurship, and only one cluster shows a strong entrepreneurial education research identity. Finally, the results indicate a low consolidation across the scholarly communities, which highlights the need for reflections on how the field can achieve increased integration and cohesion in the future.