“We are experts on elite entrepreneurs”: A call to integrate marginalized populations into entrepreneurship research

Scholarship on entrepreneurship in top management journals has disproportionately focused on elites, leading our field to develop a great deal of understanding about a select few in society. Collectively, this bias has led to deeper expertise on elite entrepreneurs relative to entrepreneurs with different backgrounds, such as those from marginalized populations. We note the conceptual and prescriptive limitations of this traditional focus and draw attention to the importance of integrating research involving individuals from marginalized populations to improve our theories and prescriptions. Centering our discussion on the relationship between entrepreneurship and employment, we explore the focus on elites in top management journals, highlight exceptions to this focus, and propose a set of research questions as a path to more integrated and robust scholarship on entrepreneurship as represented in top management journals. In particular, we explore ways that our field can better understand when and how employment leads to entrepreneurship, how to better theorize the relationship between one’s past entrepreneurial experience and subsequent employment, and how a richer set of entrepreneurial outcomes can be examined. In each of these cases, we argue that integrating marginalized populations is not merely a matter of representativeness but is essential for strengthening our conceptual frameworks and analyses.