Keywords

In this chapter, we explicitly describe a controversial theorizing tool—anthropomorphizing. In doing so, we highlight the usefulness of this tool for furthering our understanding of entrepreneurial phenomena by combining loose and strict thinking (as suggested by Bateson [1941] in the quote below) while also acknowledging its limitations (as expressed in the Allport [1924] quote below).

I want to emphasize that whenever we pride ourselves upon finding a newer, stricter way of thought or exposition; whenever we start insisting too hard upon “operationalism” or symbolic logic or any other of these very essential systems of tramlines, we lose something of the ability to think new thoughts. And equally, of course, whenever we rebel against the sterile rigidity of formal thought and exposition and let our ideas run wild, we likewise lose. As I see it, the advances in scientific thought come from a combination of loose and strict thinking, and this combination is the most precious tool of science. (Bateson, 1941)

Impressed by the closely knit and reciprocal nature of the social behavior, some writers have been led to postulate a kind of “collective mind” or “group consciousness” as separate from the minds of the individuals of who the group is composed. No fallacy is more subtle and misleading than this. It has appeared under numerous guises; but has everywhere left the reader in a state of mystical confusion. (Allport, 1924, p. 4)

Anthropomorphizing refers to imbuing non-human agents (e.g., computers, robots, and new ventures) or non-human processes with human characteristics, motivations, intentions, and/or emotions (Epley et al., 2007). While some find this theorizing tool useful, others seem to loathe it, thus making it particularly controversial in the entrepreneurship field. However, as prior research has demonstrated, anthropomorphizing can be vital to developing influential entrepreneurial theories. For example, the importance of anthropomorphizing to the management field (also of relevance to entrepreneurship) is illustrated in the following four award-winning theory papers. First, Van de Ven and Poole (1995) proposed lifecycle theory as one of the four building blocks to explain change in organizations. This notion of lifecycles builds on knowledge of human development and has been applied to organizations, products, and ventures. Second, Adler and Kwon (2002, p. 18) explained the anthropomorphic roots of their model of social capital (including relationships between units within an organization and between organizations): “The core intuition guiding social capital research is that the goodwill that others have toward us is a valuable resource. By ‘goodwill’, we refer to the sympathy, trust, and forgiveness offered us by friends and acquaintances” (see also Nahapiet & Ghoshal, 1998). Third, McGrath (1999) drew on knowledge about human psychology to understand firms’ perceptions of, distaste for, attributions of, and desire to avoid failure. Finally, when exploring change in an organization’s identity, Corley and Gioia (2004) acknowledged Albert and Whetten’s (1985) original theorizing on organizational identity, which was modeled after important aspects of individual identity.

Beyond these examples, Walsh and Ungson (1991) more generally acknowledged anthropomorphizing in theories that extended work on humans to organizational phenomena, such as theories of organizational learning (Fiol & Lyles, 1985; Starbuck & Hedberg, 1977), including by entrepreneurial firms (Phan et al., 2009; Zahra & Hayton, 2008). Further, Andersen (2008) provided more examples of anthropomorphizing in studies on healthy organizations (Cooper & Cartwright, 1994) (and healthy industries; Miles & Snow, 1986), organizational death (Shepherd, 2009), organizational personality (Hellriegel & Slocum, 1992), and organizational cognition (Huff et al., 2016; Walsh, 1995).

Anthropomorphizing has been a prominent means for enhancing theorizing in the literature, but it is often disparaged, primarily when applied in “scientific” research. For instance, Timberlake (2007: 140) contended that the “primary dependence on unshackled anthropomorphizing for our knowledge about other species is not a promising direction for science to go... [because it can] lead toward automatically adjusting and confirming just-so stories.” In a similar vein, Wynne (2007: 154) argued that “anthropomorphizing runs deep and seems to require repeated weeding out” and that “the name anthropomorphizing has a seven century history of standing for an error of thinking.” Some scholars have gone as far as including the term “error” when defining anthropomorphizing, emphasizing the prevalence of this error in theorizing about organizations (Andersen, 2008; Schneider & Angelmar, 1993). Indeed, such scholars have claimed that anthropomorphizing often imposes irrelevant information (about humans) onto a focal target (i.e., a non-human agent) and excludes certain information (about humans) so it is not applied to the target (Krippendorff, 1975).

Thus, anthropomorphizing has played a useful role in generating theories that advance knowledge of entrepreneurial phenomena (especially entrepreneurial organizations); however, some still view this tool with concern, distrust, and even scorn. In this chapter, we aim to remove some of the mystery around how anthropomorphizing informs and motivates theorists as they attempt to make guesses about, construct, and tell plausible stories about entrepreneurial phenomena. We take an abduction and sensemaking perspective to investigate the usefulness of anthropomorphizing in generating, developing, and communicating new entrepreneurship theories. Moreover, we center our investigation on ideas that have been well established in the literature—namely, entrepreneurial orientation (e.g., Covin & Slevin, 1989; Lumpkin & Dess, 1996) and organizational knowledge (e.g., Aldrich & Kenworthy, 1999; Zahra et al., 2006), including organizational memory (Dai et al., 2016; Walsh & Ungson, 1991)—and explore their origination and development. In doing so, we hope to achieve three main goals.

First, recent studies have highlighted the value of abduction in the theorizing process, exploring how this process can begin with a guess and progress from doubt (Locke et al., 2008; see also throughout this book). According to the pragmatic perspective, any initial guess can serve as the framework for further inquiry, theorizing, and understanding (Hansen, 2008). While we appreciate the freedom granted by the relative unimportance of an initial guess, we also argue that individuals’ experiences with and knowledge of humans (i.e., themselves and others) can be strong stimuli in triggering abduction and can enrich scholars’ early guesses, thereby increasing their chances of revealing novel insights about (non-human) entrepreneurial phenomena. Indeed, long ago, Charles Peirce noted the following:

I have after long years of the severest examination become fully satisfied that, other things being equal, an anthropomorphic conception, whether it makes the best nucleus for a scientific working hypothesis or not, is far more likely to be approximately true than one that is not anthropomorphic. (Peirce et al., 1935)

Thus, in this chapter, we explore how scholars have used anthropomorphizing for abductive theorizing about organizations’ entrepreneurial orientation and knowledge.

Second, over the past decade, scholars have stressed the need to consider the mechanisms underlying entrepreneurship theories (Kim et al., 2016; Shepherd, 2015)—that is, the “theoretical cogs and wheels that explain the how and/or why one thing leads to another” (Anderson et al., 2006: 102). Despite the progress that has been made in this area, less focus has been dedicated to understanding how entrepreneurship scholars come up with these mechanisms. This is one area where anthropomorphizing can be useful as it serves as a rich source of knowledge about the mechanisms behind the outcomes individuals experience. When applied to a “black box” of non-human agents, such knowledge can provide the confidence, control, and understanding (Epley et al., 2007, 2008; Waytz et al., 2010) needed to develop (and refine) stronger entrepreneurship theories (e.g., entrepreneurial organizations). In particular, we explore how anthropomorphizing has enabled both the creation of and “major shifts” in theories on entrepreneurial organizations’ entrepreneurial orientation and knowledge. Moreover, we examine how anthropomorphizing seems to have been less useful in facilitating incremental advancements in theory as these domains have become more mature.

Finally, research taking a social constructionism perspective has highlighted the importance of scholars communicating both the theoretical novelty and continuity of their work (McKinley et al., 1999). In this chapter, we show how anthropomorphizing is not only valuable in helping entrepreneurship scholars make sense of organizational phenomena themselves but is also valuable for sensegiving to others (e.g., editors, reviewers, and readers)—namely, it helps entrepreneurship scholars persuasively communicate theorizing outcomes to their readers by providing an organizing framework for such outcomes. Thus, we provide insights into how anthropomorphizing facilitates sensegiving.

To accomplish these goals, this chapter proceeds as follows. First, we begin by introducing anthropomorphizing as a theorizing tool. Second, we outline how anthropomorphizing can be applied to enhance the process of making informed guesses about non-human entrepreneurial phenomena, to generate social mechanisms that can be used to build an explanation, and to tell plausible stories to persuasively communicate theorizing outcomes. To illustrate these possibilities more concretely, we describe how anthropomorphizing has been used in theorizing about organizations’ entrepreneurial orientation and knowledge. Finally, we conclude by explaining the conditions under which anthropomorphizing is more or less effective and discussing anthropomorphizing as a specific type of metaphor that facilitates entrepreneurship scholars’ sensemaking and sensegiving.

Anthropomorphizing for Entrepreneurial Theorizing

As mentioned earlier, anthropomorphizing is a process of inference whereby humans imbue non-human agents and processes with humanlike characteristics, motivations, intentions, or emotions (Epley et al., 2007: 864; Kwan & Fiske, 2008). Stemming from the “Greek words of anthropos (meaning human) and morphe (meaning shape or form),” the term captures individuals’ propensity to ascribe higher-order cognitive and emotional capacities, such as awareness, conscious will, and personality, to non-human agents or things (Epley et al., 2007: 865).

Indeed, in entrepreneurship research, such higher-order cognitive and emotional capabilities have been attributed to organizations, with research suggesting that organizations are deviant (Chirayath et al., 2002), believers (Floyd & Wooldridge, 1999), and motivated (Bouwen & Steyaert, 1990). Furthermore, scholars have proposed that organizations have wishes (Culbertson et al., 2011), values (Bansal, 2003), and compassion (Shepherd & Williams, 2014; Williams & Shepherd, 2016, 2021) and that they are aggressive, nurturing, caring, accommodating, and respectful (Brickson, 2007). Likewise, anthropomorphizing is also evident in the entrepreneurship literature on organizational knowledge. According to this research, organizations intentionally and unintentionally learn (Lumpkin & Lichtenstein, 2005); form beliefs based on organizational learning (Floyd & Wooldridge, 1999), including from trial and error (Zahra et al., 2006); accidentally forget (de Holan & Phillips, 2004); and have blind spots (Hodgkinson & Healey, 2011) and illusions of control (Durand, 2003). Society also tends to view organizations as individuals, often giving them legal status (Gioia et al., 2010), and entrepreneurs frequently anthropomorphize their organizations by giving them identities that are distinct from themselves and their employees (e.g., an entrepreneur describes a venture as their baby [Cardon et al., 2005]).

People anthropomorphize because they have a high level of knowledge about themselves (via direct experiences). These knowledge structures about themselves are rich and highly accessible, meaning individuals can apply them both to understand other people (Epley et al., 2004) and to make inferences about non-human agents (Morewedge et al., 2007). For instance, as humans, people can directly access the phenomenological experience of being human, but they do not have access to the experience of being “a bat (Nagel, 1974), a sloth (Gould, 1996), or any other non-human agent” (Epley et al., 2007: 686). Moreover, personal experiences as a human are a richer source of information for theorizing about organizational phenomena compared to other metaphors, such as machines (e.g., Taylor, 1911) or organisms (e.g., Burrell & Morgan, 1979), with the possible exception of entrepreneurship scholars with considerable knowledge of, for example, mechanical engineering or biology, respectively.

As these different aspects demonstrate, anthropomorphizing serves as a foundation for making everyday inferences about non-human agents using one’s current knowledge structures (about the self and other humans) as a starting point. Thus, anthropomorphizing “at the very least... provides a rich source of testable hypotheses to guide a person’s behavior toward an unknown agent or stimulus” (Epley et al., 2007: 866). Since anthropomorphizing can be a starting point to better understand non-human agents and processes, it follows that this tool can also facilitate abductive theorizing on entrepreneurial phenomena, to which we now turn.

Abducting Entrepreneurial Theorizing Through Anthropomorphizing

As the essence of pragmatism, abduction refers to “the creative act of constructing explanations to account for surprising observations in the course of experience (hypothesis generation)” (Hansen, 2008: 457). In general, pragmatism (and abduction more specifically) depicts inquiry as a process in line with some notions of theorizing. For instance, according to Weick (1995: 285),

Products of theorizing processes seldom emerge as full-blown theories, which mean that what passes for theory in organizational studies consists of approximations. … [Incomplete theories] may represent lazy theorizing … [but] may also represent interim struggles in which people intentionally inch toward stronger theories.

Likewise, although anthropomorphizing as a step in theorizing about organizing could reflect lazy theorizing, it could also represent a temporary struggle that helps guide and motivate theorists as they undertake the theorizing process. This idea that anthropomorphizing organizations can be a significant step in the theorizing process is illustrated in the following statement by Gioia et al. (2002: 270):

Most organizations, after all, were initially constructed in somebody’s own image. At their essence, therefore, they are human constructions. Should we be surprised then, that as a firm approximation, they are sometimes describable in some essential ways as person-like? … Should we really predicate our understanding of organizations more on the basis of an argument that organizations are more like machines than they are like the people who constructed them?

Indeed, entrepreneurship scholars are constantly challenged to enhance their theories by improving both the validation process (which some argue has received much attention; Locke & Golden-Biddle, 1997) and the discovery process (Locke & Golden-Biddle, 1997; Weick, 1989). In light of this challenge, in the following sections, we demonstrate how scholars have used anthropomorphizing to improve their entrepreneurship theories, especially in the early stages of the theorizing process.

Anthropomorphizing to Make Guesses for Entrepreneurial Theorizing

Abduction entails experiencing the world and then applying one’s existing knowledge structures to the resulting experiences to understand them. When individuals’ existing knowledge structures highlight inconsistencies in their understanding, they first try to assimilate the anomalies. In other words, they “try to preserve the old stocks of knowledge, stretching them just enough to make them admit the novelty” (James, 1907: 35). This “stretching” provides the basis for individuals to notice and assimilate additional experiences (Hansen, 2008). At the core of this noticing and assimilating is following a hunch or making a guess, both of which can be difficult because they require a leap of faith (Hansen, 2008). However, an initial hunch or guess feeds subsequent actions and experiences. Accordingly, abduction requires individuals to be bold and permissive (i.e., to loosen the boundaries of their thinking) so they can generate guesses that give meaning to anomalies (Locke et al., 2008: 909).

While the pragmatic tradition suggests that any guess will do (Hansen, 2008; Weick, 1995), we argue that grounding such guesses in something one is knowledgeable about provides a stronger foundation for leaps of faith. People’s in-depth understanding of themselves (and of others to a lesser degree) can serve as such grounding, providing a fruitful starting point for making sense of non-human agents and processes (Epley et al., 2007; Waytz et al., 2010). Indeed, Peirce et al. (1935) proposed that the fundamental aspects of the human experience often stimulate scientific inquiry and offer a conception of causality by enabling individuals to formulate hypotheses via analogies connecting the human experience to the inexperienced.

Because entrepreneurship scholars engage in contexts “characterized by high levels of uncertainty, novelty, emotion, and time pressure” (Baron, 1998: 275), those who anthropomorphize can draw on a wealth of personal experiences with these contextual attributes to develop conjectures that are richer, clearer, and more explicit about underlying assumptions than those developed without anthropomorphizing. Such experiences include, for example, organizing one’s life in terms of uncertainty (e.g., looking for a job after college, deciding whether to buy a house or move to another country, or starting a new job with a new organization in a new country), organizing others (e.g., students, a spouse, children, parents, sporting team members, colleagues, volunteers, etc.) under such conditions, and being organized by others (e.g., a boss, a spouse, children, extended family, coach, colleges, etc.). This pool of accessible experiences and related knowledge provides not only the feedstock for guessing but also the specifics needed to build conjectures about entrepreneurial phenomena at the organizational level of analysis.

While scholars can begin their anthropomorphizing efforts by harnessing their understanding of themselves or others, they can also begin by diving (perhaps directed by experiential learning) into a research stream about individuals more generally, such as a specific domain of human psychology. Building on literature about humans to make guesses about organizational phenomena in this way is in line with Bateson’s idea (1941: 59) that “a vague ‘hunch’ derived from some other science leads into the precise formulations of that other science in terms of which it is possible to think more fruitfully about our own material.” Accordingly, a hunch about an organizational phenomenon derived from experience with or knowledge of humans can lead to a deeper exploration of humans (e.g., a specific domain of human psychology), thereby moving entrepreneurial theorizing forward. Against this important background, it is likely unsurprising that our review of leading entrepreneurship theories revealed just how significant anthropomorphizing has been in triggering the theoretical development of concepts related to both organizations’ entrepreneurial orientation and knowledge.

Entrepreneurial orientation. According to Miller (1993: 771), “An entrepreneurial firm engages in product-market innovation, undertakes somewhat risky ventures, and is first to come up with ‘proactive’ innovations, beating competitors to the punch.” This description brings a question to light: can a non-human object even have an orientation? While it possibly can, a human must be involved in the first place to provide this object direction. Indeed, the assumptions that an organization is entrepreneurial and has an orientation rely on the notion that organizations have human attributes. This implied anthropomorphizing has triggered considerable entrepreneurial theorizing at the organizational level. In particular, until the concept of entrepreneurial orientation was introduced, entrepreneurship was seen as an individual-level phenomenon (despite it impacting the creation of organizations and other organizational-level outcomes). However, initial ideas about entrepreneurship at the organizational level of analysis prompted an intriguing discussion about the dimensions of entrepreneurial orientation, including their nature, number, and interrelationships, and the ways they influence firm performance given specific external environments (Covin & Slevin, 1989; Lumpkin & Dess, 1996). We describe this early theorizing on entrepreneurial orientation not as a critique but as an indication of the important role anthropomorphizing has played in generating a significant stream of research in the field of entrepreneurship.

Organizational knowledge. Similar to it triggering theorizing on organizations’ entrepreneurial orientation, anthropomorphizing has also provided a crucial framework for theorizing about organizational knowledge (including organizational memory). For instance, Walsh and Ungson (1991, p. 57) highlighted anthropomorphizing in their work:

To the extent that organizations exhibit characteristics of information processing, they should incorporate some sort of memory, although not necessarily resembling human memory. … Theories, however, have not elaborated on the nature and function of any type of memory.

Anthropomorphizing is also reflected in these authors’ definition of organizational memory as “mental and structural artifacts that have consequential effects on performance” (58), in their investigation of the requirements of an organization’s retention structures in terms of “the processes by which information can be acquired, stored, and retrieved from this retention structure” (61–62), and in their descriptions of the outcomes of organizational memory (e.g., the influence of an organization’s history and the inertial force of automatic information retrieval on its decision-making).

As these examples demonstrate, entrepreneurship scholars can use anthropomorphizing to trigger abduction. However, in entrepreneurial theorizing, an early guess is merely a starting point, initial direction, and first step as full-blown theory building comprises more than one step—it is a process of doubting and formulating explanations to eliminate that doubt. Indeed, in pragmatism, the nature of inquiry is based on resolving doubt (i.e., the experience of not knowing), which in turn stimulates the process of inquiry (Burks, 1946; Locke et al., 2008). In other words, doubt “drives us to generate possibilities, try them out, modify, transform, abandon them, try again, and so on until new concepts or patterns are generated that productively satisfy doubt” (Locke et al., 2008: 908). The resulting new concepts or patterns can be sources of insights, and while the resulting insights can be highly fallible (Peirce, 1955) and wildly incorrect (Hansen, 2008), they push scholars toward solving problems (James, 1907), generating imaginative understandings, and ultimately building theories (Fann, 1970). Next, we turn to how scholars can use anthropomorphizing to build more robust entrepreneurship theories from early guesses.

Anthropomorphizing to Build Explanations

Organizational theory scholars generally theorize about organizations (i.e., non-human agents) but nevertheless have humans embedded in them in some way—a point widely recognized in numerous studies on organizational identity and organizational knowledge. Huy (1999: 333), for instance, described organizations as “patterns of coordinated activities of interdependent parts, including people.” Feldman and Rafaeli (2002: 309) similarly explained that “organizations consist of people producing some form of work” and that “much of organization theory has been concerned with how to coordinate the activities of people in organizations.” Indeed, many scholars see organizations as “hierarchically nested systems” (Klein & Kozlowski, 2000: 232; e.g., Katz & Kahn, 1976; Scott, 1974), contending that individuals and groups are components and subsystems of organizations, which are in turn components and subsystems of societies (Miller, 1972). Anthropomorphizing can enable a deeper understanding of the “how” and “why” underlying these relationships at the organizational level by shedding light on the theoretical mechanisms linking relevant constructs. To begin using anthropomorphizing for this purpose, theorists can draw on their rich knowledge of themselves and other humans, for example, by recalling being assigned to workgroups or sporting teams, being on successful and unsuccessful teams, exchanging information with others, coordinating actions with others, remembering feelings conflict brought up, and recollecting how others’ feelings influenced how one felt. This knowledge of the feelings, activities, and processes individuals have experienced as humans can inform and stimulate theorizing on organizing by enabling theorists to articulate the social mechanisms underlying concepts to explain how things function at the individual level (e.g., exploring the mechanisms behind individuals’ attention, interpretation, and learning to understand their actions). They can then begin to form a deeper understanding of how to connect concepts at the organizational level to clarify how things function in organizations (e.g., exploring the mechanisms of organizations’ attention, strategic issue diagnosis, and learning to understand organizations’ actions).

Thus, while theorizing simply about relationships between constructs is required, it is not enough to generate strong theories; theorists must also articulate the social mechanisms underlying their assumptions about organizing. Social mechanisms—namely, the cogs and wheels of social scientists’ theorizing—explain the relationships among and between constructs. In other words, they explain how and why one construct influences another (see Anderson et al., 2006; Davis, 2006; Hedstrom & Ylikoski, 2010). For example, in recounting her efforts to theorize on the mechanisms involved in her research, Spreitzer affirmed that theorizing about mechanisms enabled her and her coauthors to “uncover important patterns that [they] had not seen before” (cited Anderson et al., 2006: 104). In a similar vein, Bunderson explained that by questioning the mechanisms behind proposed relationships, he was able to discover implicit assumptions that could then be contested in future studies (reported in Anderson et al., 2006). While the significance of articulating the mechanisms underlying theorized relationships is well recognized (Sutton & Staw, 1995), theorists who develop such mechanisms often face challenges in going beyond mere statistical associations and identifying alternative generative mechanisms (Hedstrom & Swedberg, 1998: 17).

Anthropomorphizing can help with these challenges. Specifically, when facing uncertainty about a non-human agent’s (e.g., a firm’s) organizing, scholars typically begin by considering how their own stocks of accumulated knowledge, experiences, intentions, emotions, actions, etc., are organized (Waytz et al., 2010) as a basis for understanding (in this case, understanding organizing within a firm) (Epley et al., 2008). Organizing refers to mobilizing “ongoing interdependent actions into sensible sequences” (Weick, 1979: 3), which can direct individuals’ attention to make sense of potential changes in the environment (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2007), achieve convergence among members (Weick, 1979), coordinate movement and inputs (Weick, 1989), funnel action toward specific outcomes (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002), lessen ambiguity to establish order (although ambiguity can never be completely eliminated) (e.g., Christianson et al., 2009), and regulate emotions (Huy, 1999). Furthermore, organizing frequently entails recurring interactions between individuals (Weick & Quinn, 1999). Since most people have substantial experience interacting with other people (Mead, 1934; Stryker & Stratham, 1985), these interactions are stored as highly accessible knowledge (Baldwin, 1992) and can thus be used for anthropomorphizing. Therefore, anthropomorphizing can inform theorizing on the mechanisms connecting constructs and enable a deeper understanding of the “why” and “how” essential to constructing more robust theories. We explore how anthropomorphizing has been used to develop the research streams of entrepreneurial orientation and organizational knowledge.

Entrepreneurial orientation. Covin and Slevin (1989) outlined three formative indicators of entrepreneurial orientation—innovativeness, risk taking, and proactiveness. In contrast, Lumpkin and Dess (1996) argued that the dimensions of entrepreneurial orientation vary independently, so they added two more dimensions—autonomy and competitive aggressiveness. First, innovativeness refers to “a firm’s propensity to engage in and support new ideas, novelty, experimentation, and creative processes that may result in new products, services, or processes” (Lumpkin & Dess, 1996: 142). In theorizing innovativeness as a dimension of entrepreneurial orientation, Lumpkin and Dess (1996: 142) discussed firms’ “tendency,” “willingness to depart from existing technologies or products,” and “emphasis on technical expertise.” Can non-human agents have tendencies, a willingness to depart, or the ability to emphasize, or are these instead human qualities projected onto organizations? These qualities seem to reflect anthropomorphizing organizations to categorize them as more or less entrepreneurial.

Second, Miller (1993) defined risk taking as a “firm’s proclivity to engage in risky projects and managers’ preferences for bold versus cautious action to achieve firm objectives” (Lumpkin & Dess, 1996: 146). Initially, justification for this dimension started with references to early research wherein risk taking was applied to entrepreneurs who created and managed organizations. One of the first studies to develop the notion of organizations having an entrepreneurial orientation discussed risk taking at the individual level (but also crossed to the organizational level) as “the degree to which managers are willing to make large and risky resource commitments—i.e., those which have a reasonable chance of costly failures” (Miller & Friesen, 1978: 923). However, as a dimension of entrepreneurial orientation, risk taking seems to reflect anthropomorphizing in human qualities like “willingness,” “commitment,” and “reasonableness” are applied to organizations.

Third, proactiveness refers to a “firm’s tendency to lead rather than follow in developing new procedures and technologies and the introduction of new products or services” (Lumpkin & Dess, 1996: 148). In defining and theorizing about this dimension, Lumpkin and Dess (2006: 146) relied on a dictionary definition of proactiveness: “acting in anticipation of future problems, needs, or changes”. Humans anticipate, so proposing that organizations can anticipate problems or market demand and stating they have the “foresight to seize new opportunities” (Lumpkin & Dess, 1996: 147) are examples of anthropomorphizing organizations.

Fourth, autonomy refers to organizations not constraining “strong leaders, unfettered teams or creative individuals” (Lumpkin & Dess, 1996: 140). According to this definition, organizations may not have autonomy themselves but may instead provide a context for humans to have autonomy (which may therefore not be anthropomorphizing). While Lumpkin and Dess (1996) justified the salience of this dimension by referencing early work on the autonomy of entrepreneurial individuals (e.g., Bourgeois & Brodwin, 1984; Miller, 1993; Mintzberg & Waters, 1985), they still argued that organizations must “grant autonomy.” However, being able to grant something is a human quality, which means that this theorizing also likely entails anthropomorphizing.

Finally, competitive aggressiveness is “a firm’s propensity to directly and intensely challenge its competitors to achieve entry or improve position, that is, to outperform industry rivals in the marketplace” (Lumpkin & Dess, 1996: 140). In formulating this dimension, Lumpkin and Dess (1996) proposed that organizations “respond to trends”; compete for demand; and are opportunity seeking, aggressive, and passive through indifference. Similar to above, responding, competing, seeking, and feeling aggressive or indifferent are human qualities, so applying them to non-human agents—organizations—represents anthropomorphizing.

Organizational knowledge. Scholars have also applied anthropomorphizing to theorize about organizational knowledge and organizational knowing mechanisms. For instance, Patriotta (2003) started his theorizing to explain how organizations obtain knowledge by describing how narratives help people make sense of the world. He then outlined how understanding the ways narratives and storytelling shape human cognition can inform understanding of the mechanisms whereby organizations obtain knowledge:

The narrative mode of cognition is important for understanding how perspective making and perspective taking occur within a community of knowing. … Narratives appear to be fundamental diagnostic devices, enabling operators to perform a coherent description of machine breakdowns. … [Narratives facilitate] the circulation of organizational knowledge within the community of workers … connecting modes of knowing with modes of organizing … [and they] identify a distinctive mode of thought. … [Narratives] provide access to the controversy-based dynamics through which organizational actors deal with the equivocality of everyday action … turn action into text and text into action … show how knowledge in organizations is mobilized through discourse, and therefore highlight a distinctive mode of knowing related to everyday coping with the world. … [Narratives] are the carriers of such a deep-seated, sticky, commonsensical stock of knowledge … emphasize the processual nature of knowing and organizing … act as carriers of tacit knowledge as well as storage devices … exhibit organizations as enacted through discourse and characterized by ongoing processes of transformation and social becoming … [and] can be seen as material traces of learning and collective remembering processes, social imprints of meaningful course of events, documents and records of human action. (Patriotta, 2003: 352–354)

Walsh and Ungson (1991) also applied a prior understanding of how the human brain acquires, retains, and retrieves knowledge and experience to theorize how organizations’ information processing influences their outcomes and performance. Many entrepreneurship scholars have referred to these early studies to examine entrepreneurial firms’ organizational knowledge without necessarily documenting the anthropomorphizing roots of this construct (e.g., Yli-Renko et al., 2001; Zahra et al., 2006).

These examples demonstrate how anthropomorphizing can be a useful tool in formulating robust theories from novel guesses by explicitly recognizing the social mechanisms underlying proposed relationships. As we discussed earlier, using one’s knowledge of humans to generate explanations and making the underlying social mechanisms of those explanations explicit are central to theorists’ anthropomorphizing. The goal here is to come up with a theorizing outcome that forms a sufficiently plausible story to inspire others (and oneself) to take further action—namely, to engage in additional entrepreneurial theorizing and data collection to pave the way for further discussion, negotiation, and persuasion that advances our understanding of venturing. Thus, anthropomorphizing holds promise for revealing interesting insights into organizational phenomena and offers entrepreneurship theorists a discursive tool to build and communicate persuasive accounts of organizing.

Thus far, we have shown how anthropomorphizing serves as a useful framework for sensemaking. Now, we turn to how it can also provide a framework for sensegiving.

Anthropomorphizing to Tell Entrepreneurship Theories as Plausible Stories

Anthropomorphizing is instrumental in sensemaking, enabling entrepreneurship scholars to build and rebuild meaning as they gradually form an understanding of different phenomena—for our examples above, understanding of organizations’ entrepreneurial orientation and knowledge. However, scholars also need their theorizing outcomes to make sense to others. For instance, McKinley et al. (1999) contended that if a theory is to receive scholarly attention and have an impact, it must exhibit both novelty (i.e., it must be significantly different from theories in the established literature) and continuity (i.e., it must be linked to the established literature). Entrepreneurship scholars can communicate novelty by providing new insights—that is, “suggestions of relationships and connections that had previously not been suspected” (Weick, 1989: 524)—and they can convey continuity by connecting new inferences and assumptions to ideas that are already grounded in the literature. Articulating the social mechanisms underlying proposed relationships, as we discussed earlier, helps scholars focus on verbs (i.e., causal links) rather than nouns (i.e., variables) (Weick, 1974). As Glynn argued, “One of the utilities of a mechanism-based approach... is that it enables you to articulate the causal linkages” (quoted in Anderson et al., 2006: 104), thereby helping authors convey how a story unfolds to their audiences (Anderson et al., 2006; Sutton & Staw, 1995). This reasoning suggests that entrepreneurship scholars need to enable their audiences to make sense of their theorizing—that is, they need to engage in sensegiving. Sensegiving is “the process of attempting to influence the sensemaking and meaning construction of others toward a preferred redefinition of” reality (Gioia & Chittipeddi, 1991: 442). Anthropomorphizing may help with sensegiving as it is a useful tool in convincing editors, reviewers, and other audiences about the plausibility of certain outcomes. Specifically, it enables scholars to connect novel outcomes with their audiences’ rich knowledge of themselves and other humans so these audiences’ can make more sense of the outcomes. In reviewing the literatures on entrepreneurial orientation and organizational knowledge, we found several instances of anthropomorphizing playing a sensegiving role in theorizing outcomes.

To begin, we found that some scholars juxtapose organizational- and individual-level studies to highlight a commonality that is sufficient enough to justify jumping from theorizing at the individual level to theorizing at the organizational level. While establishing commonalities across levels is more effective in some cases than others, we contend that such connections increase the believability of theorizing outcomes and help persuade readers. In other words, these connections serve as bridges, helping readers move from the mainland of an established literature (and their personal knowledge) at the individual level to the island of an idea or a conjecture at the organizational level.

Some scholars establish a different type of connection by explicitly acknowledging distinctions between individuals and organizations. In particular, some help readers step from the individual level to the organizational level by delineating the mechanisms whereby individuals influence organizations (e.g., von Krogh et al., 1994: 59), while others help readers step from the organizational level to the individual level by delineating the mechanisms whereby organizations influence individuals (e.g., Hargadon & Fanelli, 2002: 294). In turn, highlighting distinctions between levels and building steps from one level to another helps scholars communicate their theorizing outcomes.

Entrepreneurial orientation. As an example of juxtaposing studies at different levels to emphasize commonality, Covin and Slevin (1998: 77) linked top managers’ inclination “to take business-related risks, to favor change and innovation to obtain a competitive advantage for their firm and to compete aggressively with other firms (Miller, 1993) [and] entrepreneurial top management styles, as evidenced from the firms’ strategic decisions and operating management philosophy” to firms’ entrepreneurial orientation. They then shifted their theorizing to firms’ entrepreneurial behaviors by citing Miller (1993), Miller and Friesen (1983), and Khandwalla (1977), theorizing small firms’ entrepreneurial strategic postures are more positively related to firm performance in hostile environments than in benign environments (Covin & Slevin, 1989: 78).

On the other hand, Lumpkin and Dess (1996: 164) highlighted distinctions across levels (individual, group, and organizational) to discuss the autonomy dimension of entrepreneurial orientation:

Another critical component of an EO [of an organization] is a tendency toward independent and autonomous action. Start-up firms must exercise intentionality to carry forward the specific actions required to launch new ventures (Bird, 1998; Katz & Gartner, 1988). Layers of bureaucracy and organizational tradition rarely contribute to new-entry activities in existing firms (Kanter, 1983). Instead, it requires the exercise of autonomy by strong leaders, unfettered teams or creative individuals who are disengaged from organizational constraints to lead to new entry. This was the conclusion of Burgelman (1983: 241), who found that, in the case of internal corporate venturing, “the motor of corporate entrepreneurship reside in the autonomous strategic initiative of individuals at the operational levels in the organization.”

While we recognize the difficulty in establishing these connections, when it comes to conveying the plausibility of theorizing outcomes from anthropomorphizing, we believe a bridge with missing planks is better than no bridge at all. Next, we discuss the bridges for organizational knowledge.

Organizational knowledge. Scholars have also used anthropomorphizing to communicate theories of organizational knowledge and memory by emphasizing commonalities across levels that justify a jump from the individual level to the organizational level. For instance, in developing the concept of organizational memory, Walsh and Ungson (1991: 63) used the ideas of records and files to highlight a commonality across levels and then linked the literature on the psychology of human memory to that on organizations’ information processing:

Briefly, individuals store their organization’s memory in their own capacity to remember and articulate experience, and in the cognitive orientations they employ to facilitate information processing. Moreover, individuals and organizations keep records and files as a memory aid. … Such information technologies help to constitute an organization’s memory.

As an example of acknowledging distinctions between individuals and organizations and then connecting the two levels of analysis, Galunic and Rodan (1998: 1199) explained how knowledge produced by an individual can become knowledge at the organizational level and, vice versa, how organizational knowledge can affect the knowledge of organizational members:

As individuals interact (say around a new technology or an emergent process within a young firm) a particular body of language and symbols (both social and technical) develop over time, facilitating information exchange. The use of a common (often unique) language improves the efficiency of knowledge exchange first by allowing exchanges to take place more quickly and second by avoiding the necessity for ideas to be translated into a higher-level language for exchange (Kogut & Zander, 1992). Such an esoteric language itself represents a store of tacit knowledge since it often contains words with highly specific associations and meanings that are seldom (if ever) documented. More generally, this process suggests the construction and solidification of perceived reality through the imparting of common meaning to repeated exchanges and patterns of action (e.g., Rorty, 1991). These “externalized” actions and routines (see Zucker, 1977) create mental models by which actors are guided in subsequent interactions.

In this section, we described how anthropomorphizing can help articulate entrepreneurial theorizing outcomes. However, it is also necessary to recognize the role storytelling plays in building entrepreneurship theory. Although a lot of the knowledge for guessing and building a theory is idiosyncratic—that is, it depends on the focal scholar’s unique experiences of being human—others can often identify with such experiences (given their own knowledge of being human). Accordingly, anthropomorphizing provides entrepreneurship scholars a foundation for labeling and categorizing the constructs of an emerging theory such that they form connections in readers’ minds when communicated. In turn, these connections serve as the basis for interactive talk (Taylor & Van Every, 2000). Via this process, scholars’ tacit knowledge becomes explicit, thereby providing them opportunities (either alone or conjointly with others) to improve the plausibility of their stories. That is, anthropomorphizing (1) enables an entrepreneurship scholar to communicate the complex ideas and mechanisms underlying their emerging theory to others; (2) allows others to apply their own rich knowledge (of being human) to understand these ideas and mechanisms, identify issues, come up with solutions, and communicate them to the entrepreneurship scholar; and (3) helps the entrepreneurship scholar revise, retell, and retest the plausibility of their story to ultimately build a more robust theory. Thus, by enabling scholars to communicate novel entrepreneurship theories, anthropomorphizing can help “lift equivocal knowledge out of the tacit, private, complex, random, and past to make it explicit, public, simpler, ordered, and relevant to the situation at hand” (Weick et al., 2005: 413).

Criticisms of Anthropomorphizing for Theorizing

Although anthropomorphizing can be a very useful tool for theorizing, some scholars believe it hinders theorizing (Sullivan, 1995; Wynne, 2004). For example, some criticize how natural selection has been anthropomorphized using non-neutral terms. Indeed, natural selection has been described as a “battle” rather than a “competition,” as “victory” rather than “survival,” and as stemming from a “selfish” gene rather than “selection.” While these descriptions are fanciful (Sullivan, 1995), picturesque, and colorful (Rousseau, 1985), some contend that these terms result in folk theories instead of scientific theories (Wynne, 2004). In addition, some scholars believe that anthropomorphizing generates constructs that are difficult (if not impossible) to operationalize to allow for experimental tests of central relationships (Blumberg & Wasserman, 1995; Panksepp, 2003). Indeed, Wynne (2007: 154) argued that anthropomorphizing “hides causes inside imaginary structures that cannot be operationalized in objective observable phenomenon.”

While some critics admit that anthropomorphizing has potential benefits in stimulating thinking (known as “mock anthropomorphizing”; Blumberg & Wasserman, 1995; Kennedy, 1992), Rousseau (1985) explained that when it comes to theorizing about organizations, such “literary license” can itself become a theory over time.Footnote 1 Similarly, Andersen (2008) argued that notions that start as “as if” frequently become “is,” which can create major problems. For instance, instead of writing “as if” in the following quote, Brown and Starkey (2000: 103) contended that the organization “is” “self-reflective,” “wise,” and “secure”:

If skillfully managed, the outcome of critical reflection upon the nature of identity is a self-reflexive and wise organization, secure in its ability to negotiate identity change. … For Kohut, wisdom represents “the ego’s ultimate mastery over the narcissistic self, the final control of the rider over the horse.”

According to Andersen (2008: 181), these forms of anthropomorphizing can have major repercussions: “When organizations are seen as actors the consequence is grave. It implies that the people in the organizations are not actors. Their initiative and efforts are of no importance. Anthropomorphizing ‘kills’ human, individual action.” Here, it is important to stress that the micro-process of anthropomorphizing in an entrepreneurship theorist’s mind is unlikely to “kill” any individual’s action (which is itself a potentially anthropomorphic idea). However, ironically, some scholars have highlighted the role of anthropomorphizing in lessening the importance of the individual in organizational research. Entrepreneurship scholars need to make sure we do not follow strategic management’s lead in this regard. Rather, as Hambrick (2004: 94) proposed, we need to reintroduce the human component in our work: “During the last two decades, human beings have largely been discarded from a great part of the strategic management research as scholars have sought to anthropomorphize organizations, treating them as willful, purposive entities... [which is] barking up the wrong tree.” Similarly, although not directly suggesting that humans be reintroduced, Shepherd (2015: 489) discussed the importance of human attributes in further advancing the field of entrepreneurship:

Future contributions from entrepreneurial studies will come from viewing the entrepreneurial process as one of generating and refining potential opportunities through building, engaging, and transforming communities of inquiry; as one constituted by a pattern of activities that is dynamic, recursive, and immersed in entrepreneurial practice; as one in which the head engages the heart and the heart engages the head; and as one of motivations beyond solely those of financial goals. I believe that such an approach will increase our understanding of how entrepreneurial action will meet some of the grand challenges of our time and thereby make important contributions to the field of entrepreneurship.

In this call for future entrepreneurship research, Shepherd outlined the central role humans play in progressing the field of entrepreneurship by viewing the entrepreneurship process as generating and refining potential opportunities and interacting with different groups of people who collectively comprise communities of inquiry, by exploring the micro-activities of entrepreneurial individuals and individuals working in entrepreneurial organizations, and by considering how individuals’ cognitions and emotions interact.

In general, the critiques of anthropomorphizing center on two major theorizing shortfalls. The first occurs when a theorizing outcome is separated from its original assumptions, propositions, and associated observables (Schoeneborn et al., 2013), which in turn results in a missed opportunity to undertake multilevel theorizing (Thompson, 2011). The second stems from borrowing concepts, relationships, and theories without adequate consideration of their relevance for organizational theories (Whetten et al., 2009). Obviously, these challenges can arise for any theorist, but they may be especially salient for entrepreneurship scholars who anthropomorphize (and the theorizing outcomes from anthropomorphizing may also be scrutinized more heavily in cases of “borrowing”).

When anthropomorphizing leads entrepreneurship scholars merely to affirm (through labeling or otherwise) that a human behavior, attribute, or characteristic also applies to an organization, the resulting theorizing outcome is likely to be limited (and maybe even detrimental). In other words, such anthropomorphizing simply contextualizes human behaviors/characteristics in organizations and borrows from other disciplines or fields (e.g., a theory of human psychology) without significantly contributing back to those disciplines or fields. This “demonstrative research”—namely, research that demonstrates “it” applies in another context—provides few contributions to the disciplines or fields involved (Heath & Sitkin, 2001).

To gauge the value of theorizing on organizational behavior, Heath and Sitkin (2001: 53) proposed an “organizational centrality test,” which asks, “How much would we understand about organizations if we understood everything there was to know about” the source of potential knowledge—here, an anthropomorphizing source. Building on this idea of the organizational centrality test, we contend that anthropomorphizing is unlikely to lead to significant contributions to the organizational literature if scholars merely relabel constructs and relationships found in contexts other than organizations and/or the topic at hand is tangential to understanding “how organizations accomplish their task of organizing” (Heath & Sitkin, 2001: 53). However, the reverse also applies: when anthropomorphizing motivates and informs theorizing (as discussed earlier in this chapter) that results in a plausible story about an organization’s entrepreneurial tasks, it has the potential to generate valuable contributions to the literature.

Indeed, scholarly entrepreneurship frequently borrows theories from disciplinary research, but the entrepreneurial context is often so extreme compared to the contexts in which those theories originated (and their empirical testing) that the theories need to be adapted by extending their boundary conditions. Such extension can contribute to both the entrepreneurship literature and the source literature (from which a focal theory was borrowed). Accordingly, entrepreneurship scholars are likely in a strong position to borrow from and then adapt anthropomorphizing to theorize about non-human entrepreneurial phenomena, such as entrepreneurial organizations.

Implications for Anthropomorphizing in Entrepreneurship

While all entrepreneurship scholars have substantial experience being human (as do all adults) and can likely benefit from using anthropomorphizing in their theorizing, some are likely to benefit more. First, beyond differences in their knowledge about human actors and other sources of metaphors, entrepreneurship scholars have different levels of confidence in their ability to theorize. Indeed, scholars who are likely to be less confident in their ability to undertake successful research include doctoral students and junior faculty (Meyer & Evans, 2003) as well as those who have received less research training (Phillips & Russell, 1994), scarce encouragement or modeling by more senior faculty (Galassi & Moss, 1986), and less mentoring (Feldman et al., 2010). For such scholars, anthropomorphizing can offer more confidence for theorizing as it enables people to feel more efficacious in explaining non-human agents (Epley et al., 2007; Waytz et al., 2010). Thus, anthropomorphizing can help scholars feel like they are more capable of organizing and performing the tasks involved in entrepreneurial theorizing than when they do not use anthropomorphizing or use metaphors they are less familiar with. This increased self-efficacy in theorizing from anthropomorphizing likely drives entrepreneurship to complete theorizing tasks, persist through interim struggles, and eventually build more robust theories. Therefore, anthropomorphizing could be a vital tool for entrepreneurship scholars who lack expertise or do not fully believe in their ability to theorize.

Second, the breadth and depth of scholars’ experiences differ. For instance, some scholars may have a greater variety of experiences from, say, living and working in numerous culturally diverse countries; obtaining a broader education; taking on different roles within one organization, different organizations, and/or different industries; experiencing adversity; investigating diverse topics from varying theoretical and philosophical standpoints and with different coauthors; etc. Entrepreneurship scholars who have a greater variety of experiences typically have a deeper pool of knowledge to draw upon to enable anthropomorphizing and inform theorizing compared to those with less variety. Likewise, people vary in their imaginative and creative abilities (Bacharach, 1989), both of which are likely to enable anthropomorphizing and thereby help scholars build robust theories of entrepreneurial organizations and venturing.

Finally, there are certain conditions under which anthropomorphizing is likely to be most effective at enabling scholars to advance our understanding of entrepreneurial phenomenon. In particular, anthropomorphizing is likely to be especially effective when it passes Heath and Sitkin’s (2001) organizational centrality test (as discussed above). Moreover, entrepreneurship scholars may need to rely on anthropomorphizing less as their knowledge of non-human agents grows (e.g., knowledge of organizational behavior) (for more on the relationship between knowledge of non-human agents and the level of anthropomorphizing, see Waytz et al., 2010). For example, there are hundreds of studies on entrepreneurial orientation such that the early considerations of its anthropomorphizing roots have moved further to the background, and the dimensions at the organizational level have become taken for granted (particularly by new scholars).

As such, anthropomorphizing offers entrepreneurship scholars (including senior scholars) a knowledge base from which they can theorize in underdeveloped areas—where little to no literature or in-depth understanding exists (e.g., the development of a theory of organizational knowledge in the 1970s)—and from which they can perhaps revitalize research on relatively static and stable organizational attributes. However, even when scholars have substantial knowledge of non-human agents that can serve as a source of metaphors for entrepreneurial theorizing, for some entrepreneurship scholars and some topics, anthropomorphizing may stimulate theorizing even further. Moreover, even when entrepreneurship scholars apply such non-human metaphors, some still choose to anthropomorphize, using their rich knowledge of themselves and others to fuel their theorizing.

Research Opportunities

In offering a few suggestions for entrepreneurship topics that could potentially benefit from anthropomorphizing, we open ourselves up to the same critiques of anthropomorphizing discussed above. More specifically, since anthropomorphizing for entrepreneurial theorizing starts with a guess, that guess can itself seem more like a fantasy, dream, or science fiction than a theory that would contribute to the field of entrepreneurship. However, we believe this is exactly the allure and creative input that should be encouraged and fostered in scholars. A guess is only the beginning of the entrepreneurial theorizing process—a process that also necessitates adaptation, the development of social mechanisms, and the generation of a plausible story. As an illustration of an initial guess, let us begin with a guess about venturing based on our knowledge of humans. People typically grieve after losing a loved one (and other things that are important to them), but they can reduce the resulting grief and learn from the focal experience by oscillating between a loss orientation and a restoration orientation (Shepherd et al., 2011). Given this knowledge, we can begin to form a guess for theorizing about whether and how entrepreneurial organizations feel and manage grief. In turn, this guess prompts a series of questions: what is essential to organizations; how are collective emotions triggered by loss; and how are these emotions sustained, expressed, and organized? Indeed, prior research exploring how emotions become collective (e.g., emotion contagion; Barsade, 2002) and organized (e.g., emotional capability; Huy, 1999) would likely be useful in this entrepreneurial theorizing effort.

Throughout the process of refining the initial anthropomorphic guess with successive guesses, considering the mechanisms connecting constructs, and constructing a plausible story, the theorizing outcome will likely change substantially. The process becomes more than simply an exercise in relabeling a human quality as an organizational quality and instead becomes a creative process of building and (re)combining to form something new—namely, a novel theory about an entrepreneurial phenomenon. Accordingly, much work needs to be done to construct a plausible entrepreneurial theorizing outcome from a fanciful initial anthropomorphic guess. While anthropomorphizing will sometimes lead to a dead-end, we believe it can infuse the theorizing process with creativity, with some efforts resulting in significant contributions to the field of entrepreneurship.

Conclusion

Despite its potential criticisms (Aggarwal & McGill, 2007), anthropomorphizing can be a useful tool in building new theories of entrepreneurship. With this tool, entrepreneurship scholars can access a rich body of knowledge about humans (i.e., themselves and others) to theorize about organizational phenomena and, in doing so, can gain confidence in their ability to use this rich knowledge to achieve the highly uncertain task of offering new insights into entrepreneurship, including venturing. As our review of the literatures on organizations’ entrepreneurial orientation and organizational knowledge demonstrated, entrepreneurship theorists use anthropomorphizing to inform and motivate their guessing about, building of, and telling of plausible stories.

Scholars have shed considerable light on theory testing, but less is known about theory generation (Locke et al., 2008). Since abduction requires scholars to make a mental leap to investigate an experienced anomaly (Hansen, 2008; Peirce, 1955), it can result in very novel propositions—it is itself an entrepreneurial process of scholarship. However, the processes that prompt these mental leaps are still relatively underexplored and underarticulated. Therefore, we introduce anthropomorphizing to the abductive process to provide an informed basis from which scholars can make guesses and thus generate novel propositions. Indeed, Epley et al. (2007) showed that individuals are skilled in using anthropomorphizing to explain happenings in their day-to-day lives. We similarly contend that anthropomorphizing can also be beneficial for scholars’ entrepreneurial theorizing.

Anthropomorphizing offers scholars a rich body of knowledge they can use to address entrepreneurship-related anomalies. If no additional inquiry is pursued after the initial guess (e.g., the focal scholar merely relabels human attributes as organizational attributes) and/or the focus is on aspects tangential to venturing activities, the critics of using anthropomorphizing in research have a strong case. However, in the face of uncertainty (e.g., when trying to explain a venturing anomaly), anthropomorphizing can be a source of understanding, control, and confidence (Meltzoff, 2007; Nickerson, 1999; Waytz et al., 2010) that empowers scholars to take additional steps in the entrepreneurial theorizing process. Furthermore, we propose that anthropomorphizing is a theorizing process that entails guessing, building, and telling stories based on one’s knowledge of humans to advance knowledge of non-human agents/systems. In reviewing the literatures on anthropomorphizing, entrepreneurial orientation, and organizational knowledge, we hope we have eliminated some of the mystery around anthropomorphizing in entrepreneurial theorizing and shown its usefulness in stimulating richer theories of entrepreneurship in general and venturing in particular.