Interdisciplinary mapping of body of knowledge-based agencies; A step towards understanding entrepreneurial agency

Abstract

Entrepreneurial agency, defined as people's ability to discover and exploit business opportunities and create new value, is a complicated notion that necessitates an interdisciplinary approach and the integration of various views. Adopting this approach in the first step requires understanding the knowledge-based agencies and selecting related fields, which in this article is done through the scientometric analysis method. 18060 English-language items from the WOS database were selected and evaluated. The co-citation analysis of sources indicated five major clusters: Sociology, organization and management, agency theory, neuroscience/cognitive science, and psychology. The authors' co-citation analysis revealed seven theoretical groups. The co-occurrence analysis of key phrases and time trends revealed that concepts such as agency theory, human agency, and structure-agency duality originated in the 1970s and 1980s, but newer concepts such as teacher agency and entrepreneurial agency arose more recently. The findings revealed that the concept of agency evokes diverse interpretations depending on the field researched upon. In economics and law, it refers to representation and the principal-agent relationship. In public administration and political science, it refers to an organization or firm that performs a function for another. In philosophy, sociology, psychology, education, cognitive science, and neuroscience, it refers to the capacity, condition, or state of executing an action or exerting power, as well as the human ability to perform conscious and purposeful activities. Finally, to investigate entrepreneurial agency at the individual level, an integrated study of psychology and the social sciences is proposed.

Keywords

• agency
• scientometric analysis
• interdisciplinary study
• entrepreneurial agency