Editorial

While we believe that these factors point towards an entrepreneurship research community that is in relatively good health, we wish to use our special issue to draw attention to the dangers of complacency, convergence and groupthink in social science, and to protect a “space” for the development of challenging ideas that we hope will reinvigorate theoretical work both now and in the future. In their paper “Liminality and the entrepreneurial firm: practice renewal during periods of radical change” they build on the recent entrepreneurship-as-practice turn (Johannisson, 2011; Goss et al., 2011) to study what entrepreneurs actually do, embedded in, rather than abstracted from, their social contexts. Radical empirics Dimo Dimov in his paper “Towards a qualitative understanding of human capital in entrepreneurship research” urges us to reconsider the interplay between concepts and their measurement. Exploring the influence of subjective factors on entrepreneurial intent, such as potential subcultural variations within a society, the paper helps entrepreneurship research move beyond the normative consideration of individual cognitions and economic and institutional environment (Bird, 1988; Fayolle and Liñán, 2014; Hmieleski and Corbett, 2006; Zampetakis et al., 2009).