Toward a complexity science of entrepreneurship

Darwinian selectionist theory is characterized as equilibrium bound. Complexity science focuses on order creation, hence is a better platform for a science of entrepreneurship. "Self-organization biologists" study order creation in the context of all four Aristotelian causes: material, formal, final, and efficient, whereas normal science rests only on efficient cause. Mohr's process theory and Siggelkow's narrative about entrepreneurship rest on all four, standing as good representations of postmodernist ontology. Since modern epistemology still calls for model-centered science, agent models are proposed as an alternative to mathematics as a means of applying modern normal science standards to research on entrepreneurship-all without downgrading thick, postmodernist descriptions of complex causality. (C) 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.