Earlier this year Colin Jones from the University of Tasmania presented this interactive research seminar at the Australian Centre for Entrepreneurship in Brisbane.
Follow this link to view this ACE Research Seminar
Is it possible that a plausible explanation of firm survival could emerge seemingly independent of all the actors involved in the related events? Perhaps it should not be surprising that it could when one considers the absence of any current unifying and/or coherent explanation of firm survival (Yang and Aldrich, 2012). Indeed, it would seem that the complexity of firm formats, ever-present environmental heterogeneity, diverse research methods, competing theoretical frameworks and inconsistent definitions for variables and measures (Lewin and Volberda, 1999) conspire to restrict our agreed knowledge of firm survival. This research does not seek to resolve this problem, rather, it seeks to demonstrate that there is much to be learned from exploiting this lack of consensus by staying open to new explanations as to why certain firms survive when apparently similar firms fail. Building on the recent work of Miller and Tsang (2010), this research uses a transcendental (or critical) realist approach to investigate the survival of new entrants in the restaurant industry in Australian and the United Kingdom between the years 1970 to 2004. However, in contrast to Miller and Tsang’s call for critical realism to test management theories, this research seeks to 1) propose a new model of firm survival, and 2) to then subject the model to empirical scrutiny to determine its potential value (Bhaskar, 1978). Thus, this research heeds recent calls by Godfrey and Hill (1995) and Durand Vaara (2009) for researchers to focus on issues of causality at the level of generative mechanisms and processes. In a sense, the aim is to observe the unobservable in terms of generative mechanisms that give rise to events, the outcome of which may or may not be experienced by the researcher; events which in this case may be directly related to the survival of the firms under investigation.