Fully Mature but Not Fully Legitimate: A Different Perspective on the State of Entrepreneurship Education

Abstract

This article seeks to demonstrate that the field of entrepreneurship/small business can be characterized as fully mature, a view contrasting one proposed by Kuratko. Evidence of the achievement of full maturity and marginal legitimacy is given based on benchmarks in the development of the field. In addition, this article adds additional support to the concept of partial legitimacy on which Katz and Kuratko agree. Building from these analyses, a theoretical life cycle model for the growth of disciplines in general is offered, using entrepreneurship as the example. The major consequence of entrepreneurship's full maturity is identified as the growing centrality of the business‐school based discipline of entrepreneurship in relation to the emerging entrepreneurship efforts across campuses, and the implication of this centrality for the discipline of entrepreneurship is discussed.