Construct · 5 fields · 8 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
● jingle · one name, five constructs Nearest construct by meaningentrepreneurial intentioncompare the meaningsEvery construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to effectuation is entrepreneurial intention.
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A decision logic that takes a set of means as given and selects among possible effects that can be created with them, as opposed to causation, which takes an effect as given and selects the means to reach it. Sarasvathy proposed the pair in 2001 from think-aloud protocols with expert entrepreneurs and fixed it in 2008 as five principles: start from who you are, what you know, and whom you know (bird-in-hand); risk only what you can afford to lose; build partnerships with whoever commits (crazy quilt); turn surprises into opportunities (lemonade); and treat the future as made rather than predicted (pilot-in-the-plane). The construct is a logic that expert entrepreneurs prefer under Knightian uncertainty; it is not a trait, a stage, or a recipe for success, and Sarasvathy said so. Everything else on this map borrows, measures, or predates it.[1][2]
Chandler, DeTienne, McKelvie, and Mumford turned the logic into a scale in 2011: causation loads on one factor, while effectuation splits into experimentation, affordable loss, flexibility, and pre-commitments, with pre-commitments shared by both logics. Arend, Sarooghi, and Burkemper then ran effectuation through a theory-assessment framework in 2015 and concluded it was not yet a theory: its constructs are loosely bounded, its predictions are hard to falsify, and its evidence base is small. The scale and the critique between them changed the referent from a process observed in experts to a self-reported tendency in anyone, and the fight over whether the thing measured is the thing Sarasvathy described is still open. What differs is that here effectuation is a score, not a logic.[3][4]
Effectuation and causation as two competing logics of design, tested against outcomes. Read, Song, and Smit meta-analysed 48 studies in 2009 and coded each reported predictor of venture performance as belonging to one of the effectual principles; means, partnerships, and leverage of contingency were positively related to performance, while affordable loss was not. The move treats the principles as a design heuristic that can be scored across any dataset, not a logic elicited from experts, and the meta-analysis pooled studies that never used the word. The construct here is a family of predictors that a coder assigns after the fact, which is why its evidence looks stronger than the survey literature's.[5]
An approach to marketing for products and markets that do not yet exist, where segmentation, targeting, and positioning have nothing to work on because the customers are not there to survey. Read, Dew, Sarasvathy, Song, and Wiltbank set it out in 2009 by comparing expert entrepreneurs with MBA students on a marketing problem: the experts distrusted market research, built the market with early partners, and priced by what they could afford to lose. The construct is a set of marketing practices, with the customer as a co-creator of the market rather than a segment to be found. What differs from the entrepreneurship meaning is the object: not how ventures are created but how demand is.[6]
To effectuate an agreement or a statute is to give it legal effect, and the governing maxim of contract interpretation is that courts should effectuate the intent of the parties. Farnsworth showed in 1967 that the maxim hides a choice: the meaning to be effectuated may be what each party subjectively intended, what a reasonable person would have understood, or what the words carry in ordinary usage, and the doctrines of mistake and interpretation pick different ones. Schwartz and Scott argued in 2003 that for commercial contracts the parties themselves would prefer courts to effectuate the text, not a reconstructed intent, because textualism is cheaper and more predictable. The word here is a verb about legal consequence, unrelated to the entrepreneurship noun beyond the Latin root.[7][8]
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