Construct · 6 fields · 13 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
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A situation in which new goods, services, raw materials, or organizing methods can be introduced and sold for more than their cost of production. Shane and Venkataraman made the existence, discovery, and exploitation of such situations the defining subject of the field in 2000, treating opportunities as objective features of the environment that only some people notice. Alvarez and Barney's 2007 split is the live dispute: discovery theory says opportunities exist before anyone acts, creation theory says they are made by the act of pursuing them. What sets this meaning apart is that the opportunity is seized, it is defined by the profit from acting on it.[1][2]
The value of the best alternative given up when a choice is made (opportunity cost). Buchanan's 1969 restatement put the cost in the mind of the chooser at the moment of choice: it is the anticipated utility of the road not taken, not an objective outlay recorded afterwards. Kirzner, in the same Austrian tradition, gave the word its other economic use: the entrepreneur is whoever is alert to an unnoticed price discrepancy, and profit is the reward for noticing. In both uses the opportunity is what you do not have: a comparison, not a thing.[3][4]
A favourable condition in a firm's environment (an unmet demand, a new market, a technology shift) that the firm can exploit if its capabilities fit. Ansoff's 1957 growth grid sorted opportunities by whether the product and the market were new or existing; Andrews' 1971 formulation of corporate strategy defined strategy as the match between what a company might do (environmental opportunity) and what it can do (distinctive competence), which became the O in SWOT. The opportunity here belongs to the environment, not to the entrepreneur, and it is assessed rather than discovered.[5][6]
Access to the goods that determine life outcomes (schooling, jobs, income) distributed so that circumstances a person did not choose do not determine what they get. Coleman's 1966 report measured it as the equality of school inputs and, more consequentially, of outcomes across racial groups, and found that family background mattered more than schools. Roemer's 1998 theory made the definition precise: outcomes should depend on effort, not on circumstance, and a policy equalizes opportunity when people who exert the same effort get the same result whatever their type. The distinguishing feature is that opportunity is a distribution, judged by fairness rather than by profit.[7][8]
The socially patterned availability of legitimate (and illegitimate) means to reach culturally approved goals. Merton's 1938 argument was that American culture prescribes success for everyone while the class structure rations the means, and the gap produces deviant adaptations. Cloward and Ohlin extended it in 1960: even illegitimate means are unequally distributed, so delinquent subcultures form where those means exist. Cohen and Felson's routine activity theory took the word in a narrower direction, a crime opportunity is the convergence in time and space of a motivated offender, a suitable target, and the absence of a capable guardian. In every version the opportunity belongs to the structure, not to the individual who acts.[9][10][11]
Consistent but not necessarily formal or permanent dimensions of the political environment that give people incentives to engage in collective action by affecting their expectations of success or failure, Tarrow's political opportunity structure. McAdam's 1982 political process model built it from the civil rights movement: insurgency rises when the political system's vulnerability increases, indigenous organizations exist to exploit it, and participants come to believe change is possible. Opportunity here is a property of the state's openness, elite alignments, and allies, and it is read from the outside by movements rather than made by them.[12][13]
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