International Small Business Journal 2015, Vol. 33(6) 599–611 © The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0266242615583566 isb.sagepub.com Small Firms i s b j Entrepreneurship and process studies Daniel Hjorth Copenhagen Business School, Denmark Robin Holt University of Liverpool, UK; Copenhagen Business School, Denmark Chris Steyaert University of St. Gallen, Switzerland Abstract Process studies put movement, change and flow first; to study processually is to consider the world as restless, something underway, becoming and perishing, without end. To understand firms processually is to accept but also – and this is harder perhaps – to absorb this fluidity, to treat a variable as just that, a variable. The resonance with entrepreneurship studies is obvious. If any field is alive to, and fully resonant with, a processual understanding of, for example, the creation of firms, it is entrepreneurship studies. This special issue is an attempt to consider the promise and potential of processual approaches to studying, researching and practising entrepreneurship. The articles in the issue attest to an increasing sensitivity to processual thinking. We argue that appreciating entrepreneurial phenomena processually opens up the field to an understanding of entrepreneurship as organizational creation – not simply the creation of new organizations but also experiments in new organizational form. Keywords entrepreneurship studies, organization-creation, process, process philosophy Introduction – getting into the flow Process studies put movement, change and flow first; to study processually is to consider the world as restless, something underway, becoming and perishing, without end. Take a commercial organi- zation like a firm and consider its form, its purpose, its historical beginnings and its material pres- ence; when examined carefully, what might seem fixed becomes loose. Buildings are outgrown, Corresponding author: Daniel Hjorth, Copenhagen Business School, Porcelænshaven 18B, DK-2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark. Email: dh.mpp@cbs.dk 583566ISB 0 0 10.1177/0266242615583566International Small Business JournalHjorth et al. research-article 2015 Article