Empirical research Into firm-level entrepreneurship spans over a quarter of a century. This article reviews the current state of this research by Identifying key trends in 45 published empirical studies; examining the key Issues addressed and methods used to examine them; and outlining six key areas that need greater attention in future research.

c_ In this study, we have examined high and low levels of organizational adaptation to environmental change by analyzing strategy, structure, and performance relationships. Our results indicate that organizations with particular levels of adaptation tend to have spec$c strategy-structure arrangements which yield certain performance results. Organizations with an optimum strategy-structure match tend to have higher performances. Implications for future research in organizational adaptation are discussed.

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Research on entrepreneurship and especially corporate entrepreneurship has been fragmented and lacks accepted definitions. This study develops an objective definition of corporate entrepreneurship from two areas of entrepreneurial research. Using a statewide sample of savings and loans, this research classifies organizations as entrepreneurial and conservative and empirically tests hypotheses relating to the notion of corporate entrepreneurship. MANOCOVA analysis, controlling for size, supported the hypotheses that in entrepreneurial organizations, (a) decision making is more participative, (b) decision making relies more on specialized personnel, (c) performance objectives are developed from shared participation, and (d) managers will not be penalized if risky projects fail. It was not found that managers of entrepreneurial organizations rely less on integration processes to assist in implementing decisions.

This study explored the relationships between the environmental scanning activities of chief executives from a single industry and their organizations' strategies, on the premise that executives employing different types of Porter's generic business-level strategies would use different scanning activities. There were differences in the strategy-scanning linkages. Specifically there are indications that firms with a differentiation strategy tend to employ a scanning activity that places more importance on evaluating opportunities and customer attitudes. Firms with a cost leadership strategy tend to use a scanning activity that evaluates competitive threats and tracks the policies and tactics of competitors.