Recent calls for a historic turn in organization studies offer the opportunity to relaunch dialogue between management and business history research. Focusing on the specific domain of entrepreneurship research, this article illustrates the potential of mutual contributions from management and business history. In doing so, it demonstrates how historical approaches strongly influenced the early theoretical developments within entrepreneurship and demonstrates the potential to contribute to future scholarly debates. In sum, this article brings closer together business history and management studies stressing that their different perspectives and approaches are very valuable to enriching entrepreneurship research.

The issue of network configuration has for long been debated in entrepreneurship. While the common view assumes that a heterogeneous network offers additional benefits to entrepreneurs, recent works have noted how contextual circumstances can motivate entrepreneurs to develop a homogeneous network. We pursue this issue further by uncovering how strong ties networks influence and shape entrepreneurial endeavours. Using an in-depth historical qualitative analysis of SEUR we demonstrate the dynamic interplay between social relationships embedded in strong ties networks and entrepreneurial processes over time. We conclude that the social foundation found in strong ties networks influences the economic development of the entrepreneurial firm.