Historicizing Entrepreneurial Imprinting: Sensitive Periods, Cognitive Frames and Resistance

Literature in strategy and entrepreneurship resorted to the concept of imprinting to explain the resilience of firms’ traits. Nonetheless, it assumed such a process is at work rather than aiming at its explanation. This article advances a conceptual framework based on three main building blocks - cognitive frame, resource mobilization, and resisting entrepreneurs - combined in a historical perspective, overcoming the existing generalized confusion about "what to study" and "how to study" in the investigation of entrepreneurial imprinting. We offer an original definition of the imprints and a dynamic view based on resistance investigating the replication, substitution, and re-negotiation of imprints in time. The contribution of the present work is twofold: on the one side, it contributes to the ongoing debate on entrepreneurial imprinting by closing some of the gaps that characterized previous literature on the subject, and offering an innovative bridging between imprinting and resistance; on the other side, it answers to the recent call for a deeper integration between historical approaches and entrepreneurship literature.