AoM PDW on Austrian Economics

1 July 2011 at 10:27 am Peter G. Klein Leave a comment

| Peter Klein |

Four years ago I helped organize an Academy of Management pre-conference workshop on Austrian economics featuring Nicolai, me, Joe Mahoney, Yasemin Kor, Dick Langlois, and Elaine Mosakowski. It was well attended and very well received and we are doing something similar this year. Henrik Berglund, Todd Chiles, Steffen Korsgaard, and I have put together a Professional Development Workshop (PDW) on “Austrian Economics and Entrepreneurship Research.” Full details below. The conference home page is here. Hope to see many O&Mers at the workshop!

Austrian Economics and Entrepreneurship Research

Please join us Saturday, August 13, from 12:30 to 2:30pm in the San Antonio Convention Center, Room 212A, for a PDW on the Austrian school of economics and its implications for entrepreneurship studies (Program Session #281).

The Austrian school is increasingly well-known in the entrepreneurship field and is typically associated with Joseph Schumpeter’s idea of “creative destruction” and Israel Kirzner’s concept of “entrepreneurial alertness.” But Austrian economics features a number of additional themes, constructs, and emphases — resource heterogeneity, subjectivity of beliefs and expectations, processes of organizational emergence under complexity, and more — that are particularly relevant to research in entrepreneurship, organization, and strategy. Austrian economics is also receiving increasing attention in the broader economics and policy communities, as witnessed by the revival of interest in Austrian business cycle theory as an explanation for the financial crisis and subsequent economic downturn.

This PDW features a panel discussion and interactive table discussions designed to explore Austrian themes in greater detail and examine their applications to research in entrepreneurship and related areas of management studies. The organizers also hope to encourage and help develop the growing community of management scholars interested in the Austrian school.

The program begins with an introduction and overview by session organizers Henrik Berglund (Chalmers University of Technology), Todd Chiles (University of Missouri), Peter Klein (University of Missouri), and Steffen Korsgaard (Aarhus University), followed by breakout sessions organized around particular themes such as alertness and opportunity discovery, heterogeneity of the entrepreneurial imagination, resource heterogeneity and Austrian capital theory, entrepreneurship and equilibration, entrepreneurship and punctuated disequilibrium. Other distinctively Austrian (e.g., opportunities and action, the role of individuals, the individual-opportunity nexus, the market process, methodological individualism) and related (e.g., effectuation and bricolage) ideas will also figure prominently in the discussions.

The groups will then reassemble to share findings and results with the larger group. Ample time will be allowed for informal discussion and networking.

Please contact Henrik Berglund (henrik.berglund@chalmers.se) with any questions.