Posts filed under ‘Entrepreneurship’
Between Society and Market
| Peter Klein |
I know little about the economic history of the Middle East, but the title of this upcoming workshop, "Between Society and the Market: Novel Approaches to the Business History of the Middle East," caught my eye. The workshop, organized by Relli Shechter and Andrew Godley, is part of the 8th Mediterranean Research Meeting, coming in March 2007. From the call for papers:
In the period before independent states in the Middle East (the Ottoman and colonial eras), businesses were often studied in the context of community history. It is known that entrepreneurial ethnic minorities were very active, but little is known of their larger economic and social impact on the region, and even less on Muslim entrepreneurship. There is also a large body of literature on the activities of foreign multinationals in the region, especially in the oil industry of course, but also in banking (Bamberg, Clay, Ferrier, Corley, Codley et al Jones 1981, 1987, Yergin). While these multinationals were the progenitors of the modern commercial enterprise in the region, this literature overwhelmingly views their Middle Eastern activities through the lenses of the parent companies or corporate HQ rather than understanding how the introduction of new products, techniques and business forms may have influenced local entrepreneurs, workers and consumers. . . .
During the period of emerging nation-states nad the rapid build up of national economies . . . , the study of businesses was again relegated to a secondary status. Private businesses were either discredited or simply ignored, and the rise of public sector ones mostly discussed from an administrative and political perspective. How small, medium, and large (the latter mostly state owned) businesses actually operated, and how the role of management and workers changed during these transitions has hardly been discussed.
Read the rest here.
Measuring Entrepreneurship
| Peter Klein |
Earlier this week the Kauffman Foundation released an Index of Entrepreneurial Activity for the US and for individual US states. A local TV station asked me to comment on the report (my state, Missouri, ranked sixth from the bottom, provoking much consternation), so I prepared a few sound bites. Here they are:
1. Entrepreneurship is difficult to define, let alone measure. The Kauffman index estimates the percentage of adults, not already owners of a business, who start a new business each month. But the common notion of "entrepreneurship" encompasses imagination, creativity, risk-taking, judgmental decision-making, and so on, activities or attributes not necessarily reflected in new firm formation.
2. The Kauffman index measures the rate at which new firms are established, not the number of firms that exist. The Census Bureau's Survey of Business Owners provides one measure of the latter. I haven't examined it in detail, state by state, but spot-checking suggests that its ranking doesn't correspond closely to the Kauffman ranking. (Missouri, for example, is 30 of 50 in the number of independent establishments.) (more…)
J. Bruce Bullock (1940-2006)
| Peter Klein |
My friend, colleague, and current department head J. Bruce Bullock collapsed at his home this morning, was taken to a hospital, and died a short time later. Bruce received a PhD in agricultural economics at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1960s but was a Chicago price theorist at heart. Much of his work attempted to debunk standard notions of “market failure” (he despised the term) and inefficiency. He taught for many years at N.C. State University, where he was influenced by the semi-Austrian economist E. C. Pasour, Jr., with whom he coauthored one of his most interesting papers, a critique of neoclassical welfare economics. More recently, Bruce had become interested in entrepreneurship, particularly the teaching of entrepreneurship. (He and I coauthored a short paper on entrepreneurship in the undergraduate curriculum, immodestly titled “Can Entrepreneurship Be Taught?”) Bruce’s most recent position was McQuinn Professor of Entrepreneurial Leadership at the University of Missouri. He will be missed.
Citation Impact of Entrepreneurship Research
| Peter Klein |
For you citation junkies out there ("bibliometricians"? "citophiles"?), the May 2006 issue of Entrepreneurship: Theory and Practice features a symposium on the nature and impact of entrepreneurship research, as measured by citation impact. (The formal title is "Special Issue on Understanding Entrepreneurship Scholarship from a Bibliometric Perspective.") According to the editors, bibliometric analysis suggests that entrepreneurship research contains "multiple but disconnected themes; dominant themes that reflect the disciplinary training and lens of their authors; and considerable dynamism and change in key research themes over time." More, in other words, than a disconnected "potpourri" or "hodgepodge." A fair point, but my sense is that the entreprreneurship literature still has a long way to go before constituting a coherent "field" with a distinct vision, research approach, "paradigm problems," and so on.
We Got a Contract, We Got a Contract!!
| Nicolai Foss |
Peter and I have been working for some time on an idea for a book volume, entitled The Theory of the Firm: Emergence, Synthesis, Challenges, and New Directions.
There are several textbooks that present or make extensive use of the theory of the firm (e.g., Paul Milgrom and John Roberts, Economics, Organization, and Management; George Hendrikse, Economics and Management of Organizations; James Brickley, Clifford W. Smith, and William Zimmerman, Managerial Economics and Organizational Architecture; etc.). There are also lots of readers and reference collections (e.g., Louis Putterman, The Economic Nature of the Firm and Jay Barney and William Ouchi, Organizational Economics).
There is no need for yet another textbook or reader/reference collection. What the literature lacks, however, is a critical synthesis of the various streams in the theory of the firm, one that places these streams in a historical and methodological context, discusses the various controversies that have stimulated internal development in the theory of the firm, and assesses the many critiques that have been leveled at the theory by scholars in sociology, psychology and management.
Peter and I think we can write such a book. Luckily, Cambridge University Press agrees with us, and will offer a contract. (more…)
Jane Jacobs and Economies of Diversity
| Peter Klein |
American-born Canadian writer and activist Jane Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984), and other important works on urban issues, died last week at age 89. (Jacobs never held a university post, and the obituary writers weren't sure what to call her; the Toronto Star chose "urban philosopher," suggesting to younger readers a hip-hop artist or tagger.) Lynne Kiesling at Knowledge Problem summarizes some of the Jacobs commentary around the web. (See also this from Gene Callahan and Sandy Ikeda and this from Leonard Gilroy.)
My interest in Jacobs's work stems, in part, from a current project on the economics of clustering in agro-biotechnology. My reading of the economic geography literature suggests that it tends to overstate the advantages of localization (proximity to key suppliers or buyers, access to specialized, tacit knowledge from similar firms, etc.) while downplaying the importance of economies of urbanization or diversity, an equally important kind of agglomeration. Readers, please correct me if this impression is wrong.
Besides classic works on economies of urbanization by Jacobs, Rosenberg (1963), and Henderson (1988), I like this paper by Pierre Desrochers, and this one by Desrochers and Frederic Sautet.
New Foss-Foss-Klein working paper
| Peter Klein |
A new item has just been added to our working papers page, “Original and Derived Judgment: An Entrepreneurial Theory of Economic Organization,” by Kirsten Foss, Nicolai J. Foss, and Peter G. Klein. This is an early draft, and comments are most welcome. Here’s the abstract: (more…)
A Lachmanian Approach to Entrepreneurship
| Peter Klein |
My colleagues Todd Chiles, Allen Bluedorn, and Vishal Gupta have posted an updated version of their forthcoming Organization Studies paper, "Beyond Creative Destruction and Entrepreneurial Discovery: A Radical Austrian Approach to Entrepreneurship." The paper introduces entrepreneurship scholars to the idiosyncratic Austrian economist Ludwig Lachmann, presenting Lachmann's approach as an alternative to those of Schumpeter and Kirzner.
Organizations and Markets 
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