------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW ------
Title: The Determinants of Entrepreneurship: Leadership, Culture and
Institutions

Published by EH.Net (February 2011)

José L. Garcia-Ruiz and Pier Angelo Toninelli, editors, /The Determinants of
Entrepreneurship: Leadership, Culture and Institutions/. London: Pickering
and Chatto, 2010. x + 236 pp. $99 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-1-84893-071-1.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Andrew Godley, Henley Business School, University of
Reading.

The surge among business school researchers worldwide of studies in
entrepreneurship over the last decade or so has been nothing short of
remarkable. The topic is now a fully-fledged research track in the Academy of
Management, Association of International Business and Strategic Management
Society meetings, for example. Despite such growth in volume of research, the
need for well-structured, empirically robust historical studies has never
been greater. Recent edited collections, such as those by David Landes, Joel
Mokyr and Will Baumol, /The Invention of Enterprise/ along with Hans
Landstrom and Franz Lohrke, /Historical Foundations of Entrepreneurship
Research/, have offered syntheses of existing historical research. But José
L. Garcia-Ruiz and Pier Angelo Toninelli are to be applauded because they
break new ground in /The Determinants of Entrepreneurship/ by summarizing
interim results from several new studies of historical entrepreneurship in
Italy, Spain, Greece and Latin America.

The collection begins with Franco Amatori’s masterful survey of a
lifetime’s work on understanding historical patterns of Italian
entrepreneurship. Much of what is now the consensus view of Italian
entrepreneurship was sketched out by Amatori over thirty years ago in an
article in /Business History Review/. Since 2001, Amatori has compiled the
/Biographical Dictionary of Italian Entrepreneurs/. Owing to funding
pressures, this remains incomplete. But both Amatori and Toninelli and Vasta
(below) are able to draw some impressive initial inferences here. Ioanna
Sapfo Pepelasis also introduces readers to a wholly novel database on Greek
entrepreneurs. Compiled from the founding charters of Greek Société
Anonymes between 1830 and 1909, this initial survey of the data offers
insights into the process of diversification away from agriculture and
maritime trade that characterized Greek development.

Then follow three essays examining business leaders. First, Pier Angelo
Toninelli and Michelangelo Vasta provide a quantitative analysis of a section
of the /Biographical Dictionary of Italian Entrepreneurs/. They utilize
cluster analysis to generate new findings from collective biographical data,
a reasonably frequent method used in recent research on present-day
entrepreneurs, but rare among historical surveys. This is followed by Gabriel
Tortella, Gloria Quiroga and Ignacio Moral, who compare data drawn from David
Jeremy’s well known /Dictionary of Business Biography/ for British
entrepreneurs with less well-known surveys of Spanish entrepreneurs to
challenge the received wisdom that Spanish entrepreneurs were not well
educated. This section is completed by Paloma Fernandez-Pérez and Nuria
Puig’s analysis of the importance of social capital to Catalan family
firms.

The third group of essays explores the impact of national, ethnic and
religious cultural values and education levels on entrepreneurial activity.
James Foreman-Peck and Peng Zhou develop Foreman-Peck’s earlier work on
modeling entrepreneurial culture, with the results suggesting that such
cultural influences can be remarkably persistent. In the only
non-quantitative contribution in the volume, Carlos Davila focuses on the
need among the Latin American community of business and economic historians
to move away from conceptualizing the past in terms of dependency theory.
Finally José Garcia Ruiz assesses educational attainment among Spanish
entrepreneurs since the 1940s.

What do we learn? Above all this reviewer was impressed by the sheer volume
of new empirical data that is being created by this group of researchers. As
all the authors acknowledge, these are interim results. Nevertheless there
are several highly suggestive findings. Prime among these are the relatively
high levels of educational attainment by Spanish and Italian entrepreneurs
during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and that the business
group structure was the norm in Greece in the past, as it is in China and
India today. Perhaps most strikingly, however, is the clarification of the
how technological transfer was initiated by entrepreneurs in Mediterranean
Europe. For while it has been a commonplace for years that economic
development on the South European periphery during this period was dependent
on foreign technology, the institutional structure that facilitated that
process is less well understood. Recent developments in Asian development
have challenged the previous consensus that strong property rights encourage
entrepreneurial initiative. The studies here also undermine such a simplistic
association of innovation and market creation with the creation of property
rights. There is no doubt that as the studies progress the number of insights
will increase. We can certainly look forward to several of these studies
eventually finding their way into the leading journals. But the editors are
to be congratulated for such a tantalizing view of what is to come.

Andrew Godley is Professor of Management and Director of Research at the
Henley Centre for Entrepreneurship, Henley Business School, University of
Reading, UK. He has authored many studies of historical entrepreneurship,
including /Jewish Immigrant Entrepreneurship in London and New York:
Enterprise and Culture/ (Palgrave, 2001), and “The Veterinary Medicines
Industry in Britain, 1900-2000” (with Tony Corley), /Economic History
Review/ (forthcoming), “Weetman Pearson in Mexico and the Emergence of a
British Oil Major, 1901-1919” (with Lisa Bud Frierman and Judith Wale),
/Business History Review/ (2010), and “Democratizing Luxury and the
Contentious ‘Invention of the Technological Chicken’ in Britain” (with
Bridget Williams), /Business History Review/ (2009).

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Geographic Location: Europe, Latin America, incl. Mexico and the Caribbean
Subject: Business History
Time: 19th Century, 20th Century: Pre WWII, 20th Century: WWII and post-WWII