------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW ------
Title: Historical Foundations of Entrepreneurship Research
Published by EH.NET (June 2011)
Hans Landström and Franz Lohrke, editors, /Historical Foundations of
Entrepreneurship Research/. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2010. x + 431
pp. $200 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-1-84720-919-1.
Reviewed for EH.Net by Robert F. Hébert, Auburn University (emeritus).
Buried deep in the 400+ pages of this book is a statement by British
Management Professor Andrew Godley that may easily be overlooked: “...
the mechanism between entrepreneurship and cultural values can be better
understood once the economic function of entrepreneurship is clarified” (p.
366). This proposition suggests that the unsettled nature of
entrepreneurship constitutes an impediment to research on that subject.
However, despite their obvious research zeal, except for Godley, the
contributors to this compendium of essays seem blissfully unaware of this
anomaly and/or its implications. Over the past three decades Albert Link
and I have written repeatedly about the lack of clarity in the economic
function of entrepreneurship (Hébert and Link, 1982, 1988, 2006, 2009). Yet
judging by the present volume little progress to date has been made toward
clarification. The economic function of entrepreneurship remains as murky
and manifold today as we found it three decades ago. As Peter Kilby (1971)
wrote a decade before us, defining entrepreneurship is like hunting for the
heffalump -- a mythical creature that defies description.
Some of the contributors to the present volume view entrepreneurship in a
narrow, historical context, in which the function of the entrepreneur is to
establish a firm (i.e., start a business) and secure capital funding for
it. These features, as Godley points out in Chapter 16, are those preferred
by contemporary management scholars, although in a larger historical context
entrepreneurship is about far more than that. Other contributors adopt a
wider, historical context, emphasizing culture, psychology, cognitive
learning, social networks, and related ideas. Some writers follow a
discipline-centric approach. Others advocate a cross-disciplinary
perspective. The unsuspecting reader who approaches this collection of
essays expecting to find a unanimous definition of entrepreneurship will be
disappointed. Of course, the conceptual maelstrom into which
entrepreneurship has descended is the fault of neither the editors nor
contributors. Nevertheless, the reader might have been alerted to the
problems involved in exploring the historical foundations of a moving target.
That having been said, what are the positive accomplishments of this book?
The editors cast a wide net in selecting contributors. Many of the authors
are affiliated with Colleges/Schools of Business (Baron, Kreiser, Lohrke,
Marino, Moss, Nagy, Robinson, Sarasvathy, Short, and Wadhwani) or
Schools/Departments of Management (Ahlstrom, Edmond, Huse, Lumpkin, Wang, and
Wiklund). Some are at research/applied institutes or centers (Benner,
Berglund, Delmar, Foss, Gabrielsson, Godley, Jack, Johnson, Klein,
Landström, and Rose). One is an economic historian (Schön), and two are
sociologists (Persson, and Ruef). This cross-section of authors and
disciplines reflects the heterogeneous nature of entrepreneurship as well as
the interest in it as a research subject.
The eighteen chapters that comprise this book are divided in the following
fashion. Chapter 1 is an introductory essay aimed at establishing the
importance of history and historical context in entrepreneurship research.
The remaining chapters are partitioned into three categories. The first
category (Chapters 2 and 3) traces the historical development of
entrepreneurship as a research field, emphasizing changes in the composition
of entrepreneurship research over time, and raising the possibility of a
cross-disciplinary and theory-driven research platform. This section gives
scant attention to the fact that entrepreneurship suffers from an identify
complex that potentially threatens the prospects for entrepreneurship to
emerge as a unified field.
The second category (Chapters 4 to 14) -- subdivided into opportunity
recognition, evaluation, exploitation and integrative works -- explores the
intellectual roots of entrepreneurship research. The essays in this section
advocate and explain various approaches, such as organization theory,
cognitive theory, governance systems and socio-network theory. Taken
together, they provide a good example of the implicit heterogeneity and
manifold functions of entrepreneurship. Perhaps the best advice to
prospective researchers is on page 92: “Future entrepreneurship research
would benefit from the continued development of a clear and accurate
understanding of the role of environmental uncertainty in the entrepreneurial
process. In particular, researchers should be aware of the theoretical and
empirical distinctions between the concepts of uncertainty and
risk-taking.” That we need to be reminded of this almost a century after
Frank Knight (1921) is a bit surprising, if not discouraging.
The third, and final, category (Chapters 15 to 18) promotes the use of
economic history in entrepreneurship research. Chapter 15 is a general plea
for historical reasoning in the development of entrepreneurship theory. The
next three chapters have a geographical orientation; they are aimed at
understanding entrepreneurship in Great Britain, Sweden, and Asia,
respectively. In Chapter 16, Andrew Godley offers some insightful
historical revelations on the rise and fall of the British economy (and the
nature and role of entrepreneurship in it), especially before and after World
Wars I and II.
For better or worse, the contributors to this volume have, for the most part,
taken a Forrest Gump approach to entrepreneurship, i.e., “entrepreneurship
is what entrepreneurship does!” Each essay is competently written,
providing practitioners of narrow entrepreneurship research, of whatever
academic stripe, some nuggets to mine. But the grand problems of
entrepreneurship research still lurk unresolved (and mostly unexposed) within
the historical foundations of the subject: Can entrepreneurship attain the
status of a unified field of research? Do entrepreneurial opportunities
constitute an endogenous or exogenous variable? Does the best payoff lie
within a discipline-centric or cross-disciplinary approach? For whatever
reason, these issues have been either ignored or deferred, not just by the
writers reviewed here, but by entrepreneurship researchers as a whole.
There remains much work to be done.
References:
Hébert, Robert F. and Albert N. Link. (1982). /The Entrepreneur: Mainstream
Views and Radical Critiques/. New York: Praeger.
________ . (1988). /The Entrepreneur: Mainstream Views and Radical
Critiques/, second edition New York: Praeger.
________. (2006). “Historical Perspectives on the Entrepreneur,”/
Foundation and Trends in Entrepreneurship/ 2 (4): 261-408.
________ . (2009). /A History of Entrepreneurship/. London: Routledge.
Kilby, Peter. (1971). “Hunting the Heffalump,” in /Entrepreneurship and
Economic Development/, ed. Peter Kilby. New York: Free Press, pp. 1-40.
Knight, Frank H. (1921). /Risk, Uncertainty and Profit/. New York:
Houghton Mifflin.
Robert F. Hébert is Emeritus Russell Foundation Professor of Entrepreneurial
Studies, Auburn University. He is the author of more than 100 articles,
books, and reviews, published in such venues as the /Quarterly Journal of
Economics/ and the /Journal of Political Economy/. His latest book on
entrepreneurship is /A History of Entrepreneurship/, with Albert N. Link.
London: Routledge, 2009.
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Geographic Location: General, International, or Comparative
Subject: Business History
Time: 20th Century: Pre WWII, 20th Century: WWII and post-WWII
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