The Entrepreneur

Foreword

This book presents fundamental insights into entrepreneurship that are missing from much of the recent literature on the subject. The roots of entrepreneurship theory lie in political economy, but much of the modern academic literature on entrepreneurship appears in business and management studies journals. This book provides an up-to-date perspective on both economic and business aspects of the subject.

To understand the role of the entrepreneur it is necessary to know something of the way the economy works. Acquiring this knowledge can be a difficult and demanding task. Economics as a discipline has evolved over 240 years since the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, so there is much to learn. In business studies the role of the entrepreneur is often analyzed in terms of the firm rather than the economic system in which firms operate. As a result, many of the key insights into entrepreneurship are lost. Business-based studies of entrepreneurship provide a simple and accessible introduction to the subject, but many of the deeper insights disappear. A key strength of this book is that it embeds entrepreneurship within the economy, whilst recognizing the importance of the firm as well. The book is therefore able to summarize insights from both the economics and business studies literatures.

It might be thought that turning to a standard economics text would provide an economic context for entrepreneurship, but that would be a mistake. Modern neoclassical economics ...