How Entrepreneurship Forgot Capitalism: Entrepreneurship Teaching and Research in Business Schools

By most measures, entrepreneurship education and research is flourishing in business schools today. Classes abound and students are keen to take them. The number of business school professors identifying themselves as focused on the study of entrepreneurship has also soared. Yet, the meaning and scope of entrepreneurship as it has come to be defined, taught, and studied in business schools over the last three decades is remarkably narrow, largely divorcing entrepreneurship from its economic and social context and from its relationship to processes of change in the market economy. In short, entrepreneurship as it is understood in business schools today has largely lost its raison d’etre as the engine of change in capitalist economies. This paper examines the origins of the splintering of entrepreneurship education from the study of capitalism and highlights a set of intellectual and educational problems this has created.     

Advancing Public Policy for High‐Growth,Female, and Social Entrepreneurs

Findings from a large and growing body of entrepreneurship research offer insights for public policy and public officials and managers. Entrepreneurship policy is defined as measures undertaken to stimulate entrepreneurship in a region or country. The authors discuss generalizations from empirical research on three types of entrepreneurship activity that are vital for inclusive, sustainable economic growth: high‐growth (stressing economic impact), female (inclusive impact), and social (sustainable impact) entrepreneurship. High‐growth firms make up a small share of all entrepreneurial activity but create the majority of economic growth. Compared to their male counterparts, female entrepreneurs are fewer in number (one‐third of all entrepreneurs) and tend to start ventures with lower financial capital and growth expectations. Social entrepreneurs generally have high levels of education and pursue social objectives, often remedying market failures with innovative solutions. For each entrepreneurship type, the authors provide a definition, empirical generalizations, and implications for public policy.     

An exploration of the application of universities as artificial institutional entrepreneurs: The case of China

Universities worldwide have increasingly been encouraged to incubate and create business enterprises in order to fulfil national and regional economic development objectives via rapid research commercialization, technology transfer, and open innovation. The definitions of university-level entrepreneurship appear to be controversial in the extant literature, with special reference to government–university–industry partnerships under the overarching theoretical framework of institutional entrepreneurship. No longer do universities act only as agents for knowledge transmission and diffusion but also as business enterprises to help change formal institutional arrangements to meet evolving economic and social demands and to graft the entrepreneurial paradigm into academic culture and structures. As a transitional economy, have China's universities also acted as institutional entrepreneurs for change? In this paper, we address this research question by exploring the nature of government–university–industry links and the application of “institutional entrepreneurship” to Chinese universities. We use a case analysis of the Industry Technology Research Institute of Geo-Resources and Environment Co. Ltd. established by the China University of Geosciences to support our argument that Chinese universities are artificial institutional entrepreneurs. As a result of our analysis, we identified several success factors and constraints on universities as institutional entrepreneurs in the context of China.     

Social Entrepreneurship,Entrepreneurship, Collectivism,and Everything in Between: Prototypes and Continuous Dimensions

This article uses prototypes and continuous dimensions to place social entrepreneurship in relation to other organizational forms. This approach is more fruitful than classical attempts to stipulate essential characteristics and establish boundaries. A prototype and continuous dimension approach allows consideration of the way social entrepreneurship functions similarly to and differently from related concepts, such as traditional entrepreneurship, public social services, and collectivism. These categories can be distinguished according to the degree to which control over the way value is created, allocated, and distributed occurs socially or entrepreneurially. This approach offers the additional advantage of making the concept more precise, as subdimensions clarify the relationship to practices such as volunteerism and theories such as antidevelopment. By mapping the network of organizational forms in which social entrepreneurship can be located, we can focus on the viability and advisability of different ways of solving social problems.     

From government to governance: External influences on business risk management

The influence of external organizations and pressures on business risk management practices has hitherto been examined through the influence of state regulatory regimes on businesses. This article concentrates on key socio‐legal concerns about the influence of the law in social and economic life. We know that the sources of regulation and risk management are diversifying beyond the state. What we do not have is much empirically informed research about the range of sources influencing the business world and in particular the weighting of influence exercised by them. In this paper we explore the understandings regulatory actors have of the different external pressures on business risk management through an empirical study of the understandings of those in the food retail sector about the management of food safety and food hygiene risks. A broader objective is to throw some further light onto the debate about regulation within and beyond the state.     

Who coupled which stream(s)? Policy entrepreneurship and innovation in the energy–water nexus in Gujarat,India

Although policy entrepreneurship is essential for fostering policy innovations to achieve sustainable development, the literature has conflated different types of entrepreneurship and disaggregated it using inconsistent terminology. We conceptualize entrepreneurship using a six-stream variant of the multiple streams framework (MSF)—which addresses key limitations of the original MSF—to examine entrepreneurial activities in the case of the Jyotigram Yojana, a widely recognized policy innovation for managing the energy–water nexus in Gujarat, India. We find that whereas policy and political entrepreneurship no doubt played a significant role in coupling the streams and fostering this policy innovation, the process broker, program champion, and technology innovator were also important in policy formulation, implementation, and “success.” We conclude that the six-stream variant of MSF is useful for identifying and distinguishing various types of entrepreneurship involved in policy innovation for sustainability.     

校内创业实践的调查与分析——以常州建设高职校为例

创业实践是职业学校开展创业教育的重要环节,是增强创业体验、提升创业认识、增强创业知识、培养创业能力的主要途径。在职业学校大力开展创业教育的背景下,以常州建设高职校学生为对象,通过问卷的形式对参与创业实践的学生进行了调查统计分析,提出了职业学校实施创业教育实践的建议。     

Rethinking Academic Entrepreneurship: University Governance and the Emergence of the Academic Enterprise

The theory and practice of academic entrepreneurship, like many domains of public management, requires active recognition that context affects individual behavior. In this Viewpoint essay, the authors contend that the operational logic of a university affects the values and activities of actors within that university in ways that shape the broader entrepreneurial activities of the university. The authors describe a new entrepreneurial organizational logic, termed the “academic enterprise,” and situate it in relation to the more established academy, bureaucratic, and market logics. The academic enterprise is inherently entrepreneurial in terms of the management of the university and its reliance on faculty and student entrepreneurship as a tool for broad-scale social and economic transformation.     

Diasporan students social entrepreneurship intention: The moderating role of institutional support

The daunting global challenges saddling polities and governments alike have resultantly created a situation whereby governments and corporate civil society have inadvertently reneged on delivering public good and services to citizens. In ensuring and strengthening a public–private actor synergy, with particular emphasis on leveraging acquired knowledge and skills of diaspora‐based students, social entrepreneurship activities could be harnessed to provide sustainable remedies to social challenges such as unemployment, famine amongst others by utilizing social entrepreneurship as a tool. Using the theory of planned behaviour as a theoretical framework, the study elicited data from 322 respondents to empirically investigate determinants of social entrepreneurship intentions of Ghanaian students, with the moderating role of institutional support. Study results revealed that sense of social responsibility and service learning have significant relationship with social entrepreneurship intention. However, social volunteering experience had no significant relationship. Moreover, whereas attitude to social entrepreneurship intention demonstrated a positive relationship, institutional support as a moderator was also revealed to influence the relationship between attitude and social entrepreneurship intention. From the study findings, we discourse on the implications for social entrepreneurship in Ghana to policy makers and stakeholders.     

External affairs and trusted family businesses: A research agenda

In the past two decades, the Journal of Public Affairs has solidified corporate public affairs as a legitimate leadership skillset vital to driving future business growth. Yet, more work at a persistently overlooked gap in the Journal, the intersection of public affairs and family businesses, might shed new light on thriving, trusted, and sustainable business practices. This paper examines the unique contributions of family businesses as trusted influencers. As one of the most prominent forms of business, worldwide, family businesses persistently enjoy unusually high levels of public trust while collectively employing millions of wage earners yet their contributions to corporate external affairs research ostensibly have been largely overlooked. These “silent” community and social influencers offer a potentially new perspective on effective public outreach given their persistent and unique trust advantage. Family business' trust-based capabilities can potentially bring new insights to understanding effective stakeholder engagement, credible communications, and issues management—the sweet spot of corporate public affairs functions. Future research opportunities based on relational- and locational- advantages of trusted family businesses are identified.     

Leveraging Administrative Data to Better Serve Children and Families

The challenge of complex social issues drives the need for data systems that can connect information across multiple service delivery systems. Integrated data systems provide significant value for needs assessment, program planning, policy decision making, and collective impact evaluation across a range of social issues. This case study describes a mature county‐based integrated data system. The case study has three aims: (1) to highlight the value of integrated data systems to research, (2) to outline common challenges that such initiatives face, and (3) to present several ongoing considerations for the field that could inform policy recommendations to facilitate the use of integrated data. The authors present examples from the experience of developing this integrated data system, including involvement in the design and evaluation of the first county‐level social impact bond. The case study highlights the benefits and limitations of integrated data use in research and the potential to advance evidence‐based social decision making.     

The institutions of economic freedom and entrepreneurship: evidence from panel data

This paper provides new evidence on the determinants of entrepreneurship across countries. The paper investigates the relationship between the institutional setting, in terms of economic freedom, and entrepreneurship, measured by self-employment, in a panel data setting covering 23 OECD countries for the period 1972–2002. The measure of economic freedom includes five aspects: size of government, legal structure and security of property rights, access to sound money, freedom to trade internationally, and the regulation of credit, labour and business. The empirical findings show that a smaller government sector, better legal structure and security of property rights, as well as less regulation of credit, labour and business tend to increase entrepreneurship.     

Schumpeter's economic theory and the dynamic accounting view of the firm: neglected pages from the Theory of Economic Development

Abstract

The first English translation of some of Schumpeter's (1926) pages of the Theory of Economic Development is presented. These neglected pages are remarkable because they significantly add to Schumpeter's masterpiece on a number of issues concerned with accounting, law and economics of the firm. They show that Schumpeter considered understanding the firm, together with innovation, as important scientific problems. Schumpeter doubts the explanatory value of proprietary entrepreneurship and provides an early justification of the dynamic entity view of business activity generated by the firm as a becoming concern. He discusses its implications for understanding issues of economic organization and corporate governance, and suggests some theoretical insights concerning business capital and money under conditions of real dynamics and complexity. The doors opened by Schumpeter indicate that money and accounting are fundamentally coupled as complementary institutions in framing and shaping the economic and monetary process of the firm as an enterprise entity.     

Greasing the wheels? The impact of regulations and corruption on firm entry

This paper investigates the question of whether corruption might ‘grease the wheels’ of an economy. We investigate whether and to what extent the impact of regulations on entrepreneurship is dependent on corruption. We first test whether regulations robustly deter firm entry into markets. Our results show that the existence of a larger number of procedures required to start a business, as well as larger minimum capital requirements are detrimental to entrepreneurship. Second, we test whether corruption reduces the negative impact of regulations on entrepreneurship in highly regulated economies. Our empirical analysis, covering a maximum of 43 countries over the 2003–2005 period, shows that corruption facilitates firm entry in highly regulated economies. For example, the ‘greasing’ effect of corruption kicks in at around 50 days required to start a new business. Our results thus provide support for the ‘grease the wheels’ hypothesis.     

Reigniting the fire: a contemporary research agenda for social,political and nonprofit marketing

The paper reports on the core challenges faced by the nonprofit, political and social marketing disciplinary areas and suggests a series of research agendas to develop theory and practice to meet these challenges.

• Social marketing's research agenda involves the continued adaptation of the new developments in commercial marketing, whilst building a base of social marketing theory and best practice benchmarks that can be used to identify, clarify and classify the boundaries of social marketing against social change techniques.
• Nonprofit marketing is pursuing the dual research agenda of developing the theory and practice of social entrepreneurship whilst seeking deeper consumer‐based research to understand motivations for charitable behaviour and gift giving.
• Political Marketing's research agenda looks for an increase in the level of background research, core data and market research to use as a basis for developing more advanced theoretical and practical models. In addition, as political marketing is being transferred internationally between a range of political and electoral systems, there is a need for comparative research into both the relevance and effectiveness of these techniques to isolate nation independent and nation dependent political marketing strategies and campaigns.

Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Integration of the Swedish Local Elite: The Role of Professional and Private Networks

This article uses social network data to study the integration of local elites in four Swedish municipalities. Four research questions are asked. First: How integrated are the elites? While the results modify the picture that there are two rather distinct elites in Sweden – that is, a political elite dominated by the labour movement and an economic elite dominated by business and the large business organizations – it is interesting to note that integration between elite spheres is lowest for the relation between politicians and business representatives. To a considerable degree, integration between political and economic elites is indirect, mediated through the administrative elite. The second question is: Are the inner elite circles dominated by the political, economic or administrative elite? The study indicates that local elites in Sweden are strongly dominated by political elites, and also by administrative elites. This is reassuring, since it would indicate a democratic deficit if the structural power of decision making in municipalities resided predominantly in economic actors and administrators. The third question is: What is the role of friendship relations in creating elite integration? The study indicates that private relations among elites both reinforce professional networks and extend them in important ways. The final question is: Is elite integration contingent on political stability and/or the structure of local business? The results are surprisingly stable across the four municipalities, even though the largest distinction was found between elite core and periphery in the politically most stable municipality, which was also the one with the lowest economic diversity.     

Reforming Social Services in Hong Kong: The Role of Contracting and Performance Management in the Non‐Profit Sector

Contracts and performance management, along with the concept of consumerism, have become the fundamental metaphors for New Public Management (NPM) and key changes in the public service. ‘Doing well while doing good’ and finding generally acceptable accountability measures for social services have become the perennial aspirations of planners, service providers and funders. This article examines the contingent factors and rationales behind the quality movement and recontracting exercise in reforming the delivery of personal social service programs in Hong Kong within the framework of New Public Management (NPM). It explains the use of long‐term relational contracts rather than the standard business contracts between the government as funder and non‐profit organisations as service providers. It also deals with the complex relationships among quality issues, quality standards, consumerism, accountability, performance indicators, and performance management.     

Understanding Business Improvement Districts: A New Governance Framework

What is the current state of research on business improvement districts (BIDs)? What is an appropriate framework for analysis? What are key questions for advancing future BID research? BIDs can be understood best within a network governance framework. The research shows, first, a blurring of the line between the public and private spheres as a result of BIDs; second, BIDs are increasingly important actors in urban governance; third, BIDs engage in collaborative, conflictual, and co‐optative relations with local and state governments; and fourth, difficult accountability and management problems are created by their interdependent relationships with local governments. Future research needs to focus on understanding the role of BIDs in urban governance and assessing their impacts on metropolitan areas, as well as their inherently complicated public accountability and management challenges.