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.