Showing papers on "Entrepreneurship published in 1978"

Industrial Organization and Entrepreneurship in the Developing Countries: The Economic Groups

Abstract: The subject of industrial organization has not received much attention in the analysis of postwar economic development. This neglect has occurred despite the importance of industrial organization for such questions as efficiency in production and investment and, especially, for transmitting the external economies which are believed to play a central role in the development process.' By contrast, the topic of entrepreneurship in lessdeveloped economies has been discussed extensively, if not always in satisfactory theoretical terms.2 As William Baumol expressed it a decade ago, despite the entrepreneur's "acknowledged importance . . . [he is] one of the most elusive characters in the cast that constitutes the subject of economic analysis . . . [and has] virtually disappeared from the theoretical literature."3 This conceptual elusiveness is especially unfortunate for the analysis of the developing economies, in which entrepreneurship is likely to be more necessary for output expansion and structural change than in the more developed countries.

Characteristics and Role Demands of Entrepreneurship1

Abstract: In the past decade interest in teaching and research on entrepreneurship has grown dramatically. More than one hundred universities now offer new venture creation and entrepreneurship courses that ...

Major control points in american economic geography

Abstract: The headquarters locations of large, private business organizations in the United States have changed greatly during the past half-century. Technology, resources, accessibility, and legacy have imposed pervasive constraints upon entrepreneurs. Those constraints, in turn, have given a general order to the pattern. Variety of entrepreneurial talents and fortunes, meanwhile, has produced much variability around the general trends. Entrepreneurship, instability, inertia, and drive for security appear to have been essential, simultaneous processes reflected in the changing maps of headquarters.

Competition and Entrepreneurship

Abstract: Stressing verbal logic rather than mathematics, Israel M. Kirzner provides at once a thorough critique of contemporary price theory, an essay on the theory of entrepreneurship, and an essay on the theory of competition. Competition and Entrepreneurship offers a new appraisal of quality competition, of selling effort, and of the fundamental weaknesses of contemporary welfare economics. Kirzner's book establishes a theory of the market and the price system which differs from orthodox price theory. He sees orthodox price theory as explaining the configuration of prices and quantities that satisfied the conditions for equilibrium. Mr. Kirzner argues that "it is more useful to look to price theory to help understand how the decisions of individual participants in the market interact to generate the market forces which compel changes in prices, outputs, and methods of production and in the allocation of resources." Although Competition and Entrepreneurship is primarily concerned with the operation of the market economy, Kirzner's insights can be applied to crucial aspects of centrally planned economic systems as well. In the analysis of these processes, Kirzner clearly shows that the rediscovery of the entrepreneur must emerge as a step of major importance.

Industrial Entrepreneurship and Management in Great Britain

Abstract: Introduction Since the Second World War the effort to understand the process of economic growth has been a major preoccupation of the social scientist. During this quarter-century those economic historians investigating this complex phenomenon have tended to follow the lead of the late T. S. Ashton by according a critical significance to the entrepreneur; and with their growing disenchantment with the strategic roles of natural resources and capital in economic development, economists too are increasingly promoting entrepreneurship and the supply of managerial ability to a position of greater and greater importance. More and more attention is being given to the economic and social circumstances favourable to increasing the supply of entrepreneurs, and the investigation of these circumstances is becoming ever more sophisticated. Economic historians and sociologists have identified a number of beliefs, attitudes, value systems, climates of opinion, and propensities which they have found to exert a favorable influence on the generation of enterprise and of developmental initiative. They have also stressed the role of minorities and of deviant behavior in the formation of entrepreneurial groups. [And] joining in the search,… psychologists have recently undertaken to establish the dependence of development and of entrepreneurial activity on the presence of achievement motivation. These interrelated explorations leave the student of the phenomenon of entrepreneurship both stimulated and not a little bewildered. The arguments advanced by both sociologists and psychologists are often fascinating, but the majority of them are as yet imprecise, chronologically ill-fitting, and empirically insubstantial.

Entrepreneurs and Managers in German Industrialization

Abstract: Concepts and Scope The definitions used in this Chapter have to meet two requirements. First, they must be applicable within the whole period under discussion. They must be flexible and broad enough to subsume the tremendous changes occurring within entrepreneurship and management from the late eighteenth century to the twentieth. However, they need not be so broad and abstract as to cover all types of entrepreneurs and managers in history. They should rather be framed with regard to characteristics of the German economy which remained constant through this whole period (without necessarily existing at other times and places) and which were, at the same time, of central importance for the development of entrepreneurship and management. Such a characteristic we find in the fact that this has been, and – for the larger part of Germany – still is, a period of industrialization structured according to capitalist principles. The general features of industrial capitalism which are most central for the study of entrepreneurship and management during the whole period are ( a ) a factory system which is characterized by power-generating and manufacturing machines, by large amounts of fixed capital, by maturing techniques on an increasingly scientific basis, by the separation between organizational and operative functions, and by contractual labour working under centralized managerial authority, not at home, according to elaborate patterns of labour division; and ( b ) largely independent and autonomous business enterprises on the basis of the private ownership and control of capital, which is used for the production of goods and services and their sale on the commercial market, according to the criteria of profitability; business enterprises relate to each other mainly through market mechanisms.

Technological Entrepreneurship: The Allocation of Time and Money in Technology‐Based Firms

Abstract: This synopsis reports on original research which was designed and supervised by the author and sponsored jointly by two units of the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor)—the Division of Research of the Graduate School of Business Administration and the Industrial Development Division of the Institute of Science and Technology. The research focused on the amount of time and effort allocated to eight functional areas of management in new technical spin‐off firms in Michigan and on the variation of effort associated with higher levels of success. Although the most substantive elements of the study concern Michigan enterprises, the intention of the undertaking—to assist with development of existing technological entrepreneurships, to prevent failure due to common pitfalls among new technical firms, and to encourage the growth of this potentially important sector of industry—permits translation of its findings to different economies.

Development of Entrepreneurship: A Conceptual Model

Abstract: Rao T. Venkateswara and Pareek Udai (eds). Developing Entrepreneurship: A Handbook, New Delhi, Learning Systems. pp. 29-41

The blacksmiths of Kano City: A study in tradition, innovation and entrepreneurship.

Abstract: This thesis examines the factors involved in the expansion, during the colonial and post-colonial periods, of a traditional, i.e. pre-European craft specialism - blacksmithing, in Kano City, Nigeria - and its subsequent conversion into a modem metal-working industry. In doing so, it sheds new light on the general proposition that such traditional crafts necessarily decline before the technological onslaught of colonialism. A notable feature of the recent development of this craft has been the differential responses of the various clusters of blacksmiths to the new socio-economic factors introduced by the British. Of these groups, the most far-reaching changes have occurred in that located within the Central Market area of Kano City, and it is the behaviour of these craftsmen - and/or trader-entrepreneurs which provides the focus of this study. These dynamic individuals effected major advances in the manufacture and marketing of ironwares, and transformed the nature of the industry here. Attention is also given to the reason why the rapid and positive reaction to the new economic opportunities of the time was limited mainly to this group. Despite the changes in economic organisation it is argued, resultant breaches in indigenous patterns of social relationships have apparently been relatively slight. At the same time, the colonial presence, and the reorientation in production which took place later on in the City, both had important repercussions especially on urban-rural craft relations. Village blacksmithing communities, hitherto largely self-supporting, were drawn more and more into the economic orbit of the City, and particularly towards the Central Market complex which became an increasingly influential node in the metalware trade.

A Multi-Variate Model for the Analysis of Entrepreneurship in Manufacturing Organization∗:

Abstract: Whether ethico-social, psychological or political factors are more or less effective in shaping the patterns of entrepreneurial growth is a debatable issue as is evident in the current sociological literature. To resolve this controversy a multi-variate model was suggested by the author in his earlier studies (Sharma 1973, 1975). But it was not fully validated empirically. The present paper endeavours to validate this model in the context of small manufacturing entrepreneurs of Northern India.

Restrictions on Foreign Ownership of Manufacturing Industry in a Less Developed Country: The Case of Ghana

Abstract: Many less developed countries (LDCs) pursue a policy of restraining or prohibiting foreign ownership of manufacturing establishments across a wide and growing range of industries. The broad aim of such a policy is the reasonable one of stimulating the development of indigenous entrepreneurship and of reducing, pari passu, the degree of dependence on foreign-owned firms (FOFs), i.e., all those owned by nonnationals, this group usually including both firms owned by multinational corporations (MNCs) and firms owned by resident expatriates. Recently, the growing pressure of unemployment has compelled LDC policymakers to devote increasing attention to the matter of job creation; and as it is widely asserted that FOFs tend to invest in plant and machinery which are "inappropriately" capital intensive1 (thus reducing the number of new jobs unnecessarily), the technology issue provides an additional persuasive rationale for the pursuit of the policy of the arrogation of certain sectors of manufacturing to local ownership.2 In view of the costs, in the form of forgone investment funds and technical and managerial know-how, which the exclusion of MNCs and other FOFs may impose, it is clear at the a priori level that policies which seek to

Stabilisation, regulation and misplaced entrepreneurship

Abstract: There is now widespread scepticism among economists and others as to the efficacy of activist stabilization policies directed at employment objectives. A cold eye is also being cast on policies designed to stabilize other economic variables. The problem is that stabilization policy not only fails in its own terms - it does not stabilize, or in stabilizing one thing destabilizes something else - but it distorts entrepreneurial incentives, so that business- men concentrate on negotiating a cosy deal from government and its committees and agencies. Rather than produce a better product, management is induced to produce a better relationship with Canberra. The business of business becomes Government.

Entrepreneurship and a Probabilistic View of the British Industrial Revolution

Abstract: response. First, it is not at all clear that the argument that non-conformists played a vital role in innovation is acceptable. Payne has pointed out that there are very serious difficulties in the way of establishing this proposition in terms of differential survival of records.' Second, it is clear that it is not acceptable to use patent statistics as comparative indices of inventive activity, or of the elasticity of entrepreneurial innovational response, given the well-known (different) deficiencies of patent legislation in England and France in the eighteenth century. However, as Roehl has argued,2 it does seem primafacie that biases in the patent data would be in the direction of overstating English inventiveness and understating French inventiveness, and hence it is quite possible that one could argue for greater French inventiveness at least prior to I 760. Third, my article was concerned with the achievement of the decisive innovations that led to structural change in the form of the Industrial Revolution. It is not obvious that the greater innovational zeal which Rostow alleges was present in late-eighteenth-century England reflected a greater likelihood of coming up with and using spectacular and strategic improvements, any more than Germany was guaranteed the invention of the Gilchrist-Thomas process a century later. In any event, assertions, however widely made, about the quality of entrepreneurship, are notoriously unreliable. It may be revealing, therefore, to ask whether this innovational quality was reflected in a rapid acceleration of the rate of growth of total factor productivity in the mid-eighteenth century. On the best, admittedly imperfect, figures available it appears that of the 0 4 per cent rise in the growth-rate of the English economy in the period I 740-80 as compared with I7I0-40, only o o6 per cent came from an increase in total factor productivity growth.3 The great innovational zeal which Rostow sees in the British 1 P. L. Payne, British Entrepreneurship in the Nineteenth Century (1974), p. 25. 2 R. Roehl, 'French Industrialization: A Reconsideration', Explorations in Economic History, xiii (I976), 250-I. 3 N. F. R. Crafts, 'The Eighteenth Century: An Overview', in the work on modern English economic history to be edited by R. C. Floud and D. N. McCloskey (Cambridge, forthcoming).