Historical Foundations of Entrepreneurship Research

This book is excellent and should be on the shelf of all entrepreneurship scholars. Unfortunately, it will not be since the book is priced for academic libraries. This is a shame because research in entrepreneurship would be much better if this book were widely read and referred to during the research process. For example, it would be difficult if not impossible for anyone who closely read this book to make basic elementary errors regarding what historical figures such as Knight, Schumpeter, or Kirzner thought. (Such errors unfortunately regularly appear in the literature.) The benefits to the scholarly community as a whole that flow from this book would seem to be high enough to warrant its purchase, even at such a high price.

This volume originated from a discussion between the editors at the 2007 Academy of Management (AOM) meeting. Landström and Lohrke's research interests lie in the historical aspects of entrepreneurship and they thought it would be a good idea to bring together a group of scholars to discuss the historical foundations of current entrepreneurship research. Starting with a symposium at the 2008 AOM meetings and through three (!) rounds of revisions, they worked with the authors to produce what ended up being a very readable and useful collection of essays. In many ways this collection exemplifies all that is good about entrepreneurship research: plurality in methodology, intellectual curiosity toward the subject matter, and a desire to better understand the world.

A total of 18 chapters are included in the book, which is organized into three parts. Before Part I begins, Lohrke's and Landström start off with an essay that makes the case why history matters in entrepreneurship research. This is primarily an overview of each of the papers that are in the book, but it is helpful to see their framing of the papers, especially when it is not immediately obvious how certain papers tie together. Part I contains two papers, both co‐authored by Hans Landström, tracing out the historical development of entrepreneurship as a research field. The third chapter in particular is interesting in that it empirically shows how the entrepreneurship research community has developed over time and become primarily anchored in management studies.

Part II covers the intellectual roots of entrepreneurship research and comprises nearly 60 percent of the book's pages. As a result of its length, it is broken up into four sections covering different areas in opportunity research. Section II.1 contains four chapters on opportunity recognition. My favorite chapter in the book is in this section. Foss and Klein discuss the Austrian School of economics, the work of Israel Kirzner, and the role his theory of alertness has to play in research on opportunity recognition. In my opinion, Foss and Klein do an outstanding job of explaining the role that alertness plays in Kirzner's theory of the market process and how that is very different from how many entrepreneurship scholars seek to employ the concept of alertness in their own research.

Sections II.2 and II.3 are on opportunity evaluation and opportunity exploitation, respectively, while Part II concludes with a section on “integrative works.” The papers in these sections highlight the wide variety of approaches, theories, and empirical methods that have been brought to bear in studying entrepreneurship. These chapters touch on psychology and entrepreneurship, social capital and entrepreneurship, social networks and entrepreneurship, etc. What is particularly nice about all of the essays in Part II is that they not only take stock of where the literature has come from, but they use that stock‐taking as an opportunity to look forward and discuss holes in the literature or future avenues for research. For scholars looking for help with new research ideas this book is a gold mine.

The book concludes with four papers on economic history and entrepreneurship research. I am a big fan of economic history and was glad to see an entire portion of the book devoted to better understanding entrepreneurship through economic history. Reading these papers and seeing how the use of Baumol's theory of productive and unproductive entrepreneurship, however, reminded me of how most entrepreneurship scholars ignore institutional context when studying entrepreneurship. It seems that only economic historians are willing and able to regularly take into account how public policy influences entrepreneurship. While this point is not lost on all researchers (e.g. Foss and Klein discuss how policy might distort opportunity recognition), more research explicitly looking at the role of public policy in the recognition and exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities is needed. This criticism, however, is about the field of entrepreneurship and not this book, which goes a long way toward nudging the field in the right direction.