In the preceding chapters we have highlighted the entrepreneurial function, arguing that the entrepreneurship literature needs to go beyond its current preoccupation with the discovery and evaluation of opportunities, and consider more fully the exploitation of these opportunities through resource ownership and control. The judgment view explicitly highlights this aspect of entrepreneurship, and therefore points to the role of the entrepreneur as an investor, an owner with skin in the game. But we have not yet explored the context in which judgmental decision-making takes place. Some perspectives in entrepreneurship research – notably network perspectives (Greve, 2003; Hoang and Antoncic, 2003; Sorenson and Stuart, 2005) and the effectuation view (Sarasvathy, 2008) – strongly emphasize the contextual aspects of entrepreneurship, albeit in very different ways.

In the previous chapter we discussed the epistemological and ontological contexts of judgment as seen by Knight (1921) and Mises (1949). However, we said little about the more concrete contexts, those of markets for inputs and outputs, and even inputs and outputs themselves. In this chapter we argue that the judgment view is naturally aligned with a specific view of capital, one that is often associated with the Austrian school of economics, but also has a strong similarity to certain key perspectives in modern management research, notably the resource-based view of strategy and, to some extent, transaction-cost economics. These perspectives highlight the heterogeneity of capital assets, the benefits of combining them in complementary bundles that generate competitive advantage, and the hazards associated with investments in assets that depend on particular exchange relationships to maintain their value.