Preface

Entrepreneurship, long neglected by economists and management scholars, has made a dramatic comeback in the last two decades. As the economic theory of the firm flourished following the rediscovery and reworking in the 1970s of Coase’s path-breaking “The Nature of the Firm” (1937), the new field of “strategic entrepreneurship” has also begun to take off, along with a parallel rebirth of entrepreneurship studies in economic growth and development, sociology, and anthropology.

As management and organizations researchers with a particular and decade-long interest in entrepreneurship, we obviously welcome all these new developments, just as we have been heavily influenced by modern work on the theory of the firm. And yet, we think both sets of literature have missed important insights from the other. This book is written to fill the gap, proposing and developing an entrepreneurial theory of the firm that focuses on the links between entrepreneurship and management.