|Peter Boettke|
There has been a tremendous rise of entrepreneurship professors over the past 25 years. The Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research seeks to acknowledge the contributions made to the field. Israel Kirzner won the award in 2006.
I have long been of the opinion that Austrian or market process economists are under exploring this field. Kirzner's seminal contributions should be viewed as a building block, not as a finished research agenda. It would be fantastic if more young scholars sought to make contributions in this area. Of course, Peter Klein is pushing that agenda as well so perhaps we will see a new generation of Austrian or market process economists entering into the field.
Business studies is an area ripe for Austrian economics. In many ways the modern fields of both management and marketing were by-products of the Austrian school of economics from its Vienna days. Wroe Alderson, the father of modern marketing research, acknowledged explicitly his intellectual indebtedness to Bohm-Bawerk, and contrasted the Austrian approach to the economic process with the neoclassical textbook model of perfect competition which left no room for marketing per se. Similarly, Peter Drucker, the management guru, has acknowledged the early influence on him of the Austrian emphasis on innovation and entrepreneurship. And, if you read closely the work of insightful business economists, such as Yale Brozen, you will see throughout an emphasis on the competitive market process, and the role of innovation and entrepeneurship in a dynamic economy.
A young scholar wanting to "study mankind in the ordinary business of life" and in particular in the context of the ongoing commercial enterprise, building on the price theoretic foundations provided by Menger, Bohm-Bawerk and Mises, and supplementing with the work of Schumpeter and Kirzner on entrepreneurship, with Alderson on marketing, Drucker on management, and Brozen on the legal/regulatory environment, seems to be a rock solid foundation. Of course, we already have folks who have branched out quite successfully -- see Peter Klein and the folks at Organizations & Markets -- but I personally believe we should encourage more young scholars to take this route in their research and teaching.
Read this post while Peter Klein was giving his MisesU talk on firms, production, and entrepreneurship. I had my high school econ class spend one week on Israel Kirzner's ideas on the same... now my mind is spinning with more ideas for a high school curriculum to pair with my elementary-grade curriculum Cost Benefit Jr. (www.cbjr.org) Definitely worth striving for.
Posted by: Stephanie McPeak Herman | July 23, 2013 at 01:47 PM
Pete, thanks very much for the shout-out. I couldn't agree more with your diagnosis and recommendations. Also, as a purely tactical matter, the top-ranked departments, journals, societies, and conferences in entrepreneurship, organization theory, and strategic management are quite open to Austrian ideas. This is fertile ground for advances in Austrian scholarship.
Posted by: Petergklein | July 23, 2013 at 06:09 PM