Co-evolution, opportunity seeking and institutional change: Entrepreneurship and the Indian telecommunications industry 1923-2009

"This is an Author's Original Manuscript of an article submitted for consideration in Business History [copyright Taylor & Francis]; Business History is available online at http://www.tandfonline.com/." 10.1080/00076791.2012.687538In this paper, we demonstrate the importance for entrepreneurship of historical contexts and processes, and the co-evolution of institutions, practices, discourses and cultural norms. Drawing on discourse and institutional theories, we develop a model of the entrepreneurial field, and apply this in analysing the rise to global prominence of the Indian telecommunications industry. We draw on entrepreneurial life histories to show how various discourses and discursive processes ultimately worked to generate change and the creation of new business opportunities. We propose that entrepreneurship involves more than individual acts of business creation, but also implies collective endeavours to shape the future direction of the entrepreneurial field

Measuring Success in Family Businesses: The Concept of Configurational Fit

The problems associated with measuring success in small businesses are primarily caused by a lack of comparable data due to the ambiguity of success and by subjective biases. Success evaluation is dominated by the estimates of business owners, who tend to overestimate overall success and internal strengths. However, reliable success measurement instruments would be useful for small business owners/managers as well as small business policymakers. The main purposes of this article are to compare various measures of success, to explore the differences in their outcomes, and to analyze whether a model of success measurement using configurational fit can be used to overcome subjective biases. The study is based on a recent survey of 103 small family-owned businesses in the eastern Austrian border region. Our analysis of the data confirmed the existence of the measurement problems mentioned above. While some individual indicators show significant biases as well as effects due to company age, size and industry, the aggregated indicator based on the concept of configurational fit seems to be an appropriate means of overcoming most of these drawbacks.(author's abstract

Die zentrale Bedeutung unternehmerischen Entdeckens

Also published in Zeitschrift fuer Wirtschaftspolitik (1983) v. 32(3) p. 207-224Bibliothek Weltwirtschaft Kiel XX 4683 / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekSIGLEDEGerman

The embodiment of neoliberalism: exploring the roots and limits of the calculation of arbitrage in the entrepreneurial function

How has neoliberalism achieved its sway? We address this question by tracing an alternative history of the economic theorization of ‘entrepreneurship’ that reveals the extent to which sociological transformation is attendant upon the construction, dissemination and change of the concepts of economy. Surveying the theoretical works of luminaries such as Kirzner, Mises and Simmel and reading them alongside ethnographies of the practices that instantiate a neo-liberal world we see the ways in which entrepreneurship is fashioned, realized and ramified and, in so doing, reveal new fault lines for exploitation by those who would rather seek to escape its pernicious embrace. For it is the notion of entrepreneurship that enables both the functioning of an apparently objective market to best deploy societal resources and the continuing capture of the benefits of such by a privileged elite who seemingly bear its mark in the most vivid of terms. By unpacking entrepreneurship we unpack the market, which is a vital first step in any attempt to trammel its seemingly inevitable and unstoppable march through an otherwise undefended social