Organizing Entrepreneurial Judgment: A New Approach to the Firm
Nicolai J. Foss, Copenhagen Business School
Peter G. Klein, University of Missouri, Columbia
Cambridge University Press
April 2012
Entrepreneurship, long neglected by economists and management scholars, has made a dramatic comeback in the last two decades, not only among academic economists and management scholars, but also among policymakers, educators and practitioners. Likewise, the economic theory of the firm, building on Ronald Coase's (1937) seminal analysis, has become an increasingly important field in economics and management. Despite this resurgence, there is still little connection between the entrepreneurship literature and the literature on the firm, both in academia and in management practice. This book fills this gap by proposing and developing an entrepreneurial theory of the firm that focuses on the connections between entrepreneurship and management. Drawing on insights from Austrian economics, it describes entrepreneurship as judgmental decision made under uncertainty, showing how judgment is the driving force of the market economy and the key to understanding firm performance and organization.
Ordering: Cambridge University Press (with 20% discount); Amazon.com (US); Amazon.co.uk (UK)
Reviews:
"This is a path breaking book. Foss and Klein connect the growing entrepreneurship literature with the rich theories of the organization. It offers important rich and original insights that will undoubtedly revise long held views of entrepreneurship in organizations and how managers make judgments about entrepreneurial initiatives. Well written and grounded in solid research, the book will surely inspire and enrich future scholarship."
– Shaker A. Zahra, Department Chair, Robert E. Buck Chair, and Professor of Strategic and Organization, Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota
"It is about time entrepreneurship came into its own within economics, moving out of the mystical shadows of creative destruction and the magical imagination of the attentive entrepreneur into the more mundane and tractable reality unfolding in our empirical work. The actual content of entrepreneurial judgment has far reaching implications not only for theories of the firm, but more generally for economic organization. In this book, Foss and Klein have turned the corner on research (or lack thereof) into this important topic."
– Saras Sarasvathy, Isadore Horween Research Associate Professor, The Darden School, University of Virginia
"Anyone who thinks they intend to write anything serious about entrepreneurship is now more or less obliged to show where and how they disagree with this book - which is as solid and workmanlike an exploration of entrepreneurship as we have yet to hand."
– J. C. Spender, Svenska Handelsbanken Visiting Professor of Knowledge Management, Lund University
"Foss and Klein's book is necessary after decades in which the theory of the firm was either lost in a haze of differential equations going nowhere or obsessed with structural mechanisms relating to divisionalization in large groups. I've lost track of the number of so-called economist colleagues for whom 'entrepreneur' is a dirty word - mainly I think because they can't encapsulate it in their maths."
– Mike Wright, Professor of Entrepreneurship and Director, Centre for Management Buy-out Research Imperial College Business School