The Scientific History Entrepreneurship

Science and knowledge, like history, builds on itself for the most part. Even when there is profound error, lessons are learned from it; pick up the pieces and move-on. What humans learn from parents, families, communities, schools and especially history is particularly important to the development and progress of individuals and organized social life. Our social organizations advance assumptions, laws, principles and models about the way good social events should work; and then dogmatically try to live by them, until someone imagines and articulates the "real" truth and changes things to work better. We form worldviews, mental models and equations for living life based on accumulated wisdom and practical success. Civilization has always been about the same sequential process, trying to delete the bad and integrate the good into organized social living. These learned ways of organizing ourselves in civilized ways generally become deeply engrained and resist change; but somehow through history the entrepreneur has found ways to foster change, anyway. You can see this unique style rising to the top in the earliest of human writings, even if writers didn’t use the term entrepreneurship.

The history of researching and writing about entrepreneurship consists of a disintegrated array of observation, analysis and writing by a vast and diverse cast of characters. A rich and contrasting set of perspectives have thus emerged. This multi-faceted concept is very abstract, yet very real; and because of this complexity, I believe that one’s personal imagery of entrepreneurship must grow from the multi-disciplinary perspectives of a variety of journalists, academic specialists, practitioners and other authors who establish diverse philosophical, theoretical and practical points of view. Some of this documentation is highly scientific and rigorous, while others are more artful and soft. Below, I take you back in time to chronologically reference some of the more important (in my opinion) writings on entrepreneurship. Throughout this journey, I deal with many nuances of the definition, causation and person/environment controversies that contribute to the fuzziness of the concept known as entrepreneurship; and try to lead you to the conclusion that we have arrived at an era demanding better entrepreneurship, an entrepreneurship that is more visionary, disciplined and sensitive to the openness of modern systems. I lead you, ultimately, to the application of open systems theory (some other similar theories that I discuss that are closely aligned to open system thinking are complex adaptive theory, systems theory, emergent theory and learning organization theory). I conclude the chronology by illustrating how open systems theory has emerged as a point of light from this mass of literature; and how the future study and practice of entrepreneurship might proceed along the systems vane based on some logical assumptions arising from systems theory. At the end of this chapter, I further synthesize a definition that is more operational and captures the entrepreneurial behaviors that constitute entrepreneurial events and subsystems. I particularly develop those factors that best relate to entrepreneurship in the American socio-economic system.