A Complex and Conservative Evolution

Entrepreneurship became relevant as a concept when the earliest humans were chased from their Garden of Eden, put in tension with nature and forced to become collectively involved in economic activity. The earliest writings of man didn’t really focus on economics or entrepreneurship, per se. The words and terms weren’t invented in these early times. Yet, if you read deep enough, the underpinning ideologies of entrepreneurial systems appear in such writings as the Bible, The Vedas, Plato and Aristotle, other Eastern philosophies and ancient manuscripts. One of the earliest writings with entrepreneurial significance for Americans occurs in Genesis (the first book of the Bible), in the story of Joseph. Joseph was clearly an entrepreneur with exceptional vision. Not only could he interpret Pharaoh’s dreams and imagine the future, he was a capable manager who acted on his visions to create the future; his story is therefore full of entrepreneurial thoughts, behavior and events. The dates of Moses’ writings are imprecise, but it’s clear that these events occurred thousands of years ago. The ancient writings of all religions similarly develop the principles of creative and visionary stewardship in leaders as basic to the altering of events to impact the welfare of mankind, and they establish general rules for engaging in the mundane and innovative game of economic survival.

From such humble beginnings, the concept of entrepreneurship has gradually evolved, and we are still adding to its connotation and annotation. Such is the origin and lineage of words, theory and practice; first we do it, then we notice it, then we name it then we try to understand predict and control it. Entrepreneurial behavior has thus always been a staple of man’s existence in space and time, being perceivable by the first thinking people endeavoring to organize the trading value or some communal effort; but it certainly wasn’t called "entrepreneurship" yet. That didn’t officially happen until around the 15^th century (1437, at least according to Landstrom, 1999, p. 9). Even cavemen and other prehistoric people realized that there was significant benefit to be had from starting-up economic exchanges with those who had a unique, or different, relationship with nature; and prehistoric man surely recognized the possibilities and imperatives inherent in the exchange process. The language, description, understanding, and conceptualization of the technical aspects of the process and theorizing about it, however, were irrelevant. There was no science in prehistoric and ancient times! Entrepreneurship was simply taken for granted and passed implicitly from generation to generation as a dominant genetic trait. The deeper understanding of entrepreneurship would be left to yet unborn scholars, scientists and theorists.

As I have pointed out several times, the literature on entrepreneurship since 1437 doesn’t exactly clean up conceptual, definitional and theoretical matters; in fact, in many ways theoretical progress has left us more puzzled on many issues. For good reason, Wilken (1979) used the search for the Heffalump as a metaphor to describe the search for a definition of entrepreneurship. The mystical Heffalump search is particularly poignant because the Heffalump is a leviathan beast of “Winnie the Pooh” fame, which is a large and intimidating entity that exists in an unknown kingdom that is mysterious and abstract. In my opinion, the connotation of the word entrepreneurship, itself, is leviathan, having many roots, a large trunk and many extremities -- indicative of quite a long and diverse past that has roots in several languages and a variety of nations, eras, cultures and other tributaries, which contributes to its subjective and diverse connotation and annotation. Taking further metaphor liberties, I believe that defining entrepreneurship is like verifying the validity of a picture of the Loch Ness Monster. Some claim all sightings must be fakes or illusions, because the beast defies logic and can't be conclusively verified, while others insist that they have seen it with their own eyes and have recorded its vision for posterity. The believers claim it is real and there is clear evidence that it is the monster rules in the waters of the Ness Loch. In the end, such metaphors reinforce the fact that each of us must uniquely imagine, through rationality, faith and inspiration, our own interpretation of the concept of entrepreneurship, which makes it such a unique and powerful inclination, orientation and style.

The monstrous entrepreneurial field just keeps getting bigger, too. Today, the term entrepreneurship is routinely defined to fit the audience interested in the entrepreneurial information. We even develop fancy prefixes to target specific perceptions of the concept. I recently heard an advertisement with a reference to: Agripreneurs (farming entrepreneurs), biopreneurs (biological entrepreneurs), technopreneurship (entrepreneurs using high tech), "cyberpreneurs" (entrepreneurs on the Internet), nichepreneurs (entrepreneurs that focus on niches), micropreneurs obviously start-up small businesses while macropreneurs do the large ones, and I’ve coined the term Ameripreneur (America’s version, which I develop, at length, in Chapter 4). Word games with such liberties arise from a certain clarity that is assumed about the “preneur” part, but it also implies a level of vagueness that allows liberty to be played. Such game-playing is fun and marketable, but it also distracts from logical rigor, which run counter to producing clear principles, definitions or a science. Science doesn’t advance very well where its words and concepts proliferate in unsystematic ways. A most helpful and conservative way to sort through this mass of entrepreneurship literature is to start somewhere near the beginning and follow the chronology through history. A model conservative, Barry Goldwater, once said, "conservatives believe the past holds the answers to today's problems.” This ideal, I believe, certainly applies to the study of the meaning of entrepreneurship, because modern economic-man in many ways is a prisoner of the economic past. The long and storied literature of economics, management, entrepreneurship and other related topics, therefore, holds many of the answers to establishing a foundation for today’s entrepreneurial systems.

Systematic chronological analysis of the literature also arrays entrepreneurship writings in roughly the order they were written, which matches writings with their contexts, vis-à-vis the ebbs and flows of major political and economic epochs and systems. Many of these writing can only be fully sensed and appreciated within their temporal context. Relationships between managers and contexts have changed across centuries of cultural and social evolution, as the technology of building and progressing socio-economic systems has progressed, and that fact is essential to truly understanding the special nuances of entrepreneurship at any given time in man’s history. A rigorous chronology especially helps connect relevant knowledge and literature with the practical social context, forces and realities that make up a civilization’s environment during and across particular eras. A disciplined chronology thus helps us more readily see how entrepreneurship has grown proportionally and parallel to the growth of man’s intellect, the industrial revolution, the modernization of the world, and especially the Americanization of the world. I have consequently adopted a number of systematically related timelines in Exhibit I that continuously trace human progress, economic events, market epochs, key theoretical issues and other controversies addressed by scholars relative to entrepreneurial phenomena.