1 - Introduction: Why Entrepreneurship Matters

Summary

Introduction

When the three editors of this volume studied and prepared for their doctoral degrees in three different American Ph.D. programs during the late 1970s, not one of them heard a word about entrepreneurship and small business. All three of them had a specialization in the field of industrial organization within economics, the field most closely related to issues concerning firm size and organization. In all three Ph.D. programs, as was no doubt true across the entire landscape of American graduate schools, the focus was exclusively on large corporations and their impact on the economy. The large corporation was widely accepted as the source of jobs – good-paying ones – and security. No wonder that when the Chairman of General Motors, Charlie “Engine” Wilson, exclaimed, “What's good for General Motors is good for America,” the country believed. There certainly was no room for the study and analysis of something as peripheral and tangential as small business and entrepreneurship in the nation's top graduate programs in economics. Nor was there any room or interest within the entire economics profession. The 1990 edition of Palgrave's Encyclopedia of Economics, consisting of over a dozen volumes and spanning thousands of pages covering virtually every topic imaginable on economics, barely touched on the issues of small business and entrepreneurship, a gap unfilled until 2008 The most influential economics book in the modern history of the profession, Principles of Economics, by Paul Samuelson, barely contains reference to small business and entrepreneurship.