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Schumpeter’S Plea: Historical Approaches To Entrepreneurship Research

Schumpeter’s Plea:
Historical Approaches to Entrepreneurship Research
R. Daniel Wadhwani
Assistant Professor of Management &
Fletcher Jones Professor of Entrepreneurship
University of the Pacific
dwadhwani@pacific.edu
Geoffrey Jones
Isidor Straus Professor of Business History
Harvard Business School
gjones@hbs.edu
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Abstract:
This paper outlines the case for why and how historical methods are important to the social scientific study of entrepreneurship. We begin by surveying the changing ways in which historical reasoning has been used in the development of entrepreneurship theory over the last century. We show that, despite theoretical agreement on the importance of context in the study of entrepreneurship, empirical research in recent years has tended to display declining analytical attention to historical setting in favor of focusing on entrepreneurial behavior and cognition. We highlight why analysis of historical context as well as behavior is essential to the study of entrepreneurship. We then outline some of the specific ways in which historical methods can help scholars analyze historical context in studies of entrepreneurial behavior. To ground our discussion, we focus on how historical methods can contribute to the emerging field of international entrepreneurship. We conclude by arguing that these methods can stimulate the kind of exchanges between the history and theory of entrepreneurship that Schumpeter envisioned.
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Joseph Schumpeter began his now-famous 1947 article on “Creative Response in Economic History” with this plea: “Economic historians and economic theorists can make an interesting and socially valuable journey together, if they will” (Schumpeter, 1947). Though his article is most often cited for the distinction it developed between “adaptive” and “creative” responses in business, Schumpeter’s main purpose was to call for the extensive use of historical methods in the study of entrepreneurship. To Schumpeter, the very nature...