Entrepreneurs

An entrepreneur is someone who owns an economic activity, producing goods or services to be traded on the market. To this end, he coordinates production factors and assumes the risks involved in running a business venture. The aim of entrepreneurial action is to maximize profits by using a particular combination of production factors—which can in turn be acquired on the market—whereby goods are produced and then placed on the outlet markets. Thus, the classic definition of entrepreneur emphasizes instrumental, tangible, and concrete action. This, in any case, is also the etymological meaning of the term, which comes from the French entreprendre: to do something. However, entrepreneurship should not be considered just a supply-side matter. Within a complex and diversified economy, entrepreneurial choices are also increasingly shaped by consumer needs, which express themselves in a heterogeneous commodities demand. Thus, entrepreneurship is a good point of view to analyze the mutual tension between economic action and consumption pattern.

Introduced to the scientific debate by Richard Cantillon in the first half of the eighteenth century, the concept of the entrepreneur gained general currency among economists thanks to the work of John Stuart Mill and later entered the lexicon of many other disciplines: sociology, psychology, economic history, and economic anthropology. Two of the seminal figures in the literature on entrepreneurship are Joseph Schumpeter and Max Weber. Schumpeter underscores the central role of the entrepreneur in processes of innovation: he introduces new combinations of production factors, employs previously unknown raw materials, and reshapes the organization of work. By combining existing resources in an innovative way, the entrepreneur shakes up the existing economic equilibrium and implements new production functions. A series of psychological elements that make up the entrepreneurial personality stand at the root of these innovative processes: strong will, creativity, intuitiveness.

Weber, for his part, considers the entrepreneur as part of his analysis of the interrelationship between the development of capitalism and the Calvinist ethos. In his view, Protestant asceticism made an aptitude for business—once stigmatized—socially acceptable and introduced new orientations in economic life. In this setting, modern capitalism's entrepreneur is quite different from the economic actors of the past: he acts rationally toward an end, systematically works to maximize profit, and foregoes self-indulgence for a life of frugality and temperance, the better to pursue the process of accumulation.

The work of these two authors suggests the complexity of the topic, which provides fertile ground for [Page 534]a number of lines of thought: from entrepreneurship as a case of exceptionality stemming from specific individual traits to studying the sociocultural variables in the context that impact the development of acquisitive market behavior; from the processes that are decisive for entrepreneurial success to identifying the social groups that are particularly important in fueling entrepreneurship; from decision-making processes to the entrepreneur as risk bearer.

Broadly speaking, studies of entrepreneurs tend to be arrayed along a continuum, whose endpoints are the micro-view approach, which investigates the psychological and sociological characteristics of entrepreneurs, and—on the opposite end—the macro-view approach, which investigates the context in which entrepreneurs act. In recent years, a multilevel approach has gained ground, which brings these two extremes together with the aid of action theory. The entrepreneur is thus seen as an actor possessed of cognitive rationality (i.e., he defines the situation and makes his choices on the basis of reasons he thinks to be good) who acts in a context of constraints and opportunities arising out of the relational structures in which it is set and the more general characteristics of the economic and social organization.

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