POSSIBILITIES FOR A REALISTIC THEORY OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP. THE CLIMATE OF ENTERPRISE.

In this article the author suggests possibilities for a realistic theory of entrepreneurship. He also focuses on the contrast between the preoccupations of economists in the 1930s and in the late 1940s. According to the author criticism rests, on the generality of the concept of entrepreneur, a result of the failure to identify him with any specific set of conditions, institutional and ideological. For comparative study of long-period change, the author found the entrepreneur most useful if visualized as an ideal type in the Weber sense, and hence to be regarded as an objectively possible entity even though one we would not expect to find in all its purity in real life. This ideal type may be taken as one responding to a free competitive market, making his decisions, innovating and managing in response to competitive market forces, in short, an idealized economic category operating freely in an idealized institutional environment. The entrepreneur, then, maximizes his net income as his primary motivation, the ideal authoritarian form maximizes period of existence as its most come pelling purpose. Maximization of income with the limitations set by the market is the criterion in the one instance; in the other, dominance of the market provides the means of ensuring continuity of income as more significant than highest returns.