Across the world at present, researchers and teachers are being exhorted to become entrepreneurial. Universities are being restructured accordingly. The debate presented in this book considers what that involves and portends for academia. Literary studies are often regarded as the most resistant to – unfit for – entrepreneurial purposes. Literary research is therefore taken as a baseline for this debate. The uneasy place of literary research within profit-driven academia is revealing of the prevailing conditions for scholarship in all areas. Questions that are raised and discussed here include: What does doing research for the public good mean? What is the relationship between profits and benefits from research? What are applied and basic research? Are concepts of academic freedom and disinterestedness meaningful? What is the relationship between corporate and academic research? Are skills and knowledge different? Can pursuits like close reading and text interpretation be made profitable? What is literary value and how can it be measured? Can the literary system be modelled to profitable ends? Can university teaching be automatized? What are the differences between a standard publication agreement and a scholarly publication agreement? How can digital and open-access academic publication be made profitable? Does the academic monograph have a future? What sorts of knowledge and skills inform entrepreneurial leadership?

The Theory of Entrepreneurship examines the interiors of the entrepreneurial value creation process, and offers a new unified and comprehensive theory to afford empirical investigations as well as delineate a broader view of the entrepreneurial contextual milieu.

The principal audience for this book seems to be deliberately and most certainly an academic one; that said, those practitioners from a business management or central/local government support-agency background might also find the text a useful resource. Intrinsically, those employed teaching and researching within the fields of entrepreneurship or regional economic development will find this publication an invaluable and indispensable reference tool. . . After an excellent, cohesive and informative introductory chapter, which places the book firmly in the field of regional entrepreneurship theory development, the reader is effortlessly prepared for the intellectually challenging read ahead. . . this book is well laid out and it is easy for the reader to pick up the thread of the argument, even after a lay-off. The endnotes after each chapter are useful and comprehensive, adding richness to the text through the additional information. The bibliography is as comprehensive as it is exhaustive. . . Professor Julien has given us a book that presents both an interesting and alternative perspective to the field of entrepreneurial cross-disciplinary research. Paul J. Ferri, International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour and Research . . . it is my view that this book gives a very important contribution for the understanding of development of local entrepreneurship, through its cross-disciplinary approach. I see the book is especially interesting from an entrepreneurship and a regional development perspective. . . this book should inspire research that takes a more holistic approach using different levels of analysis and applies it to economic development at a local/territorial level, when studying entrepreneurship. Einar Lier Madsen, International Small Business Journal The reader who is interested in entrepreneurship and/or regional development will find this book a welcome contribution to the field. Rainer Harms, Entrepreneurship and Innovation For too long, researchers have regarded local dynamism as the result of the actions of certain entrepreneurs. If this were the case, how could we explain the simultaneous presence of winning , stagnating or declining areas with very similar socioeconomic profiles within the same region? Departing from this restrictive and somewhat inadequate approach, Pierre-André Julien considers entrepreneurship as a collective behaviour specifically related to the dynamism of the milieu in which it develops. The author introduces a complex, innovative theory of local entrepreneurship, demonstrating that the emergence of new ventures and the development of existing enterprises cannot be understood without taking into account certain factors: locale, social capital, networking and entrepreneurial culture within a given area are all crucial to entrepreneurial growth. Expanding upon this theory, the book demonstrates how entrepreneurship can be fostered in order to support collective development. Various forms of partnership among socioeconomic actors are then analysed to highlight the social conventions and entrepreneurial culture that connect and intensify the energies at the root of local dynamism. This highly original book represents a departure from entrepreneurship literature that is largely limited to the study of entrepreneurs behaviour. Its dynamic presentation of holistic theory will prove an extremely absorbing read for those with an academic or professional interest in business and management, entrepreneurship and regional development.

As the breadth and empirical diversity of entrepreneurship research have increased rapidly during the last decade, the quest to find a "one-size-fits-all" general theory of entrepreneurship has given way to a growing appreciation for the importance of contexts. This promises to improve both the practical relevance and the theoretical rigor of research in this field. Entrepreneurship means different things to different people at different times and in different places and both its causes and its consequences likewise vary. For example, for some people entrepreneurship can be a glorious path to emancipation, while for others it can represent the yoke tethering them to the burdens of overwork and drudgery. For some communities it can drive renaissance and vibrancy while for others it allows only bare survival. In this book, we assess and attempt to push forward contemporary conceptualizations of contexts that matter for entrepreneurship, pointing in particular to opportunities generating new insights by attending to contexts in novel or underexplored ways. This book shows that the ongoing contextualization of entrepreneurship research should not simply generate a proliferation of unique theories – one for every context – but can instead result in better theory construction, testing and understanding of boundary conditions, thereby leading us to richer and more profound understanding of entrepreneurship across its many forms. Contextualizing Entrepreneurship Theory will critically review the current debate and existing literature on contexts and entrepreneurship and use this to synthesize new theoretical and methodological frameworks that point to important directions for future research.

This original, provocative work encompasses a wealth of existing literature and leads it in a new direction. It will inspire economic scholars particularly within the fields of Austrian economies and the theory of the firm.

"This is a book about who we are today, and how we have become who we are. It is about the engineers of the modern soul, the entrepreneurial self. It is essential reading for all those who care about the incessant demands placed on us to become more than we are, to become entrepreneurs of our selves, to maximise and optimise our capacities in ways that align personal identity and political responsibility." - Professor Peter Miller, London School of Economics & Political Science Ulrich Bröckling claims that the imperative to act like an entrepreneur has turned ubiquitous. In Western society there is a drive to orient your thinking and behaviour on the objective of market success which dictates the private and professional spheres. Life is now ruled by competition for power, money, fitness, and youth. The self is driven to constantly improve, change and adapt to a society only capable of producing winners and losers. The Entrepreneurial Self explores the series of juxtapositions within the self, created by this call for entrepreneurship. Whereas it can expose unknown potential, it also leads to over-challenging. It may strengthen self-confidence but it also exacerbates the feeling of powerlessness. It may set free creativity but it also generates unbounded anger. Competition is driven by the promise that only the capable will reap success, but no amount of effort can remove the risk of failure. The individual has no choice but to balance out the contradiction between the hope of rising and the fear of decline. Ulrich Bröckling is Professor of Cultural Sociology at the Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg, Germany.

In the study of entrepreneurship there has been little interaction between economic theory and history. For the first time a single volume combines analyses of leading specialists from both disciplines. It examines the ways theory and historical evidence can be linked, how economic theory can contribute to improving the historical interpretation of entrepreneurship, and significant thematic aspects of the history of entrepreneurship. Conceptual analyses are fused with historical archive-based work, reflecting the current state of the art and new directions in research.