Abstract
In the course of the study of entrepreneurship, business humanization has become salient only recently. In this chapter, we review the scholarship connecting entrepreneurship and business humanization, classifying the literature chronologically. We identify the key themes linking these two topics that have emerged over more than two centuries of academic inquiry into this subject, and we conclude that the late Austrian economics tradition is the natural home for a humanistic approach to the economy given the role it assigns to entrepreneurship.
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Notes
- 1.
The most general meaning of the term according to Littré is “se mettre à faire une chose,” that is, put oneself to do something. Entrepreneur, on its part, according to this dictionary appears for the first time during the fifteenth century, and its general meaning is “celui, celle qui entreprend quelque chose,” the one who undertakes something.
- 2.
Hoselitz (1960, 240) references the definition of adventurer in Johnson (1755), quoting: “He that seeks occasion of hazard; he that puts himself in the hands of chance.” Apparently the word enjoyed some popularity anew thanks to the translation of Jean-Baptiste Say’s Traité d’économie politique in 1821, in which Charles R. Prinsep preferred it to the term undertaker because the latter was, as he explained in 1827 in his Third Edition of the Traité, “already appropriated to a limited sense,” quoted in Hoselitz (1960, 240).
- 3.
Hébert and Link (1988, 54) note that in a footnote in Chap. xv of Book ii, Mill expresses the superiority of the French term to adequately convey the desired economic meaning, while disfavoring those writing in English because they are compelled to use the less accurate ‘undertaker.’
- 4.
It is worth mentioning that uncertainty was not fully understood until the publication of Frank Knight’s Risk, Uncertainty and Profit in 1921.
- 5.
The cornerstone growth theory in economics was developed by Robert Solow, who stated that production was a function of physical capital and human labor. According to this theory “technical change,” the motive behind higher levels of output, was exogenous (Solow 1956). It wasn’t until the 1980s that growth models included both technology, as an endogenous feature of investments in research and development, and investments in human capital (Grossman and Helpman 1991). Modern growth theory, as it is known, additionally takes into consideration the role of institutions and government. Because of its emphasis on market imperfections, and the consequent need for institutional corrections, modern growth theory integrates the market and the government in a framework that allows to think about real-world problems. As a result, these set of models introduced increasing returns to scale, in contrast to the decreasing ones assumed by endogenous growth theories, offering a mechanism for the engine of growth. Nevertheless, both exogenous and endogenous growth models, while useful in accounting for the causes of sustained growth, fail to explain the sources of such growth.
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Moreno, Á.J. (2022). A Historical Perspective on Entrepreneurship and Business Humanization: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present. In: Dion, M., Freeman, R.E., Dmytriyev, S.D. (eds) Humanizing Business. Issues in Business Ethics, vol 53. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72204-3_32
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