This is an excellent two volume set contribution to the specialist literature on entrepreneurship and a useful addition to the Edward Elgar Publishing portfolio of publications on this important research topic. The title implies that the set provides both an introduction and a theoretical grounding in this very topical area of business research. As far as I am concerned, the chapters and articles chosen by the editor provide all that, as well as a great deal more to the interested reader. Most of all I appreciated the choice of selections and the structure of the book, no doubt aimed at both the novice and the more advanced reader.
The first volume is organised logically in six parts. The two articles in part one provide an overview of the entrepreneurship field. In the first article, Shane and Venkataraman present an overview of the “promise of entrepreneurship” as a field of research. In the second, Venkataraman attempts to distinguish the domain of entrepreneurship research from among other topics of academic endeavour. The three book chapters included in the second part focus upon the entrepreneurial process. These are older contributions that, in their time, set out the basics of entrepreneurial profit, risk, capital, credit and uncertainty. Part 3, the largest in this volume contains 11 articles and chapters on entrepreneurial opportunities. Interestingly, with the exception of the last two contributions, Peter F. Drucker authored all the other chapters included here, as published in Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Practice and Principles (1985). For the curious, I can confirm that Shane has included here chapters 2‐10 of this excellent book. Is this justifiable, I hear you ask? Well, the answer might lie somewhere between the authors well‐known fascination with entrepreneurial opportunity and his wish to acknowledge Drucker's impact upon our field of research (see Shane, 2003). I would like to state, however, that I am aware of some other significant contributions to entrepreneurial opportunity research, both before and after 1985.
Part 4 is dedicated to the discovery of entrepreneurial opportunities and the first of four articles included here is my own favourite, authored by Hayek. Few of those who jumped upon the well‐greased “knowledge management” academic gravy train have bothered to mention his seminal article “The use of knowledge in society” which was published in the American Economic Review (1945). The other three articles are more contemporary contribution to this aspect of entrepreneurship. In part 5, three articles review the human experience and the decision to exploit. In my opinion these articles should have been merged with the three articles in part 6, which ostensibly deal with the nature of the entrepreneur and the decision to exploit. Personally, I would not like to dichotomise between the human and the entrepreneurial experience, in relation to the decision to exploit the same or similar business opportunities!
Volume 2 is organised into eight parts. In the first part there are three articles and chapters clustered around the locus of exploitation topic, originally published in the mid‐ to late‐1980s. All of these articles centre around issues related to various aspects of innovation. Part 2 also incorporates three articles, which focus upon entrepreneurship through market mechanisms. In part 3 there are four articles on new venture creation and firm formation. Four more articles are included in part 4, on the topic of environmental influences on firm formation. The next section tackles the important issue of financial resources. The five chapters and articles in this part involve issues clustered around risk and risk sharing, liquidity, venture capital and entrepreneurial investments. Interestingly, in chapter 6, only two articles are included on the subject of human resources. This, I believe, is symptomatic of the low priority apportioned to this crucial and often neglected aspect of entrepreneurship.
The final sections concentrate on the creation of new organisations and markets. The main difficulty here is that six articles and chapters can hardly do justice to the wide variety of new organisational forms in existence, or to the emergence of a variety of new market forms. In part 7, three chapters and articles are dedicated to the design of new organisations. Similarly, part 8 incorporates three selections on the creation of new markets. I would suggest that more in‐depth analysis could have been achieved if a less ambitious and narrower structural approach would have been taken. Perhaps fewer sections and more articles and chapters in each part would have provided a better foundation to a smaller number of sub‐topics.
Despite some minor irritations and differences of opinion or perspective, I enjoyed reading this excellent set of two volumes on the foundation of entrepreneurship. I would highly recommend it as selective reading for anyone interested in a grounded theoretical approach to this important topic. Its mainly economic and US bias should not deter undergraduate and postgraduate students from taking up the theoretical challenges presented in these two volumes. I would particularly recommend this reading as a “must” for doctoral students, who might feel compelled to dwell deeper than most researchers in certain areas of entrepreneurship theory and practice. I must admit that these books have challenged me to follow up a largish number of references, some of which I have forgotten about or not encountered before. Other interested parties might also benefit from various sections, but those who might want to read on the human aspect of entrepreneurship will need to go and look elsewhere.
