Indian business houses and entrepreneurship: A note on research trends

Abstract

Empirical research in entrepreneurship is of recent origin. This is so because it is only recently that the entrepreneurial and managerial ability was accorded full recognition as one of the proximate causes of economic development. True, there was considerable debat a inspired by the seminal contribution of joseph A Schumpeter's Theory of Economic Development, published originally in german in 1911 whose english version first appeares in 1934- but it was centred around the place of entrepreneur in economic theory. It was only around the middle of the 1950s or the beginning of the 1960s that the attention shifted from the purely theoretical discussion to the specific or tangible role of entrepreneur in economic and business development in various countries. A rather unfortunate consequences of this was a conceptual confusin about entrepreneurship. To the puritane it still connotes, as schumpeter and his followers emphasised, an economic endeavour of unconventional nature or business innovation, while many others consider it synonymous with self- employment or setting up of a new business unit and the number of those who would like to expand the meaning of the term to include any kind of innovational act- not only in the sphere of business alone but also in the political, social, literary, educational or institutional fields- under the rubric of entrepreneurship is by no means small. Borrowing a phrase which a prominent political theorist said of socialism, it is no exaggeration to say that entrepreneurship as a concept has become like a hat which has lost its shape because everybody wears it.