Some Empirical Aspects of Entrepreneurship in Twentieth-Century Spain

Abstract

Hébert and Link defined the entrepreneur as ‘someone who specializes in taking responsibility for and making judgmental decisions that affect the location, the form, and the use of goods, resources, or institutions’ (1989, p. 47), and identified three traditions in the entrepreneurship literature: the German Tradition (von Thünen, Schumpeter), the Chicago Tradition (Knight, Schultz), and the Austrian Tradition (von Mises, Kirzner, Shackle). The first has had the greatest impact on the contemporary entrepreneurship literature. In the well-known Schumpeterian approach, entrepreneurship is a disequilibrating phenomenon rather than an equilibrating force. In Theorie deer wirtschaftlichen Entwicklungen (1911), Schumpeter proposed a theory of ‘creative destruction’, where new entrepreneurial firms displace less innovative incumbents (translated in Schumpeter, 1934). Since Schumpeter (1911), entrepreneurship has been seen as a key factor in economic growth, but only in the 1980s did some scholars begin to deal scientifically with entrepreneurship to try to build theoretical and empirical models.