Search results

The purpose of this paper is to present and compare alternative theoretical frameworks for understanding entrepreneurship policy: targeted interventions to increase venture creation and/or performance. The authors contrast the Standard view of the state as a coherent entity willing and able to rectify market failures with an Individualistic view that treats policymakers as self-interested individuals with limited knowledge.

The authors draw on the perspective of “politics as exchange” to provide a taxonomy of assumptions about knowledge and incentives of both entrepreneurship policymakers and market participants. The authors position extant literature in relation to this taxonomy, and assess the implications of alternative assumptions.

The rationale for entrepreneurship policy intervention is strong under the Standard view but becomes considerably more tenuous in the Individualistic view. The authors raise several conceptual challenges to the Standard view, highlighting inconsistencies between this view and the fundamental elements of the entrepreneurial market process such as uncertainty, dispersed knowledge and self-interest.

Entrepreneurship policy research is often applied; hence, the theoretical rationale for intervention can be overlooked. The authors make the implicit assumptions of these rationales explicit, showing how the adoption of “realistic” assumptions offers a robust toolkit to evaluate entrepreneurship policy.

While the authors agree with entrepreneurship policy interventionists that an “entrepreneurial society” is conducive to economic development, this framework suggests that targeted efforts to promote entrepreneurship may be inconsistent with that goal.

The Individualistic view draws on the rich traditions of public choice and the entrepreneurial market process to highlight the intended and unintended consequences of entrepreneurship policy.

An interview with Milton Friedman in 1996 ‐ presents his reflections on some of the important issues surrounding the evolution of, and currrent debates within, modern macroeconomics. A world‐renowned economist and prolific author since the 1930s, Milton Friedman has had a considerable impact on macroeconomic theory and policy making. Associated mostly with monetarism and the efficacy of free markets, his work has ranged over a broader area ‐ microeconomics, methodology, consumption function, applied statistics, international economics, monetary theory, history and policy, business cycles and inflation. In the interview discusses Keynes’s General Theory, monetarism, new classical macroeconomics, methodology, economic policy, European union and the monetarist counter‐revolution.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.

The book consists of an introduction and eight chapters. Chapter 1 “The Unchanging Focus of Modern Economics” considers economists’ attitude toward the invisible hand. It begins with quotations from standard microeconomic textbooks (Mas-Colell, Whinston and Green, Pashigian, and Ruffin) that show how that invisible hand is treated by modern economics as a technical issue, in which voluntary trades improve agents’ position. Markets allow trade, and thus, subject to the well-known standard conditions, make people better off. The texts train students in models that demonstrate the same. The chapter explores how the invisible hand metaphor has significantly deviated from Adam Smith's first use of the term. Klein argues that Smith's contextualization has been lost in technical proofs. Chapter 2, “Making Progress with Theory: Do We Get What We Want or Want What We Get?” considers macroeconomic issues; it points out that there is little communication among different schools of economics, and that researchers play by their own rules. In it Klein discusses Robert Lucas's positive view of W. C. Mitchell, and Lucas’ negative view of Keynes. Klein concludes the chapter with a discussion of how, today, macro is far less about policy, and far more about “playing games.”

The purpose of this article is to present an overview of the history and development of transaction log analysis (TLA) in library and information science research. Organizing a literature review of the first twenty‐five years of TLA poses some challenges and requires some decisions. The primary organizing principle could be a strict chronology of the published research, the research questions addressed, the automated information retrieval (IR) systems that generated the data, the results gained, or even the researchers themselves. The group of active transaction log analyzers remains fairly small in number, and researchers who use transaction logs tend to use this method more than once, so tracing the development and refinement of individuals' uses of the methodology could provide insight into the progress of the method as a whole. For example, if we examine how researchers like W. David Penniman, John Tolle, Christine Borgman, Ray Larson, and Micheline Hancock‐Beaulieu have modified their own understandings and applications of the method over time, we may get an accurate sense of the development of all applications.

The orderly extension of collective bargaining to cover health and safety, job design, product development and investment programmes is a goal shared by most unions. Some unions would prefer this to legislation on industrial democracy involving worker directors, although others see the two approaches as complementary. But attempts to “extend” collective bargaining have not been without their problems. The ambitious campaign for product diversification mounted by the Lucas Aerospace Combine Shop Stewards Committee is a good case in point.