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Publication of Advances in Austrian Economics has been interrupted for several years. This volume marks the return of the series to regular publication. We anticipate a new volume at least once a year. We wish to connect the Austrian tradition of economics with other research traditions in economics and related areas. To that end, we are planning a series of special issues, each devoted to a separate theme. The current volume is devoted to “Austrian Economics and Entrepreneurial Studies.” We are planning future volumes on “Austrian Economics and the Dynamics of Interventionism” and “Austrian Economics and Evolutionary Psychology.” We invite both Austrian and non-Austrian contributions that establish fruitful links between the Austrian tradition and other perspectives on important theoretical and practical problems. We seek articles from authors who are interested in constructive exchange between Austrian economists and specialists in the theme area. All submissions are subject to double-blind refereeing. Potential guest editors are invited to submit proposals to the editor.

In recent years, the topic of entrepreneurship has attracted increasing attention from academics and policy makers. Although much of the debate has taken place in business schools, its protagonists are sociologists, psychologists, organization theorists, and, of course, economists. The purpose of this paper is to take stock of this debate and of what we have learned so far about entrepreneurship. Using Kirzner’s theory as the starting point and unifying theme, the paper reviews works about entrepreneurs and what they do, the socio-economic factors influencing entrepreneurial decisions, the relationship between entrepreneurship and organizations, and the possible links between entrepreneurial activity and economic growth.

Austrian economics and entrepreneurial studies have both expanded greatly in the last 20 or 30 years. Unfortunately, they have developed more or less independently of each other. Austrian economics has enjoyed a revival since 1973 or 1974. In 1973 Israel Kirzner published his classic book, Competition and Entrepreneurship, which outlined an entrepreneurial theory of the market process. In 1974 F. A. Hayek was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. The same year saw the famous South Royalton conference, which is the traditional origin of the “Austrian revival.” The intellectual history of entrepreneurial studies reaches back at least as far as Richard Cantillon (1755). As an intellectual movement, however, entrepreneurial studies began about the same time as the Austrian revival. The beginnings of the entrepreneurship movement might be dated to sometime before 1978 when Babson College established its Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, the first such center in the U.S. In all this time, however, there has been limited exchange between Austrian economics and entrepreneurial studies. It is high time we expanded trade across the border between Austrian economics and entrepreneurial studies.

The effective working of market economies is dependent, for reasons not fully recognised, on the existence, and on the relative stability, of differences in the capabilities of individual firms. General equilibrium theory abstracts from these circumstances and is therefore unable to explain how economic adjustment actually takes place; a proper appreciation of the role played by differentiation and continuity enables to do this and to assess the scope and limitations of the process.

Markus Becker and Thorbjørn Knudsen have rendered a valuable service by bringing the attention of the English-speaking academic world to Joseph Schumpeter’s important 1928 article on the entrepreneur.

Let me start by thanking Markus Becker and Thorbjørn Knudsen for making this important article available to us all and for providing such a careful translation. “Entrepreneur” is a central piece in Schumpeter’s production, and it is a sad fact that it has not been available in English till now. This article, to be more precise, is one of Schumpeter’s key writings on entrepreneurship. It is only rivaled, in this respect, by Chapter 2 in Theory of Economic Development (1911, 1926, 1934), some passages in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), and a few articles from the late 1940s. The sections on entrepreneurship in the two books I just mentioned are subordinate to the wider themes of these books and integrated into these; and the articles from the late 1940s represent primarily an attempt from Schumpeter’s side to forge a union between the economic theory of entrepreneurship and the economic history of entrepreneurship. When it comes to a single, comprehensive work that is exclusively devoted to entrepreneurship, “Entrepreneur” is unique and alone.

The English translation of Schumpeter’s essay on entrepreneurship, written around the time when he prepared the second edition of Theorie der Wirtschaftlichen Enwicklung (1926), from which the English translation The Theory of Economic Development (1934) was made, contains many of the ideas found in The Theory of Economic Development and in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942). Since the essay, “Entrepreneur” (1928) is relatively short, yet contains most of the central ideas developed in his later works, the essay can be regarded as a blueprint for his life’s work. The task of evaluating the significance and the value of the translation in addressing the questions of whether or not, and the extent to which, Schumpeter had changed his ideas on entrepreneurship since the first edition of Theorie (1912), however, falls on Schumpeter scholars (e.g. Elliott, 1983; Shionoya, 1997). My comment here, instead, will be limited to Schumpeter’s concept of entrepreneurship as stated in the essay.