ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: Alertness versus imagination: controversy on the role of the entrepreneur
Author: Vivel Christel
The concept of entrepreneurship as alertness for profitable opportunities is most widespread in literature on entrepreneurship. Consequently the work of Israel Kirzner is well known. Many contemporary works have used his concept especially in applied management research on entrepreneurship in the first decade of this century (Ventakataraman 2000; Shane 2003 for example). This literature tries to identify what are the specificities of the alert entrepreneur, their key factors to success. Others scholars try to identify the different steps in the process of idea generation. But in all cases they talk about creativity and its generation. While the work of Schumpeter is well known and employed in literature on entrepreneurship, there is another economist of the “Austrian school of economics” that is absent in most cases. It is the work of Ludwig Lachmann. According to us one reason for this omission is that Lachmann has lost the battle against Kirzner on the understanding of the market process. Lachmann’s vision of the market process and more specifically of the entrepreneur has been buried. His theory is rarely quoted by others than specialists of the Austrian school. In this paper we want to explain the reason why Lachmann’s concept has fallen into abeyance. In order to answer this question we will refer to a dispute between Kirzner and Lachmann in the 80s. This dispute raises the problem of order in Kirzner’s conception of the market process. This point will not be developed in our paper because it has already been thoroughly coveredin the past. This will be the occasion to underline the evolution of Kirzner’s position on the entrepreneur and the issue of the market process. But we will focus on the opposition between the concepts of alertness and imagination. We will explain why Kirzner has won the dispute and also the reason why Lachmann’s works are absent in the literature on entrepreneurship.
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