Entrepreneurship – the fundamental question for economists and business theorists alike.
Item 1: Call for the Special Issue of Strategic Change on Frank Knight now up on the journal’s website. It has been extended even though it looks as if we have enough submissions to fill an SI.
In the meantime, Item 2, I have been re-working, once again, my understanding of Knight’s best-known work Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit.
First conclusion, it cannot be understood without reference to the prior works of those Knight cites extensively in the book – specifically J. Bates Clark, Thomas Carver, Herbert Davenport, and Frank Fetter. – among others often ignored today.
Importantly, Knight’s incompletely expressed ‘theory of the firm’ provokes a different approach to ‘business ethics’. That opens new doors for me. The key, I feel, lies in understanding the place of human language in economics, along with its place in all other modes of socializing. In this respect: Farber, L. H. (2006). An Anatomy of Trade in Medieval Writing: Value, Consent, and Community. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press. Is an eyeopener. It leads towards an entirely different theory of the firm – and much else in economics. Needless to say Knight seems to have something to tell those of us thinking about the nature of firms about the uses and limitations of AI – as it overwhelms the scholarly universe.
Aside from the ever ongoing Knight-oriented research, there are now two Cambridge Elements lists under way – business strategy AND business history.