Nick De Los Santos
CWID: A20317844
Professor Trost
EEE- 2083-30940
January 30, 2023
Module 01 Essay
What is an entrepreneur? An entrepreneur could be anything. It is not fair to put an assigned name on someone who holds that title. Granted, an entrepreneur is a person, but it is such a broad word. William B. Gartner believes that focusing on traits and personality characteristics will never give you the answer you want.
THE TRAIT APPROACH
Entrepreneurship research has long asked, "Who is an entrepreneur?" I believe the attempt to answer the question "Who is an entrepreneur?" which focuses on the traits and personality characteristics of entrepreneurs will neither lead us to a definition of the entrepreneur nor help us to understand the phenomenon of entrepreneurship.
The trait approach to discovering what an entrepreneur is, started by stating that being an entrepreneur is a personality trait, which I found fascinating because I never thought of it that way. In everything I have always been told, an entrepreneur gets up and starts a business. As stated in the reading, multiple events may lead to new creations. However, the tables depict many successful entrepreneurs; almost all their characteristics are the same but different simultaneously. The common goal was to achieve something bigger than themselves for their reasons. Not much has changed since then; for the most part, this is what early entrepreneurs do to this day.
BEHAVIORAL AND TRAIT APPROACHES
TO ENTREPRENEURSHIP
This approach to the study of entrepreneurship treats the organization as the primary level of analysis. The individual is viewed in terms of activities undertaken to enable the organization to come into existence (Gartner, 1985). The personality characteristics of the entrepreneurs are ancillary to the entrepreneur's behaviors. Research on the entrepreneur should focus on what the entrepreneur does and not who the entrepreneur is.
Through time and research, researchers have gained insight into the factors contributing to entrepreneurial success and developed more effective strategies for supporting entrepreneurship by identifying certain behaviors. This has allowed them to make advances in researching the study of entrepreneurship. The research implies that we should not limit entrepreneurship to the personality traits of individual entrepreneurs to achieve their goals.
In Search of the Meaning of Entrepreneurship
Moving forward, the next reading (In Search of the Meaning of Entrepreneurship) explains the reasoning behind the word and what it offers to us as a society. What and why is entrepreneurship such a highly talked about topic? One of the reasons listed in the reading suggests that it could do with the average annual labor rate and how it has steadily declined throughout the years. Because of this was the rebirth of entrepreneurship, and with it came new employment positions for others in society. President Ronald Reagan later stamped this as the "Age of the Entrepreneur." Now, is that not something? A person with ideas giving others motivation, along with their unique ideas becoming something more than themselves.
The challenge for managers of large and small companies is to learn how to develop (or buy) technology that is best for their specific purposes, how to control the cost of using it, and how to finance it, all while earning enough profit to continue to invest and compete and grow in world market on a sustained basis. In short, the challenge is to be a entrepreneur (1986, p. 518)
Ruben Mettler's argument above was said to encourage the rebirth of entrepreneurial doings. He goes about that in his argument, depicting the declining productivity growth and informing society on the increase in global competition. The reasoning is that productivity in America at that time was low. There were few job opportunities, nor were there people willing to take risks financially, physically, etc. America experienced unhealthy economic well-being for a period of time, and the way out was to be courageous and learn to invest in technological advances that could bring the economy back from a drop. Ruben Mettler stated the idea of learning to invest, compete, and grow in world markets by using these technological advances in every aspect possible and getting everything you can out of them. According to Ruben Mettler, this was the idea and challenge to be an entrepreneur. Another thing that caught my eye in this reading was the human capital approach to entrepreneurship. T.W. Schultz was a believer in the equilibrium method.
Nobel laureate T. W. Schultz has fashioned a theory of entrepreneurship rooted in the theory of human capital, which he helped to pioneer. Schultz finds in contemporary economic literature a persistent failure to see the rewards that accrue to those who bring about economic equilibration, especially as it occurs in certain non market activities
The concept that Nobel laureate T.W. Schultz is a concept based upon human capital. Within the concept, T.W. Schultz takes more of a traditional neoclassical approach (supply and demand and how they correlate to the production, price, and consumption of goods/ services). The argument he puts forth is that the value of entrepreneurial liveliness is a differential return to ability. He criticizes the basic concept of entrepreneurship on several levels, one being the basic definition of the term, the neglect of entrepreneurship being a scarce resource, differences in allocative abilities, and the negligence of entrepreneurship when general equilibrium considerations dominate the economic inquiry. T.W. Schultz then refined the concept of entrepreneurship to be "the ability to deal with disequilibria" and then furthered it to household decisions and time allocation. Lastly, he brings up how modern education teaches us to fear and have an adverse reaction to disequilibria. Still, it affects the entrepreneurial ability to be the scarce resource he mentioned.
**What makes entrepreneurs entrepreneurial? **
There will always be different opinions on the same or multiple topics. Everyone or most people likely have other thoughts regarding a topic of conversation. Hints that is the very reason conversations take place. Anyways, what makes entrepreneurs entrepreneurial? Well, the answer I would personally give you is… They are entrepreneurial by considering all business factors and finding ways to be successful using business methods and ideology. This particular paper was interesting in thinking you know the answer to something and a new idea being thrown in front of you. I learned that predetermined goals begin with casual rationality in a situation. This is where your framework is laid down to achieve the primary goal.
The word "effectual" is the inverse of "causal". In general, in MBA programs across the world, students are taught causal or predictive reasoning – in every functional area of business. Causal rationality begins with a predetermined goal and a given set of means, and seeks to identify the optimal–fastest, cheapest, most efficient, etc. – alternative to achieve the given goal.The make-vs.-Buy decision in production, or choosing the target market with the highest potential return in marketing, or picking a portfolio with the lowest risk in finance, or even hiring the best person for the job in human resources management, are all examples of problems of causal reasoning.
Saras D. Sarasvathy researched thirty different entrepreneurs, which allowed her to comprehend how they work through various problems in building a company. Throughout the interviews, she discovered a common rationality in entrepreneurship. Saras D. Sarasvathy refers to this as "effectual reasoning," which is the opposite of "causal reasoning." "Causal reasoning" involves noticing the optimal alternative to reach a predetermined goal that was made. As for effectual reasoning, it is done differently, including setting many means and considering various destinations that those means can achieve. It is problem-solving that can be controlled through human action. It allows different ideas to emerge and become something more than they already are. Ever wonder how some things come to be? I know I have, yet these same methods are how. Of course, there are more difficulties, but this is the foundation. Everything in this world needs a foundation; foundations are not built by sitting and doing nothing. Entrepreneurs do entrepreneurial things to allow new ideas to form.
Citations
“who is an entrepreneur?” is the wrong question - William B. Gartner, 1989. (n.d.). Retrieved February 16, 2023, from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/104225878901300406
Hébert, R. F., & Link, A. N. (n.d.). In search of the meaning of entrepreneurship - small business economics. SpringerLink. Retrieved February 15, 2023, from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00389915
Sarasvathy, S. D. (2008, October 21). What makes entrepreneurs entrepreneurial? SSRN. Retrieved February 15, 2023, from https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=909038
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