Entrepreneurship and Values in a Democratic and Pragmatic Economics: Commentary on ‘A Transactional View of Entrepreneurship’
Author(s)
Shook, John R.
Abstract
Entrepreneurship cannot be explained by any economic theory that isolates innovation from ongoing social processes or locates creativity in a space of given, fixed values. Unfortunately, mainstream economics has committed these mistakes, rooted in instrumentalist and antidemocratic notions of consumption and rationality that permits reasoning only about means toward given ends. Genuine innovation is, on Dewey’s pragmatic approach to values, the intelligent modification of both means and ends for experimental action. When joined to an appreciation that consumption is just a phase of production, innovation can be properly seen as productive value-creation. Entrepreneurship is democratic experimentation in the economic realm.
