Studying the wide and varying academic literature concerning the subject of entrepreneurship, it is apparent that the topic is entirely too broad to make meaningful interpretations that cover the entire spectrum. For instance, Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Steve Case and Michael Milken are all considered entrepreneurs, as is the person down the street who runs a laundromat or your cousin who is in business for herself.
The topic is much discussed in both books and magazines. Go to Amazon.com, for instance, and type in the word "entrepreneurship" and 1,884 titles come up. Make the same request of the Library of Congress, and more than 23,900 books and magazine articles come up and that's just in English! And each of these books has seemingly different views on what an entrepreneur is.
Streissler (1990) quoting earlier authorities tells us that in the conditions of a free enterprise system, if the selling price of a product exceeds the cost of the productive services for certain firms and a profit results,
entrepreneurs will flow towards this branch of production or expand their output, so that the quantity of the product [on the market] will increase, price will fall, and the difference between price and cost will be reduced; and, if [on the contrary], the cost of the productive services exceeds the selling price for certain firms, so that a loss results, entrepreneurs will leave this branch of production or curtail their output, so that the quantity of the product [on the market] will decrease, its price will rise and the difference between price and cost will again be reduced (Streissler, 1990, 118).
Is this correct? Is the entrepreneur so totally market-driven that the response is one that leads to market equilibrium? If so, then the conclusion of this argument is that an entrepreneur reacts solely "by the numbers" and deals with "ad hoc" business decisions.
Kirzner (1990) rejects that assumption and feels that t...