ABSTRACT
Entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship have received significant attention in recent years. An increasing number of graduate business schools have entrepreneurship programs, with U.S. News and World Report now recognizing such programs in its subranking of programs within America’s best business schools. The debate over U.S. industrial policy has included significant discussion of entrepreneurship as it relates to economic productivity, with Robert Reich’s The Work of Nations (1991) and Tales of a New America (1987) but two examples of books touching on the theme. Public sector entrepreneurship discussions received a substantial boost with the publication of David Osborne and Ted Gaebler’s 1992 bestseller, Reinventing Government, the subtitle of which is “How the entrepreneurial spirit is transforming the public sector from schoolhouse to statehouse, city hall to the Pentagon.” Contemporary public administration and the modern public administrator are at the center of the debate over entrepreneurship and at the center of attention in terms of producing results for a nation easily enamored by ideas like those expressed by Osborne and Gaebler.
