ABSTRACT
Schumpeter’s approach to entrepreneurship has been the topic of numerous contributions. Rather than providing one more exhaustive account of Schumpeter’s view of entrepreneurship, this chapter concentrates on ways to interpret his approach from the institutionalist perspective described in the introduction. This implies that we will not trace the evolution of Schumpeter’s theory of the entrepreneur from The Theory of Economic Development (TED) to Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (CSD), as is usually done. Instead, we will focus on the question of whether this theory can be understood as an important application of his methodological approach of combining history with economic theory, using economic sociology as the intermediary. We will argue that this methodological approach was instrumental in constructing a version of economic dynamics that links economic development and institutional change. This differs from standard interpretations of Schumpeter’s theory of entrepreneurship that emphasise either an evolutionary selection view of entrepreneurial competition or the so-called ‘Schumpeterian hypothesis’.1
