ABSTRACT
It has been said that ‘because of the unprecedented prosperity enjoyed by the West after the Second World War, we have come to worship at the shrine of economic growth’. 1 And, in this quest for growth, entrepreneurship has been venerated for the key part it is thought to play. For instance, in 1942, not long after the term appears to have been coined, Cole spoke of entrepreneurship as being a signifi cant feature in American economic history, 2 and then after 1979, when Birch revealed his fi ndings about small businesses and job creation, further attention was paid to entrepreneurship as the supposed source of the businesses which would create those jobs. Therefore, as Chapter 1 indicates, ‘entrepreneurship’ has increasingly been seen as an, if not the, essential ingredient in economic development.
