MARKET OPPORTUNITY AND ORGANIZATIONAL GRIND: THE TWO SIDES OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Abstract

In pursuing profit opportunities, entrepreneurs often use multi-person firms. Since employment contracts leave some discretion to the employees, organizational coherence requires that they are coordinated on the entrepreneurial business conception as their own frame of action. Accordingly, the entrepreneurial reorganization of production and trade implies two different coordinating tasks: the exploitation of market opportunities and the seeing through of the business conception in the firms’ daily organizational grind. The former has been center stage in the Austrian school of economics. For the neglected latter task a cognitive theory is suggested which highlights an Austrian, or entrepreneurial, approach to the firm.