Entrepreneurship: Globalization, Innovation and Development

Citation

Patton, D. (2001), "Entrepreneurship: Globalization, Innovation and Development", International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research, Vol. 7 No. 5, pp. 205-206. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijebr.2001.7.5.205.1

The emphasis of this book is placed firmly upon the notion of entrepreneurship and it has been written as a textbook with a variety of audiences in mind: undergraduates, postgraduates and practitioners. The book seeks to develop the entrepreneurial theme by offering the reader an opportunity to explore all aspects of entrepreneurial behaviour, and uses case studies and boxed examples to reinforce learning, and highlight key concepts. The book therefore makes an explicit attempt to move away from a small business focus, which enables a much broader geographical perspective to taken. The title and contents reflect the change in emphasis that has taken place away from the small business per se and towards the development of entrepreneurship and innovation as evidenced in the recent UK white paper on Enterprise Skill and Innovation (Opportunity for All in a World of Change). The author, however, points out in her preface that this fact is coincidental and was more concerned with “… how such issues as business development, the management process and the drive for business to become globally competitive articulated with entrepreneurialism.”

The contents of the text are broken down into four parts: culture and context, entrepreneurial behaviour, the business team, and the professional management of enterprise. Within these four parts the text sets out to draw the areas of globalization, innovation and development within an entrepreneurial organizational framework. A great deal of material is covered in the text from a wide range of disciplines and the breadth of the text is both a strength and a weakness. The bringing together of some topics that have often been marginal to the literature, for example, HRM, strategy and organisational structure within a cohesive framework offers a structure to lecturers and students. This structure, delivers the array of topics in a more manageable package. It is, however, difficult to cover such an amalgam of material comprehensively. To counter this criticism the author does provide a useful insight into the issues addressed and offers a thorough set of notes/bibliographies to which the reader is guided.

There are issues in the structure and content of the text that could be improved. An explanation of family business undertaken in the chapter on “Gender, self‐employment and business performance” may well have been discussed much earlier within Part One: Structure and Context. In so doing it had the potential to be developed as a theme that ran through the book rather than an incongruous section of a chapter. A similar argument could be made for networks, discussed in chapter 12, but hardly mentioned in the earlier chapters. In particular, more could have been made of the innovatory potential that networks are expected to provide and the development of networks within supply chains in terms of globalisation and competitive advantage.

In conclusion, this is an ambitious text that sets out to cover a wide range of material within an innovative structure and reflects the current thinking within governments and academia in moving away from the subject of small business per se to the concept of entrepreneurship. The author has achieved an accessible student text that considers how business development, the management process, and the drive for businesses to become globally competitive relate to entrepreneurship. Problems are encountered in trying to consider the wide range of topics from a multidisciplinary perspective but these are mitigated by the intelligent use of case study, vignettes and further directed reading. The text is probably most suitable for final year undergraduates who have a grounding in management or those studying postgraduate courses that focus upon enterprise and entrepreneurship.

Elizabeth Chell is Rory Brooks Professor of Enterprise at the Manchester Science Enterprise Centre, UMIST and is UK Vice‐President on the Board of the European Council for Small Business (ECSB).