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Entrepreneurship as a new liberal art

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Abstract

The skills and knowledge required to engage in entrepreneurship are vital elements of participating fully in contemporary society. We consider the “crisis” in the liberal arts in the USA and show why entrepreneurship can and should be considered fundamental to a renewed and contemporary conception of the liberal arts. Integral to our arguments is a pragmatic view that considers research and teaching in entrepreneurship to be inextricably intertwined. By examining the study of organizations across several social science and humanities disciplines, we highlight the relative narrowness of the current empirical domain of much entrepreneurship research associated with business schools and management journals and develop examples showing the potential theoretical value of substantially expanding the empirical domain of entrepreneurship as organization creation for both research and teaching. Our argument is that the study of entrepreneurship as a new liberal art can be an important source of individual and group emancipation and a fundamental means through which entrepreneurs can become who they want to be while creating the impact on the world they envision. We offer this as a statement of the appropriate domain of entrepreneurship to guide our approach to both research and teaching.

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Notes

  1. Some of this decline appears related to demographic shifts and to the unique circumstances driving large number of students to college in the US during the late 1960s through the early 1970s (Weissman 2013).

  2. We see such questions being addressed directly in discussions about how “social entrepreneurship” differs from default notions of entrepreneurship and what kind of novel theorizing might be warranted (Dacin et al. 2010).

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  1. Rutgers University, Newark, NJ, USA

    Ted Baker

  2. University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business, Cape Town, South Africa

    Ted Baker

  3. College of Business, Clemson University, Clemson, SC, USA

    E. Erin Powell

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Baker, T., Powell, E.E. Entrepreneurship as a new liberal art. Small Bus Econ 52, 405–418 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-018-0099-0

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