Nexus (standard)

Abstract: In the first exhaustive treatment of the field in 20 years, Scott Shane extends the analysis of entrepreneurship by offering an overarching conceptual framework that explains the different parts of the entrepreneurial process - the opportunities, the people who pursue them, the skills and strategies used to organize and exploit opportunities, and the environmental conditions favorable to them - in a coherent way. Given the level of interest devoted to entrepreneurship in the economy and among academics at business schools, one would think that researchers would have deep insights into this phenomenon. However, those who look closely at academic investigations of entrepreneurship realize that scholarly understanding of this field is quite limited. Unlike its sister fields of accounting, marketing, finance, organizational behavior and strategic management, entrepreneurship is rather poorly explained by academics. Scott Shane resolves this by considering the nexus of enterprising individuals and valuable opportunities and by using that nexus to understand the processes of discovery and exploitation of opportunities, the acquisition of resources, entrepreneurial strategy and the organi

Abstract: Since the early 1980s, social scientists have increas ingly focused upon the significance of the region to the organization of economic life. This article considers three main lines of analysis which have emerged. These concentrate respectively on insti tutions, industrial organization and transactions, and technological change and learning. Each has made strong claims about the role of the region. I argue here, however, that none has yet developed a wholly convincing explanation for the resurgence of regional economies. To do this it is necessary to understand the region as a locus of untraded interdependencies. This has implications for how we think about regional and industrial policies. I illustrate these points with some remarks on regional policies in contemporary Europe.