A Value-based Approach to Unspelling Entrepreneurship

Abstract

Entrepreneurship and the entrepreneur figure are social phenomena subjected to constant mutations. Extant definitions of entrepreneurship are always based on current characteristics of entrepreneur activity and, as a rule, absolutize them as essential. In the article main mystifications of entrepreneurship are analyzed due to the fact that it is attributed general properties of entrepreneurial activity in the way they are understood in a certain historical period. The paper suggests a way out of the succession of mystifications by rejecting the entrepreneurship definition in the frame of a subject-object interpretive scheme and the development of the entrepreneur activity concept as a kind of social activity. The social action theory and the theory of social objects fetishization are the methodological research foundation. The results of the research are the following. First, the interpretation of the entrepreneur and entrepreneurship on the basis of personal traits, functions and ways of the construction of the future are mystifications ascribing the monopoly on arising and developing human action characteristics in different historical periods to entrepreneurship. Second, the cause of mystifications is the transfer of the human action analysis according to the scheme «subject-process-object » to the research of entrepreneurship. Third, attempts to overcome mystifications while preserving the naturalistic approach result in the multiplication of entrepreneurial mystifications as the reflection of new arising general characteristics of human action. Fourth, a general approach to the definition of the entrepreneurial action as a kind of the social action, which has sense in the value production and is capable of everlasting enrichment with new modus of actions and created values, is suggested. Perspectives of further research include the investigation of synchronic and diachronic peculiarities of entrepreneurial action modus and produced values.