Entrepreneurial Groups

This chapter considers historical evidence and frameworks regarding entrepreneurial groups, defined as sets of individuals who are involved in initiating or managing new organizations as owner-managers, investors, advisors, or other helpers. The goals of the chapter are twofold. First, it will offer a selective history of entrepreneurial groups, addressing the legal origins of commercial partnerships in Roman and medieval law, the elaboration of partnership systems in the Mediterranean region during the Renaissance, and the evolution of entrepreneurial groups during the industrial revolution. Second, it traces the intellectual origins of social scientific work on entrepreneurial groups, emphasizing four perspectives, in particular: (a) Simmel’s structural sociology; (b) Coase’s theory of the firm; (c) Olson’s logic of collective action; and (d) theories of ethnic enterprise. The chapter concludes by identifying research questions that these perspectives raise for modern scholarship on entrepreneurial groups, as well as possible points of intellectual integration among them.