Competition and Entrepreneurship is a book with many interesting insights. Kirzner provides a thorough critique of contemporary price theory, theory of entrepreneurship, and the theory of competition. He sees orthodox price theory as explaining the configuration of prices and quantities that satisfied the conditions for equilibrium. He argues that "it is more useful to look to price theory to help understand how the decisions of individual participants in the market interact to generate the market forces which compel changes in prices, outputs, and methods of production and in the allocation of resources". Although Competition and Entrepreneurship is primarily concerned with the operation of the market economy, Kirzner clearly shows that the rediscovery of the entrepreneur must emerge as a step of major importance.

"Creative destruction," he said, is the driving force of capitalism. His vision was stark: Nearly all businesses fail, victims of innovation by their competitors. Businesspeople ignore this lesson at their peril - to survive, they must be entrepreneurial and think strategically. Yet in Schumpeter's view, the general prosperity produced by the "capitalist engine" far outweighs the wreckage it leaves behind. "Prophet of Innovation" is also the private story of a man rescued repeatedly by women who loved him and put his well-being above their own. Without them, he would likely have perished, so fierce were his conflicts between his reason and his emotions.

Written in non-technical terms, this book explains how the dynamics of big business have influenced national and international economies. A path-breaking study, it provides the first systematic treatment of big business in advanced, emerging, and centrally-planned economies from the late nineteenth century, when big businesses first appeared in American and West European manufacturing, to the present. Large industrial enterprises play a vital role in developing new technologies and commercializing new products in all of the major countries. How such firms emerged and evolved in different economic, political, and social settings constitutes a significant part of twentieth-century world history. This historical review of big business is particularly valuable today, when the viability of large enterprises is being challenged by small firms, networks, and alliances. These essays, written by internationally-known historians and economists, help one understand the essential role and functions of big business

Doyle and Bridgewater illustrate the key themes using case materials and the entirely new work it contains on the linkage between innovation and shareholder value. This gives the student and professional a new decision making perspective. The key themes that structure the book are: Marketing and innovation - the model, innovation and strategy, marketing strategies and shareholder value, best practice in innovation management, effectiveness in innovation.

By integrating institutionalist approaches to organizations with the capabilities theory of the firm, Richard Whitley suggests how we can understand this combination of diversity and integration by developing the comparative business systems framework in three major ways. First, by identifying the particular circumstances in which distinctive business systems and innovation systems become nationally established and reproduced, as well as how changing endogenous and exogenous pressures have affected the major kinds of business systems that developed in many OECD states during the postwar period. Second, by showing how variations in authority sharing with employees and business partners and in the provision of organizational careers lead institutional regimes to affect the nature of organizational capabilities that dominant firms develop and enable them to deal with different kinds of risks and opportunities in particular technologies and markets. Third, by identifying the circumstances in which multinational firms are likely to develop distinctive transnational organizational capabilities through such authority sharing and careers, and so become different kinds of companies from their more domestically focused competitors. In many, if not most, cases of cross national managerial coordination, these conditions rarely exist, and so the extent to which multinational firms do indeed constitute distinct organizational forms and strategic actors is much less than is sometimes claimed.