European Entrepreneurial Culture

Master's Thesis from the year 2010 in the subject Economics - International Economic Relations, grade: 1,3, King`s College London, course: MA European Studies, language: English, abstract: From the 1940s to the 1980s large enterprises in Europe was clearly the dominant form of business organisation. Small businesses were believed to be less efficient than their larger counterparts and only marginally involved in innovative activities. This has gradually changed to the extent that, at present, national and supranational policy-makers have given strong priority to entrepreneurship and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Scholars argue that the outlook of the European economies has undergone a transformation from the managed to the entrepreneurial economy. This sharp change of direction has been primarily driven by a combination of factors including: the growing importance of the knowledge-economy in terms of occupational choices, factors of production and changing patterns of commercial activities; concerns for high unemployment rates, declining international competitiveness in comparison to the USA and Japan and rates of economic growth as well as an evidence of shifting patterns of consumer demand. Evidently, a new vision of the EU's economic strategy has been conceived in terms of the belief that economic, social and environmental goals must go hand in hand in the 21st century. In the centre of this vision is the innovative entrepreneur who is believed to be a major ingredient for the revitalisation of European economies. The subject of entrepreneurship has been the topic of scholarship and research in a variety of academic fields. The interdisciplinary nature of scholarship reflects the subject as entrepreneurship itself is a multifaceted social and economic phenomenon. However, since there is no explicit horizontal entrepreneurship policy domain at the European level, the topic has not caught sufficient attention from European Union public policy analysts.
The main purpose of the dissertation is to discuss how the EU accommodates the image of 'entrepreneurial economy' within its policy-making apparatus. A generalisation of 'European' entrepreneurial economy has been made which underlines the supranational level of analysis and gives more attention to what has been undertaken collectively rather than individually by Member States.