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In recent years Professor Shackle's numerous, highly imaginative and original works on the role of expectation and uncertainty in the modelling of economic behaviour have at last become more widely acknowledged. However, still relatively little attention is paid to one of his seminal and earliest studies, that concerned with his own theory of expectations and individual decision making under uncertainty, work on which was begun and published in the 1930s and completed in 1949 with the appearance of the first edition of Expectation in Economics. Thereafter, until the early 1960s, his theory received a modest amount of interest. However, it tended to become neglected; reference rarely appears to it in books or papers on expectation, even in those papers discussing decision making under uncertainty (see, as one of the latest examples, G. O. Schneller and G. P. Sphicas, 1983). The literature has been dominated by the risk‐based, expected utility approach to decision taking.

In a series of books beginning in 1949 with Expectation in Economics, G.L.S. Shackle has analysed business decisions made under conditions of uncertainty (see Shackle, 1949,1955,1961,1970). In these he rejects the orthodox, probability‐based, approach of expected utility theory and outlines his own “model” of the decision process. This “model” is outlined in the next section. A number of criticisms which have been made of the Shackle theory are discussed in the third section together with responses which seek to preserve the underlying spirit of Professor Shackle's approach. The fourth section examines the relative merits of the orthodox mode of analysis and that of Professor Shackle as rationalisations of the judicial standard of negligence used in England and the United States.

George Lennox Sharman Shackle is now in his 82nd year having been born on 14 July 1903. Yet during the 25 years that I have known him (beginning when I was an undergraduate at the University of Liverpool in 1957) he has hardly seemed to change at all, in physical appearance, in temperament, and in his attitude to his work: retirement is a word that does not enter his vocabulary. In appearance, Professor Shackle lives up to the popular image: out of any crowd, “the man in the street” would have no hesitation in identifying him as a professor. He looks the true scholar (rounded glasses and all), benign, self‐contained, appearing absent‐minded, preoccupied with higher thoughts. Since, indeed, he has altered so little over the years it is difficult to think of him as having had to pass through the “ages of man”. As he has done so, however, his temperament has also hardly changed. He is a most modest and kind person, ever willing to assist those, young and old, who seek his help with the unravelling of economic theory. As with all true scholars and researchers of distinction, Professor Shackle's byword is humility.

Discusses the contributions to economic theory by various authors and covers popular beliefs about entrepreneurial function. Analyses the potential contribution of Shackle to the development of entrepreneurial theory and outlines key elements of his theory. Concludes that a better understanding of Shackle’s decision‐making theory is useful, particularly now there is renewed interest in entrepreneurship.

In this chapter, we present fragments of previously unpublished correspondence between Ludwig Lachmann and G. L. S. Shackle on the nature of institutions. This correspondence allows us to rationally reconstruct a theory of institutions, which extends Lachmann’s theoretical work. Shackle pointed out to Lachmann that institutions might be inputs into economic activities and that they themselves may be reproduced and transformed by these activities. Lachmann in turn contended that institutions consist of “instruments of interpretation.” We develop the concept of “instruments of interpretation” as a subset of institutions. These instruments are mental models and cognitive tools which are (1) inputs complementary to capital goods (2) jointly produced, reproduced, and transformed through economic activity. We suggest that in contrast to privately produced capital goods, parts of the institutional infrastructure are produced jointly as shared goods because the use of certain institutional elements is non-exclusive and non-subtractable; these elements – instruments of interpretation – are produced and reproduced by sharing and contributions through a process of joint production. This chapter explicitly connects two different but essential themes in Lachmann’s work: capital, and institutions. By combining these two strands of Lachmann’s work, we are able to demonstrate that there is a cross-complementarity between institutional orders and capital structures. This connection in turn provides a thicker understanding of the workings of markets.

In preparing this article, I have approached Shackle's “fundamentalist” interpretation of Keynes from a slightly different angle. Much of the discussion as to whether Shackle is right tends to get bogged down in a rather narrow textual exegisis. That is, debates that focus on whether the 1937 Quarterly Journal of Economics article means more, or less, than Keynes's apparent “endorsement” of IS/LM Keynesianism contained in his famous letter to Hicks. This type of discussion too easily overlooks the more fundamental methodological considerations that motivate Shackle. Such issues as the way in which economic actors acquire knowledge and the nature of economics as a social science are important to him. Therefore], a more meaningful way of assessing Shackle's views would be to consider whether they are in sympathy with Keynes's views on such matters.

Austrian economics figures centrally in organizational entrepreneurship research. However, researchers have focussed almost entirely on the Austrian school's “gales of creative destruction” and “entrepreneurial discovery” metaphors, which are rooted in equilibrium assumptions and thus downplay the more subjective and dynamic aspects of entrepreneurship. The purpose of this paper is to question such assumptions, proposing instead a “kaleidic” metaphor drawn from the radical subjectivist strand of Austrian economics. The paper develops, grounds, and enriches the theoretical concepts this metaphor embodies in order to advance the general understanding of entrepreneurship as a radically subjective, disequilibrium phenomenon, as well as the specific knowledge of entrepreneurs’ career and venture experiences. In doing so, the paper highlights creative imagination as a wellspring of entrepreneurship.

The paper employs a case study design to inductively develop the theoretical concepts embodied in the kaleidic metaphor and deductively ground them in the accounts 12 entrepreneurs provided about their career and venture experiences. The paper employs symbolist methods to develop thicker descriptions, generate alternative understandings, and facilitate richer interpretations. Moreover, the paper adopts a reflexive approach in considering the study's implications.

The results suggest the kaleidic metaphor comprises five overarching ideas that resonate, often very strongly, with entrepreneurs.

The study is the first to theoretically develop and empirically ground the ideas the kaleidic metaphor embodies. The paper contributes to a growing body of conceptual work and joins a handful of empirical studies by organizational entrepreneurship scholars using the radical Austrian perspective.

The methodology of mainstream neoclassical economics deals with knowledge deficiency problems in a deterministic manner and as “refinements to the theory of economic action rather than rudiments of it” (Coddington, 1975, p. 151). For Shackle (1972), such an approach to the subject is unacceptable, since its deterministic nature is fundamentally at odds with his argument that, to be meaningful, choice must make a difference to the unfolding skein of events. Central to his view of the nature of choice is clearly a rejection of the concept of equilibrium and of the assumptive fiction that co‐ordination is achieved, on a once‐and‐for‐all basis, via the costless efforts of an omniscient auctioneer. If choices are meaningful in Shackle's sense, the skein of events contains many surprises, many incentives for agents to rethink their views of things and change their behaviour. For example, the workings of a multiplier process falsify expectations and these surprises may then spark off euphoric or depressing super‐multiplier effects. In markets for financial assets, “bulls” and “bears” cannot both be right in their predictions, while in product markets the creative exercise of marketing and research and development personnel's imaginations may continuously send out waves and backwashes in keeping with Schumpeterian notions of creative destruction. If one accepts Shackle's alternative starting point, one must sacrifice notions pertaining to “given” preferences and technologies and, with them, the stable functions upon which IS‐LM macro models (see Shackle, 1982(a)) and orthodox value theory are built.

This chapter provides a comprehensive survey of the contributions of the Austrian school of economics, with specific emphasis on post-WWII developments. We provide a brief history and overview of the original theorists of the Austrian school in order to set the stage for the subsequent development of their ideas by Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek. In discussing the main ideas of Mises and Hayek, we focus on how their work provided the foundations for the modern Austrian school, which included Ludwig Lachmann, Murray Rothbard and Israel Kirzner. These scholars contributed to the Austrian revival in the 1960s and 1970s, which, in turn, set the stage for the emergence of the contemporary Austrian school in the 1980s. We review the contemporary development of the Austrian school and, in doing so, discuss the tensions, alternative paths, and the promising future of Austrian economics.

This chapter considers the role of entrepreneurship theory in the development of ideation techniques for entrepreneurship education. It begins by considering how metatheories impact theory construction in entrepreneurship research and discusses the role of ontology, epistemology, axiology, as well as the role of assumptions about human nature and social change. The chapter presents four different paradigms of thought that apply different philosophies and illustrates how these different paradigms conceptualize entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial opportunity differently. The four paradigms include the equilibrium paradigm, the disequilibrium paradigm, the disruptive innovation paradigm, and the social constructionism paradigm. Within each paradigm, the nature of entrepreneurial opportunity is discussed, and the chapter provides examples to show how different ideation techniques can be generated from these different conceptualizations. Forms of ideation technique are presented and explained, as they relate to each paradigm, and the chapter concludes by explaining the value of these techniques for ideation, opportunity discovery, and creation, in the entrepreneurial process.