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INTRODUCTION
The period of the mid-1970s through the mid1980s was the decade of small business, or as President Reagan called it "an entrepreneurial age" (Reagan, 1985: 1). The outcome was an entrepreneurial explosion during which small business suddenly became more beautiful in the marketplace. During this period, entrepreneurship was everywhere, offering something new to governments, cities, corporations, and individuals (Case, 1989: 16).
Suddenly entrepreneurship was in vogue and it became fashionable for politicians and policy-makers to extol the innovativeness and job-creation potential of small businesses (Gumpert,1982: 50). New interest spread from one end of the political spectrum to the other embracing everything from the socialist government of France to the conservative administrations in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Despite the popular frenzy over the entrepreneurial explosion of the 1980s, we are still struggling with a proper definition for entrepreneurship. The conventional equation of entrepreneurship with small business has only blurred the subject matter of the field (Cunningham and Lischeron, 1991: 45). Such a mistake often leads to ignoring the potentials of big firms in the innovative processes and the role they can play in rejuvenating the economy (Quinn, 1985: 73). Reducing entrepreneurship to small business also tends to limit the field along the lines of economic innovation and profit-seeking in the market, while excluding the role of organization creation in entrepreneurial innovation (Hornaday, 1991: 13).
This paper aims at a rethinking of the discipline of innovation not only in terms of "the role of new enterprise in furthering economic progress," but also as a systematic search for the creation of new organizational structures. We reject any attempt at reducing entrepreneurship to small business and thereby advocate a merger between the discipline of innovation and big firms through the medium of flexible specialization and internal markets. In this paper however, we limit our discourse to a critical evaluation of the ideological roots of the popular interest in entrepreneurship. A deconstructionist theory of entrepreneurship claims that knowledge is a discourse, a text, and is both a product of human manufacture and inseparable from the language which gives it expression.
THE ENTREPRENEURIAL EXPLOSION
The new interest in entrepreneurship was not confined to the public and small business sectors. Many big business corporations in the United States...