Abstract

Entrepreneurship researches started to have traction at the start of 1980 and underwent paradigmatic shift. However despite the varied veins of exploration from opportunities to innate traits, entrepreneurship literatures have yet developed a unifying conceptualization and theory with key concepts that can clearly explain why entrepreneurs act the way they do? What inspires them to action? What seduce them to move at all? This paper intends to relate the study of entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial actions and activities with references to thermodynamic and energy gradient manipulation mechanism. Studying business ventures from a process view in an attempt to reconstruct the entrepreneurial process by illustrating a range of relevant perspectives from energy gradients in naturally occurring chemicals and suspension coils, this paper hopes to pull together a unifying theory on entrepreneurship basing on the forces at work with thermodynamic concepts and expressions with gradient-manipulation mechanism to explain the entrepreneurial action-motion phenomena. The gradient-manipulating mechanism and thermodynamic expressions thus become the “nature” invisible hand that operates the motion of actions. Kirzner’s theory of entrepreneurship explains the coordination of markets and of knowledge. It is that knowledge, the recognition of the opportunities in the actual imperfect markets that triggers the gradient-manipulation mechanism.

The findings of this paper suggest that entrepreneurial actions are force-driven by the lure of profits to select of best pathways and means to achieve the ends. The idea that entrepreneurial actions are the results of the play of forces with thermodynamic forces at work is a powerful suggestion in the finding of this paper.

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