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Abstract
Entrepreneurship is predominantly
associated with the activities of an individual actor –
the entrepreneur. It has also been related to the
concept of firm ownership (e.g. Foss and Klein,
2005). This may lead to the conjecture that a
collectively-owned firm is a setting for collective
entrepreneurship. However, such reasoning
encounters a number of taxing questions. If
entrepreneurship is usually related to the individual,
how does the collective embody entrepreneurial
spirit and lead to effective outcomes? These and
other questions will be addressed in this paper,
which is mainly based on a review of the literature.
The paper starts by providing an overview of the
different schools of (economic) thought on
entrepreneurship. Subsequently we discuss the
implications for the conceptualization of
entrepreneurship when it is not carried out by an
individual but by a group of people. Finally, the
notion of collective entrepreneurship will be framed
within the context of the producer-owned firm in
agriculture, by considering conditions under which
collective entrepreneurship can be attributed to the
cooperative.