İşletme Fakültesi Seminerler Serisi / Eyüp Özveren

Title: Schumpeter Meets Scheherazade at a Disciplinary Crossroads/ A Skeleton Argument

Abstract: Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950) was a polymath within the social sciences. He was heir to grand theorists as disparate as Karl Marx, Léon Walras, and Max Weber. His work did not only bring two or more disciplines together but also, more importantly, cut across disciplines in a truly transdisciplinary manner, at a time when multi-disciplinarity or inter-disciplinarity was not yet professed. As a maverick member of the Austrian School, by bridging Marx with Walras, he developed an original theory of the ‘economic process’ in his Theory of Economic Development (1911, 1934), and rivalled Keynes, albeit without full recognition, until major economic transformations of the late twentieth century vindicated him and made him a lodestar for growth economists and development scholars in general, as well as those interested in innovation and entrepreneurship, in particular.

Before Schumpeter made up his mind to pursue an academic career as an economist, however, he had had a brief career (1907-8) as a newly-wed lawyer in Egypt which is usually omitted from his standard biographies. He would later refer to this period as a Thousand and One Nights kind of an adventure. While in Egypt, he engaged himself in business and gained a firsthand experience of economic activities. Schumpeter seems to have learned much from the turbulent Egyptian economy, the lessons of which he distilled into his theory of the economic process. In the first part of this presentation, this argument will be elaborated comparatively with his subsequent experience as an academic economist in Csernowitz (Bukovina), a peripheral province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which is usually over-credited in scholarly literature for its formative influence on Schumpeter.

Schumpeter’s theory of economic development is built upon the interaction of two rival forms of human behavior, identified with the more convenient homo economicus, and the more-important entrepreneur figure, to the specification of which, he made a genuine contribution. Whereas the former takes economic data as given and reacts passively to it, the latter is proactive and seeks to shift the limits. Entrepreneur innovates by borrowed money and thereby sets in motion a capitalist dynamics which propels successive cycles of ‘creative destruction’. In the second part of the presentation, this argument will be illustrated by recourse to an exemplary story from the Thousand and One Nights that is surprisingly traceable to the very same Egypt that Schumpeter had observed. We are faced here with a case of independent discoveries as far as the conception and theorization of an economic process are concerned.  How far the two formulations converged, and why they did not converge fully, will be related to the contours of historical capitalism.      

In the last part of the presentation, we will see how the overall structure and narrative dynamics of Thousand and One Nights more than compensates for the shortcoming vis-à-vis Schumpeterian theory of the particular story taken up for detailed analysis.  To this effect, we will venture into the intriguing world of representation, narration, and textuality as related to the Nights.  Faced with the threat of summary execution, Scheherazade, as the protagonist, is forced to behave like an adventurous entrepreneur in the realm of storytelling. Her tool-box supplies her with her instruments of trade with which she innovates in a Schumpeterian way. Her lead performance helps shape the behavior of Shahriyar (her prospective husband) as well as other characters in tune with the notion of ‘homo economicus’. In this sense, the narrative progress of the Thousand and One Nights rests upon the similar functioning of a deeper and more general type of metaphorical ‘economy’. 

Yer : AB2-345 nolu Toplantı Odası