Michael Fast

Philosophical Perspective on Entrepreneurship

Fast discusses, from a phenomenological perspective, some thoughts on how we can understand the entrepreneur as being and how he or she is situated in his or her everyday life. The focus on Being means to understand the process of the entrepreneurs’ defining of and acting in his or her Lifeworld. What is involved in the being, and how the entrepreneur is situated, is seen in the experiences of the entrepreneur and his or her project. The author maintains that this is a discussion of consciousness and the dialectical process in thinking and acting in everyday life. Viewing dialectics of everyday life as important issues in the being, Fast concludes by suggesting employing contradictions as part of everyday life to understand the movement of entrepreneur project and eventually the entrepreneur himself or herself.

Can Leadership Become a Profession

Can leadership become a profession identical with, or at least somehow comparable to, the professions of, for example, nurses, carpenters, physiotherapists? This is the main question we will address in the chapter. Furthermore we will discuss whether leadership is an immanent and latent aspect of professions and whether this is a key difference between profession and leadership. Finally, we will discuss what it would actually take to turn leadership into a new profession comparable to other practices.

Qualitative Economics: The Science Needed in Economics

This chapter is about science from a book that on Qualitative Economics (Clark and Fast 2008), specifically building a science of economics, grounded in understanding of organizations and what is beneath the surface of structures and activities. Economics should be, as a science, concerned with its assumptions and how to develop and formulate theories of ideas and reality that produce descriptions of how to understand phenomenon that create experiences, hypotheses generation, and replicable data for prediction, which need to be connected to everyday business life. Economics has to start with a discussion involving the philosophy of science.