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Nowadays probably no social scientist would deny that the entrepreneur is a central figure in economics and plays a pivotal role in economic development. Yet, with some remarkable exceptions (such as Schumpeter) for a long time the study of entrepreneurship has been neglected in mainstream economics, as well as in sociology. Both in the history of sociology and economics the entrepreneur has been “a shadowy and elusive figure” (Cole, 1968, p.60), less studied than more impersonal structures, i.e. markets and firms. This absence is not difficult to explain. There has been little room for the entrepreneur in the abstract theory of the neoclassical model of the firm (Baumol, 1968, 1993); and, in contemporary sociology no serious attention has been devoted to considering the sociological relevance of this role beyond the influential insight of Weber. Economic anthropology has sporadically dealt with entrepreneurship, as post-war interest in development (Stewart, 1991), but has tended to focus on non Western or mainly rural societies (Barth,1963, 1967a,1967b; Belshaw, 1965; Geertz, 1963; Strathern, 1972; Greenfield et al.,1979). There have mainly been three ways in which anthropologists have shown interest in the study of entrepreneurship. Firstly, they have assessed the function of enterprise in the economies of small scale social groups or peasant societies. Consequently, they have studied entrepreneurs as individuals involved in the process of social and cultural change in their own social setting. What linked those two approaches was the implication that change would occur out of the expansion and growth of entrepreneurial activity. This made the entrepreneur’s role significant from both the point of view of cultural change and that of economic development. Thirdly, anthropologists have begun to turn their interest to former agrarian societies which have been de-ruralized and modernized through processes of industrial decentralization and the development of local petty commodity production.

Small-Scale Entrepreneurship in Modern Italy - An Ethnographic Analysis of Social Embeddedness in the Access to Capital and Credit