Introduction
Virtually all of the seminal theoretical contributions of the Austrian school deal with the functioning of the market process. The centrality of economic calculation (Mises 1920), the intertemporal discoordination resulting from central bank interest rate manipulation (Hayek 1931), and the entrepreneur’s equilibrating role (Kirzner 1973) all speak to action within a specific institutional framework: a market context featuring prices, property rights, and profit and loss.
In light of this, it is notable that a significant strand of modern Austrian research has taken a “nonmarket turn”—dealing with social interaction beyond the scope of these institutions. For instance, recent scholarship falling squarely in the Austrian tradition has dealt with foreign inter vention and policing (Coyne and Hall 2018), post-disaster recovery (Storr et al. 2016), prison governance (Skarbek 2014), motorcycle gangs (Piano 2017), homelessness (Lucas 2017), and criminal justice (Koppl 2018), to name only aD. S. Lucas (B)
Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA e-mail: dlucas01@syr.edu
© The Author(s) 2021 97
A. John and D. W. Thomas (eds.), Entrepreneurship and the Market Process, Mercatus Studies in Political and Social Economy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42408-4_5
few. A common theme across this work is an emphasis on purposeful human action in the face of distributed knowledge leading to spontaneous coordination and other un-designed outcomes. Thus, just as traditional Austrian theory elucidates the entrepreneurial market process, it could be said that this “new” branch of Austrian economics deals with the “nonmarket discovery process.”
This increased breadth of inquiry offers both opportunities and challenges for Austrian scholars. On the one hand, the trend highlights the vibrancy of the school: Austrian ideas are being fruitfully applied to new questions and are permeating fresh academic literatures. On the other hand, this development also raises issues of theoretical clarity and precision.
It creates the risk of arguing by analogy, overextending, or (worst of all) misapplying theories originating in the market process to nonmarket phenomena. (Have we a clear sense of what we mean by Kirznerian “alertness to profit opportunities” in the political sector?) This is in no way meant as a slight extant work in nonmarket entrepreneurship, which has done much to pioneer the fresh application of Austrian ideas. To the contrary, it suggests the need for conceptual clarification that would provide structure and rigor to an applied research agenda on the nonmarket discovery process.What, then, does a framework building on “market process theory” look like in the “nonmarket process”? The purpose of this paper is to move toward an answer to this question. In so doing, I offer a review, theoretical synthesis, and agenda for research on nonmarket entrepreneurship. In revisiting extant work, I highlight common “Austrian” themes that have been explored in a variety of nonmarket contexts. From this, I sketch a rough framework for nonmarket entrepreneurship research, surrounding the notion of “nonmarket competition as a discovery procedure.” This framework shares many common elements with Hayek's vision of market competition as a discovery procedure, including dispersed knowledge, uncertainty, and alertness. I detail the types of questions that such a framework might facilitate. Finally, I also elaborate a number of outstanding conceptual issues that future work in the nonmarket context might address.