James O. Fiet – författare

This visionary book suggests a number of key practical methods by which poverty can be alleviated, even without resources or personal connections. Classifying IE as ‘the science of what is possible’, Fiet demonstrates how to substitute information – the lowest common denominator of what individuals already possess or can acquire – for resources. The book employs 30 years of experimental results as the basis for its entrepreneurial approach to poverty alleviation, inviting its readers to extend the science of what is possible and succeed regardless of their circumstances.

Holding the potential to alter how work is approached and carried out in the area of poverty alleviation, the innovative ideas explored in this book will be of significant interest and inspiration to researchers and students, but also beyond academia to government agencies, foundations, and charities, as well as individuals and organizations invested in solving the problem of poverty.

This book organizes entrepreneurship theory in a way that constitutes a new body of knowledge, which is Informational Entrepreneurship.  It can serve as a basis for teaching entrepreneurship and reducing performance uncertainty.  Although entrepreneurship is not entirely about information, information determines how it can be systematically understood while depending less on luck.  It also offers the only known, experimentally tested approach that incorporates decision support tools.  Other known approaches rely on exposition for validation; whereas, Informational Entrepreneurship uses two-sample experiments that controlled for other explanations as well as experimenter bias.  It will appeal to those studying and teaching entrepreneurship who are looking for a prescriptive approach, rather than a descriptive approach.

This book explores how religious doctrines influence launching a new venture. It examines 16 Christian denominations and 9 world religions and how they would reasonably be expected to apply more than 20 distinct doctrines each to entrepreneurship. It is not an examination of doctrinal veracity because adherents have confidence in their beliefs. Rather, it examines how they will evaluate the attractiveness of entrepreneurship through the lenses of their beliefs, assuming they receive what they expect. More than 100 years ago, Max Weber pitted Protestantism against Hinduism in a single hypothesis. The current study is a multifactorial examination that covers the world’s major religions, as well as most of their doctrines. It is the first comprehensive examination of how entrepreneurs view the world through the lenses of their religious doctrines, which represent the formalization of their most deeply held beliefs.

This scholarly work critically examines theoretical deficiencies in the field of strategy, delineating their origins and impact on research and practice. Though it could be viewed as a broadside against the field for the way that it has developed during its first 70 years, it is intended to be an effort to nudge it forward, which will require major institutional reforms not just in how it evaluates its research but also in how it combines theories pedagogically.

The author contends that the prevalent publish-or-perish paradigm, successful in the hard sciences, has failed in building a cumulative understanding in the social sciences, including economics, which relies on linkages with others to build cumulative knowledge.

This book scrutinizes the consequences of using theory with inappropriate units of analysis, emphasizing the importance of justified expectations. Geared towards researchers, it contributes to the discourse on theoretical development in the field of strategy.