The Entrepreneurial Culture and Bureaucracy in Twentieth-Century America

America’s entrepreneurial culture is important because it promotes the search for new opportunities for innovation. Here, the author traces that culture through two industrial revolutions and focuses on the growing tension between entrepreneurship and bureaucracy inside and outside of the nation’s twentieth-century firms. Business histories are explored using categories adapted from behavioral economics. Particular attention is devoted to some of the important exceptions that throw light upon the stereotypes of the static government agency and the slow-moving industrial firm. Still, the author concludes, following World War II the economy had to be pulled out of its bureaucratic doldrums by new science- and social science-based industries that invigorated the nation’s entrepreneurial culture and promoted a wave of significant biological and digital innovations. The article concludes with a glance at the future of the bureaucratic and entrepreneurial cultures.