During the last two decades entrepreneurship has become a buzz word for a diverse collection of items. SMEs, business start-ups, middle classes, high technology, independent business men, innovation and creativity and many other issues come to mind when talking about entrepreneurship. Consequently, fostering entrepreneurship has become a rather indefinite slogan of policy rhetoric in order to implement positive labor market effects, growth, innovation or regional spillover effects. Competition and entrepreneurship have become established expressions in science and in public policy to foster growth and further paths of development, but the terms appears to be a label rather than a notion covering domains which are unique and consensually shared. The history of economic theory proves to have changing conceptions and definitions of entrepreneurship (and competition), but also entrepreneurship research being closer to management studies or to sociology don’t prove to come up with a coherent view.

The paper will take this notion as a background and will endeavor to differentiate and to spell out different relationships between entrepreneurship and self-employment. In one case, entrepreneurship and self-employment have a one-to-one fit and serve identically, while in other cases, entrepreneurship doesn’t correspond with the labor market category of self-employment or, vice versa, given self-employment, doesn’t go along empirically with entrepreneurship. Part-time or full-time working free-lancers, farmers, micro-entrepreneurs without employees, and “big” entrepreneurs employing a larger share of wage- or salary-dependent employees are difficult to summarize in one single box. The intention of the paper is to provide an introduction into different semantics and to highlight and to explain difficulties when talking about entrepreneurship in order to systematize competing and hazy interpretations. The general discussion in the paper will try to confront an explanation in economics which is almost economically-functionally oriented with an explanation having primarily a sociological-institutional focus being concerned with social rationalities, biographies and different further dimensions. In other words, the paper will try to puzzle with interpretations of classic authors including Knight, Schumpeter, Hayek, Kirzner, Baumol on the one hand and contrast those argumentation with a view focusing at individual logics of mobility and behavior on the other hand. Both perspective don’t exclude each other necessarily but they have to be acknowledged as complementary perspectives