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Although Schumpeter's theory on `creative destruction' and Kirzner's on `entrepreneurial discovery' dominate current entrepreneurship research in organization studies, one of the most fundamental debates in modern Austrian economics is that between Kirzner and Lachmann. Using Low and MacMillan's (1988) key specifications as a rubric, we introduce organizational entrepreneurship scholars to Lachmann's work, identify the direction in which his radical subjectivist approach would lead the field, and encourage exploring important questions from, and adopting methods consistent with, his provocative perspective. This unique disequilibrium perspective, which takes into account institutional contexts and multiple levels of analysis, offers new theoretical insight into how entrepreneurs create opportunities through expectations of an imagined future and exploit opportunities through continuous resource combination and recombination. Conceptualizing time as subjective and heterogeneous, it facilitates the examination of patterns in entrepreneurial activity, especially when combined with longer time frames. And it offers hermeneutics and ideal-types as alternatives to statistical models, for developing a theoretically sophisticated understanding of how entrepreneurial processes unfold.

We draw on complexity theory to explain the emergence of a new organizational collective, and we provide a much-needed empirical test of the theory at the collective level of analysis. Taking a case study approach, we use four dynamics of emergence posited by complexity theory's dissipative structures model—fluctuation, positive feedback, stabilization, and recombination—to explain how a collective of live musical performance theaters in Branson, Missouri, came into being and periodically transformed itself over a 100-year period. Our findings suggest a strong match between the theoretical perspective employed and the empirical processes uncovered, empirically validating the model at the collective level. The study demonstrates the value of conceptualizing evolution in terms of emergence, highlighting distinctions between the nascent complexity approach to evolution and the neo-Darwinian evolutionary approach that has dominated the theoretical conversation in organization science for the past generation. Our findings complement the insights of the dominant theoretical perspectives in organization theory, providing a more comprehensive understanding of organizational evolution by directly addressing the heretofore intractable phenomenon of emergence.

We develop a new perspective on entrepreneurship as a dynamic, complex, subjective process of creative organizing. Our approach, which we call ‘dynamic creation’, synthesizes core ideas from Austrian ‘radical subjectivism’ with complementary ideas from psychology (empathy), strategy and organization theory (modularity), and complexity theory (self-organization). We articulate conjectures at multiple levels about how such dynamic creative processes as empathizing, modularizing, and self-organizing help organize subjectively imagined novel ideas in entrepreneurs’ minds, heterogeneous resources in their firms, and disequilibrium markets in their environments. In our most provocative claim, we argue that entrepreneurs, by imagining divergent futures and (re)combining heterogeneous resources to create novel products, drive far-from-equilibrium market processes to create not market anarchy but market order. We conclude our exposition of each dynamic creative process by offering one possible direction for future research and articulating additional conjectures that help point the way. Throughout, we draw examples from CareerBuilder—a firm that has played a major role in creating and shaping the online model in the job search/recruiting industry—and its industry rivals (e.g. Monster, Yahoo’s HotJobs) to illustrate selected concepts and relationships in dynamic entrepreneurial creation.