Entrepreneurship and Small Firms

David Deakins built a genuinely comprehensive textbook here, and the fact that it reached at least six editions with McGraw-Hill is meaningful evidence of sustained classroom value. The book moves from the foundational question of whether entrepreneurial personality is a real thing through financing, diversity in enterprise, family businesses, and social entrepreneurship — a scope that goes meaningfully beyond the startup-focused alternatives. Real case studies keep the theory grounded. The edition dating from 2006 is the honest caveat: the digital startup ecosystem, platform businesses, and a generation of research on entrepreneurial learning have substantially moved the field since then. Students using an older edition should treat it as a solid conceptual foundation that needs supplementing with current sources, not as a current state-of-the-field guide.