Lessons for Economists, Entrepreneurs and Business Schools

This chapter develops and integrates themes from earlier chapters to summarize where we think Shackle’s work points for academics in economics departments and business schools, and for decision-makers in businesses and the public sector. Our focus, like that of Shackle himself, is mostly on methodological issues rather than on policy pronouncements. As we have shown, Shackle was reluctant to get involved in debates about public policy even though his analysis of the challenges that uncertainty and irreversibility pose for decision-makers applies both in firms and in the public sector. His work might have made a bigger impact if he had tried to derive normative rules for coping with life’s crucial choices or statistically infrequent but potentially significant events. In contrast to today’s behavioural economists, he was unwilling to cast himself in the role a guru by offering recommendations about how to take better decisions or the kinds of choices that should be made in particular contexts. He also did not set out to show what could be done with his theoretical framework by using it in applied contexts and he did not cultivate doctoral students to whom the task might be delegated. Yet the range of applications of his thinking has turned out to be wide, from contract bidding in the construction sector (Hillebrandt, 1985), livestock auctions (Duncan, 1957) and the women’s fashion sector (Wray, 1956; 1957; 1958), to ecological issues centred on irreversible environmental change (Young, 2001; Aldred, 2012).