not gentle to the capitalists" (Schumpeter, 1991). Thus, by instead
portraying the conflict between entreprenuerial activity and the
sociology of the modern state, he came quite close to the analysis
carried out by Thorstein Veblen some decades earlier, who emphasized the
conflict between p- gressive technology and the institutions of a
contemporary "predatory dynastic State of early modern times,
superficially altered by a suffusion of democratic and parliamentary
institutions" (Veblen, 1964, p. 398). Modern neo-Schumpeterian
approaches have continued to build on this groundwork provided by their
master. During recent years there has been a great upsurge of discussion
on technology, innovations, technological regimes, etc. from the dynamic
perspective provided by Schumpeter (Dosi, 1984, Rosegger, 1985; Dosi et
al., 1988). Thus the search process for (t- poral) extra profits has
been stressed and has been used for modelling attempts. The wider
institutional framework for technological change and innovation activity
has also been strongly developed more recently. Hence emphasis has grown
in the study of technological and industrial regimes, path dependency,
and the network approach, developed recently, that social relationships
structure the opportunities and constraints that face firms and agents
that, for example, carry out innovations (Snehota, 1990).