Volume 40 (2022): Issue 2 (December 2022)
ENTREPRENEURSHIP, ENTREPRENEURS AND ENTERPRISES

When presenting the careers of entrepreneurs operating on Polish soil at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, researchers usually focus on individuals operating in the most industrialised areas, especially the Kingdom of Poland. Much less attention has been paid to successful entrepreneurs in Galicia. Studies on Galician entrepreneurship have mainly taken the form of biographical entries in encyclopaedias and lexicons and in the Polish Biographical Dictionary. These are profiles of individual business leaders of the Austrian partition, while far fewer works deal with the issue of entrepreneurs as a group, despite the fact that there are many sources for such research. This article is an attempt to create a group portrait of a number of Galician oil entrepreneurs who played an exceptional role in the economic, the social, and the political life of Galicia.

The issue of entrepreneurship in sports joins the more general trend of catching up with the long Renaissance period of “reflecting” on the character of the professional sportsman (athlete), so peculiarly overlooked, and one of the main protagonists of the culture of antiquity, alongside the artist or philosopher. The author of the article adopts the convention of the ‘corporate athlete’, for which he sees a contemporary exemplification in football, the most popular sport. The examples cited from the economic history of football, preceded by an outline of the basic categories of entrepreneurship, are an attempt to show the essence of an economic, two-way view of these issues. The description of the institutionalisation of analytics and football’s ‘information bank’, highlights the effectiveness of an interdisciplinary approach to entrepreneurship in sport. In contrast, the characterisation of the re-engineering carried out at FC Barcelona is a case of an approach that treats sport as a natural economic environment. Providing a wholesome, inspirational building block, grounding some elements of management and entrepreneurial.

The state-owned enterprise under the name of Lower Silesian Factory of Nicotine Preparations (Dolnośląska Wytwórnia Preparatów Nikotynowych; DWPN) with its registered office first in Szalejów Dolny and then in Góra Śląska existed in the years 1952–1958. It produced, above all, nicotine sulphate used by farmers for plant protection (primarily to combat extremely widespread aphids). The plant was managed by the Polish tobacco industry, which supplied the raw material in the form of tobacco waste and waste from tobacco plants. The article first presents the post-war demand of Polish agriculture for nicotine preparations and the plans of the tobacco industry to concentrate their production in one place. Initially, nicotine preparations were manufactured in plants in Szalejów Dolny, Góra Śląska and Kraków-Czyżyny. Finally, under the auspices of the tobacco industry, the DWPN company was established, which produced nicotine preparations for the entire Polish agriculture. DWPN produced approximately 40 tons of nicotine sulphate annually. The plant employed an average of 60–70 employees. Economic reasons and a reduction in the demand for nicotine sulphate resulting from the appearance of cheaper and equally effective insecticides on the market made it necessary to liquidate the plant. The company’s facilities were taken over by the Provincial Union of Enterprises of State Industry in Wrocław.

Large landownership was one of the main market players in the interwar period. It was a specific enterprise, legally and economically separated. It had its own organisational structure, human, financial and material resources. It carried out production and commercial activities with the aim of making a profit. The number of landowners in Kielce Voivodeship was estimated at 711, and together with their family members they made up a collective five times that number. The landowners were entrepreneurs, who coped with the economic reality with more or less success. The list of landowners was headed by owners of large estates – the Myszkowski, Drucki-Lubecki, Wielopolski, Łubieński, Czartoryski, Radziwiłł, Potocki, Tarnowski and Zamoyski families. However, farms consisting of a single manor, with an area of 180–300 ha, predominated. Apart from a small group of farm owners who wasted their fortune, the landowners were attached to the land and wanted to keep it in good economic condition. Owning a farm entailed responsibility for it. It obliged the owner to manage it properly and not leave it to its fate. My aim is to characterise the activities of landowners as entrepreneurs aiming to improve the economic condition of their property. I have in mind modernisation, which manifested itself in modern technical procedures, mechanisation, selective crop-animal production and the industrialisation of landed estates

Zbigniew Horbowy (1935–2019), a graduate of the Faculty of Glass of the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Wrocław, conducted from the end of the 1950s, throughout the next several decades, exceptionally fruitful and original artistic, academic, design and managerial activities on the intersection of art and industry. His artistic achievements quickly found recognition in the national art circles and in the international arena. At the same time, as the only glass designer in the times of the Polish People’s Republic, he managed to combine artistic and commercial success. The utility glasses designed by him and mass-produced and sold on a mass scale were a symbol of Polish glass in general in the public awareness. He carried out his entrepreneurial activity with amazing efficiency in spite of the conditions of the industry in the People’s Republic of Poland. And this, in principle, was extremely difficult to effectively use innovation or design. As a lecturer at the PWSSP (State Higher School of Fine Arts), then a member of the university’s management and at the same time the head of design units of the leading Lower Silesian glassworks, he played an extremely important role in educating design staff and development directions of Polish industrial design.

The paper studies the phenomenon of poverty in underdeveloped/third-world countries, particularly within the context and the failure of international organizations in Sub-Saharan Africa. The article analyzes that the increasing problem of poverty in the region’s countries/Africa is a replication of the failure of the organizations such as the IMF and the World Bank policies such countries. Despite some projects such as Millennium Development Goals (MDG), Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), and many more by the United Nations. Many of these programs have failed to eradicate or reduce poverty. Instead, the situation has worsened most, especially in Africa, where the rate of poverty is increasing, with several regions in the continent experiencing the worse hunger epidemic in recent times. Therefore, the research posits that the failure of international institutions, the World Bank, and IMF policies have immensely become a significant contributing factor to the poverty level in Sub-Saharan Africa.