【正文】 and, welfare maximization on the economy. But others, such as psychologists and historians have argued that individuals and firms and even economies may have a variety of purposes that are not given a priori and that are born, change, and die over time. While Buchanan and Vanberg decry the economist’s imposition of an exogenous telos on the phenomena they study, Joas brings to bear a wide variety of authorities from the pragmatist philosophers to expressivist anthropologists to develop a theory of creative action in which telos is neither ignored, nor imposed externally, nor assumed as a precondition for action. Within management literature, March too has called for theories that do not assume preexistent goals (March, 1982): “To say that we make decisions now in terms of goals that will only be knowable later is nonsensical – as long as we accept the basic framework of the theory of choice and its presumptions of preexistent goals. I do not know in detail what is required, but I think it will be substantial. As we challenge the dogma of preexistent goals, we will be forced to reexamine some of our most precious prejudices. … We should indeed be able to develop better techniques. Whatever those techniques may be, however, they will almost certainly undermine the superstructure of biases erected on purpose, consistency, and rationality. They will involve some way of thinking about action now as occurring in terms of a set of unknown future values.”The first step in building a strategic management based on creative action, therefore, would call for theories that explain the selection of goals as endogenous to the strategic management process. In strategic management, researchers such as Mintzberg have called for a research program to examine strategies that were intended as well as those that were realized despite intentions (Mintzberg, 1978). One such theory, the theory of effectual (as opposed to causal) reasoning has recently been developed in entrepreneurship and as will be seen in the following sections, will bring additional new answers to the other three fundamental questions in strategic management. While creativity in causal reasoning consists in generating alternative means for the achievement of prespecified goals, creativity in effectual reasoning involves the generation of possible goals, given limited means and constraints within dynamic and interactive environments. The theory of effectuation suggests that the solution to goal ambiguity need not lie in random and equivocal efforts or in dumb luck. 2. Firm Differentiation Emphasizing effectuation rather than causationWhy are firms different? Or, what sustains the heterogeneity in resources and performance among close petitors despite petition and imitative attempts?Differentiating between generalized aspirations and specific goalsThe issue of differentiation is even an issue only if we assume homogeneity of goals, especially goals that are determined prior to choice. In reality, however, human beings do not begin with specific goals – only with vague and generalized aspirations, that are themselves contingent upon a host of situational and temporal factors. This intrinsically pluralizing role of contingent aspirations affects both demandside and supplyside choices. For example, on the demand side, most hungry customers do not start with the “need” for a specific food such as hamburgers. Instead they start with a generalized hunger for something to eat. The entrepreneur induces the customer to transform that generalized aspiration into a concrete demand for a specific product such as the hamburgers manufactured by a particular pany. There are two types of choice here. The first one involves the transformation of a vague aspiration such as hunger into the specific desire for a hamburger. The second one involves the choice between possible hamburger joints, given the desire for a hamburger. As proponents of the resourcebased theory of the firm have pointed out, in mainstream economics and management, we tend to model the latter type of choice (., choice between means to achieve a particular goal) rather than the earlier one – ., the choice between possible ends, given particular means and very generalized aspirations (Ulrich amp。 Joas, 1996) explicitly question the preexistence of goals. Both exhort the necessity for developing a theory of human intentionality in which human purposes emerge within the processes studied and are not given a priori. For example, economics imposes utility maximization as the sole purpose or telos on the individual。vis his fellow human beings and environment. … The proponents of such conceptions are well aware that the preconditions assumed by the model of rational action are frequently not to be found in empirically observable action. However, these writers are forced to claim that the limited degree to which these preconditions obtain is not a deficiency of their particular theory but a fault of the actors themselves. … I am not in any way denying the empirical usefulness of rational models of action when it es to analyzing certain social phenomena. What I do question, however, is the claim that because of its usefulness this model of rational action, with all its tacit assumptions, can be applied to an ever increasing number of fields of study without a thorough reflection of precisely those intrinsic presuppositions.” (147) Joas then goes on to analyze the intentional character, the specific corporeality and the primary sociality of all human capacity for action, with a view to developing a theory of creative action that could form a basis for the social sciences.Creative action and endogenous goalsBoth works cited above (Buchanan amp。 Vanberg, 1991). In that paper, they argue for the usefulness of a perceptual construct of the market as a creative process, rather than as a discovery process, or the more familiar allocative process. Their