22.3. Discourses of entrepreneurship

The construction of entrepreneurial agency on farms K.M.Vesala 2010

22.3. Discourses of entrepreneurship

• Write down for yourself detailed answers to the following questions, so that you will be prepared to take part in the discussion:

• How, according to Perren & Jennings (2005), do governmental discourses present entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship?

• How do Perren & Jennings portray entrepreneurs?

• What is the main point that Perren & Jennings make?

Perren & Jennings 2005

• Critical discourse analysis (CDA)• Power; legitimation and subjugation (p.174)• Power relation between governments and

entrepreneurs• ”and it is antipatriotic of any small business owner-

manager to fail to grow their own business” (178) • Contradictory discourses of important function and

dependency (179)

Perren & Jennings 2005

• ”removes the possibility of entrepreneurs creating personal agency” (179,181)

• This is clearly a discourse of the supremacy of structure over entrerpeneurial agency (178)

Questions

• In cultural images the agency of entrepreneur is praised and highlighted. How to interpret P & J regarding this? (e.g. Carland et al. 1983)

• How could this agency be realized and manifested? (e.g. not growing? Other aims? Personal, shared, economic, non-economic aims?)

Ogbor (2000) Mythicizing and reification in entrepreneurial discourse: ideology-critique of

entrepreneurial studies (journal of management studies 37:5)

• Deconstruction of discourses (dichotomies), ”how ideology has penetreted, and perhaps contaminated, the discourse on entrepreneurship” (609)

• ”conventional discourse on entrepreneurship is rooted in the heroic myth which defines the dominant, rational, European/North american male model” (609) (research discourse)

• Origins of the ´Entrepreneur´ -concept in research: • Cantillon (1755): e acts in the face of risk and uncertainty• Schumpeter (1945). E has the strenght and the courage to challenge

the accepted ways of doing things and sweep aside the forces of tradition

Ogbor 2000

• ”Following these classical contributions to the understanding of entrepreneurs as agents of the capitalistic system, researchers have focused their attention to the individual entrepreneur and sought to understand not only his roles in the economic system, but also the masculine personality attributes that are supposedly congruent with these roles, namely his psychological or personality traits.” (616)

Ogbor 2000, 617• Following these heroic, and sometimes Darwinian, notions, Collins

and Moore’s (1964) conceptualization of an entrepreneur is nearly poetical:“What we have learned is that the way of the entrepreneur is a long, lonely and difficult road. The men who follow it are by necessity a special breed . . . The road they can follow is one that is lined with difficulties, which most of us could not even begin to overcome. As a group they do not have the qualities of patience, understanding, and charity many of us may admire and wish for in our fellows. This is understandable. In the long and trying way of the entrepreneur such qualities may come to be so much excess baggage. What is necessary to the man who travels this way is great imagination, fortitude, and hardness of purpose . . . The men who travel the entrepreneurial way are, taken in balance, not remarkably likeable people . . . As any one of them might say in the vernacular of the world of the entrepreneur, ‘Nice guys don’t win’. ( p. 244)

Ogbor 2000• Praxis: Gender issues: • ”The discourse on entrepreneurship, following a pattern within a general

‘Eurocentric’ character of Western thought, has sustained traditional dichotomies, oppositions and dualities – between male and female – where the male-oriented definition of reality is upheld as the legitimate world-view celebrating masculine concepts of control, competition, rationality, dominance, etc. Not surprisingly, Collins and Moore (1964) posit that:

However we may personally feel about the entrepreneur, he emerges as essentially more masculine than feminine, more heroic than cowardly . . .

His values and activities have become part of the character of America and intimately related to our ideas of personal freedom, success, and, above all, individualism . . . The myth of the entrepreneur is a drama in which

the protagonists challenge the established order . . . (pp. 5–6, italics added)In this world-view, males are seen as the archetype of entrepreneurs whereas females, at best, are restricted to what Bowen and Hisrich (1984) termed as ‘entrepreneurial ghettos’. Female participation in entrepreneurship is reasoned to be the antithesis of entrepreneurial norms as a result of gender qualities: male achievement versus female subjugation; male dominance versus female submissiveness; male control versus female appreciation; male autonomy versus female support; male aggression versus female co-operation; male independence versus female dependence; male idiosyncrasy versus female conformity.

Ogbor 2000, 624, 625

• Fay and Williams’s (1993) study of women’s participation in entrepreneurship shows how widely held perceptions about women have led to gender discrimination when seeking start-up capital. Such discriminatory behavior by loan officers and other practitioners, according to Fay and Williams, may not be, and probably is not, intentional.

• Fay and Williams (1993, p. 374) report that ‘there was a tendency for loan officers to have a gender-stereotypic view of women that emphasizes nurturance and caring, and de-emphasizes those personality traits that are stereotypical malemanagerial: dominance and achievement’. Riding and Swift (1990) also showed that women seeking business loans are required to provide a higher level of security than male applicants. An interesting point made by Riding and Swift is that without the benefit of some differentially acting mediating factor, a female applicant of objectively equal merit to a male applicant was likely to be judged a poorer risk. Through gender-biased practices women are restricted to what Bowen and Hisrich (1984) termed as ‘entrepreneurial ghettos’. The reasons given for this restriction reinforce the dominant myth: women’s lack of self-confidence (Humphreys and McClung, 1981), ‘least confident of their abilities’ (Hisrich and Brush, 1984), starting small and staying small (Charboneau, 1981), avoidance of innovation in products or services, preference in competing in existing markets (Hisrich and Brush, 1984), suffering from a math anxiety (Carter, 1981), or as graduate products of liberal arts programs (Hisrich and Brush, 1984).

Ogbor 2000, 626

• ”Individuals are also asked to admit their responses to questions dealing with, for example, selfconfidence, control over one’s life, number of children one has, propensity to take risks, etc. The process of self-examination is then followed by a process of identity transformation through various forms of entrepreneurial ‘developmental programs’. For instance, the American Women’s Economic Development (AWED) program for female entrepreneurs focuses its efforts on ‘building women’s confidence and assertiveness’ (Charboneau, 1981).The reason for the application of these ‘developmental programs’ is clear: to cultivate desired norms and values in the individuals, tying them to ‘appropriate identities’ by proscribing certain aspects of identity.”

Ogbor 2000, 626-627

• To illustrate the import of the preceding discussion we need to look at the experience of ethnic minorities in the world of entrepreneurship. The fact that African-Americans’ and other minority-groups’ participation in entrepreneurship have been historically restricted to a narrow range of services such as small-scale retailing, personal services, etc., is widely recognized by entrepreneurial researchers. However, this limited restriction has been erroneously explained, in the traditional discourse, as a result of either psychological characteristics (De Carlos and Lyons, 1979; Feagin, 1987) or else as problems of inefficiency in management and financial performance (Scott, 1983). The idea that their entrepreneurial space has already been defined by institutional and historical conditions seems to have no bearing in mainstream entrepreneurial discourses.

Ogbor 2000; conclusions

• For Ogbor, crucial questions seem to be: who can become entrepreneur? Who are restricted to entrepreneurial ghettos?

• And one of the main points, that entrepreurship discourse is dominated by psychological reductionism and methodological individualism,

”by remaining uncritical to the social, ideological and institutional forces shaping the pattern and development of entrepreneurship in contemporary society, the traditional discourse has not only served to sustain prevailing societal biases, but has equally operated as techniques of power, domination, promotion of a monolithic knowledge and the backgrounding of entrepreneurial diversity. (629)

Conclusions

• Ogbor does not question the assumption that entrepreneurship is fundamentally economic behaviour (founding and running a business), the aim of which is (only or mainly) economic gain

• He does not offer conceptual tools to approach the agency of individual, but emphasises the importance of analysing structures

• He does not problematisise the (uniform) nature of the agency conforming to the cultural model displayed in the dominant discourse

• Variety in governmental discourses; towards the issue of principals

Chell 2007: Social Enterprise and Entrepreneurship. Towards a Convergent Theory of the Entrepreneurial Process (ISBJ 25:1)

“There does appear to be more of a consensus that ‘opportunity recognition’ is an entrepreneurial attribute (Gaglio, 1997, 2004; Hills, 1995; Kirzner, 1979, 1985) as is the goal-oriented behaviour that may be summed up in the phrase the ‘creation of something (of value)’. In this way, the ‘creation of something of value’ to a given community or a cause is the possible link to the social enterprise.” (6)

Chell 2007, 6-7“Sociological approaches focus on structure and ‘agentic’ aspects of entrepreneurial behaviour; this has led to consideration of how signals from the environment may infl uence entrepreneurs’ actions and also how they might think about or represent images of those situations to themselves (Thornton, 1999). Not only has social constructionism emerged as an important paradigm in which to understand entrepreneurs but also theoretical constructs like social embeddedness have enabled one to develop insights into the social and structural relations in which entrepreneurs operate(Aldrich and Zimmer, 1986; Granovetter, 1985). Furthermore, sociologists that focus on societal issues have started to consider the relations between business and society and what is needed to reduce fragmentation and begin to knit the frayed structure of society together (Kent and Anderson, 2003). This thinking suggests that theories about entrepreneurs as agents of change and the creation of social as well as material value should enter our theories of entrepreneurship.”

Chell: discourse of enterpriseMany authors have suggested this sense of entrepreneurship; going beyond the technical skills of, for example, business founding – the ability to make fi ne judgements in business and the marketplace, envision opportunities that others cannot and create incredible wealth as a consequence. It is this sense of entrepreneurship that distinguishes the entrepreneur from the owner-manager or life-style business founder (Carland et al., 1984; Chell, 2000; Chell et al, 1991).

Chell 2007, 8“‘Enterprise’, however, appears to have a relatively recent English history to it. The term enterprise was adopted in the 20th century to identify economic zones in depressed areas identifi ed by government for industrial and commercial renewal”

“Here enterprise took on a particular meaning or rather set of meanings, a philosophy and underpinning economic theory – that of the free market. Enterprise culture as an element of Thatcherism was indeed an oxymoron. Enterprise stood for the values of individualism, personal achievement, ambition, striving for excellence, effort, hard work and the assumption of personal responsibility for actions. ‘Culture’ refers to attitudes and values that are socially derived, usually associated with a particular society or civilization.”

Chell 2007, 10• “Since the enterprise culture of the Thatcher era, politically, policies have

moved on. Post-1997, the Labour government has attempted to develop, on the one hand, a culture of science enterprise and, on the other, that of social enterprise. Science enterprise policies have specifi cally been targeted at the UK’s competitive position on the world stage; the underperformance of R&D expenditure in producing innovative products and processes; and, the preference of university-based scientists to pursue ‘blue-sky’ research rather than the development of the applications of technology and the creation of economic wealth (DTI, 1998). The government’s social enterprise strategy, in contrast to its science enterprise policy, attempts to address a ‘wide range of social and environmental issues’; it defines a social enterprise as:

… a business with primarily social objectives whose surpluses are principally reinvested for that purpose in the business or in the community, rather than being driven by the need to maximise

profi t for shareholders and owners. (DTI, 2002: 14)”

Chell 2007, 11“The point is that social enterprises may need to make a surplus that will assure their survival, and to do so in the long term they should become entrepreneurial. However, there may be differences in economic and social perspectives of the incumbents working for social enterprises. The culture and ethos of the social enterprise are based on principles of voluntarism, ethical behaviour and a mission with a social cause. This, on the face of it, gives the appearance of a culture clash with the entrepreneurially led, for profi t organization that is based on an employment contract, pragmatism and instrumental actions, with a view to creating shareholder value. Is it possible to reconcile these disparate socio-economic standpoints?”

Chell 2007, 13“If social enterprises are to behave entrepreneurially then arguably we should apply the same defi nition of their entrepreneurial behaviour, as we would to economic enterprises. Taking one particular definition, we would mean that the social enterprise would ‘create and pursue opportunities relentlessly, without regard to alienable resources currently controlled, with a view to both creating wealth that may be reinvested in the business to assure its sustainability, and social value’. This definition, based on the Harvard defi nition of entrepreneurial behaviour (Hart et al., 1995; Stevenson and Jarillo, 1990), raises some issues in respect of social enterprise. The examples where social enterprises operate in a competitive environment suggest that they do need to pursue opportunities. There is though a question over the usage of the term ‘relentlessly’ as this may convey a sense of mindlessness. However, if we mean by relentlessly, ‘persistently, having carefully evaluated the opportunity’, then the need for not only the economic but also the social entrepreneur to be fleet of foot, is clearly apparent.”

Chell 2007, 13”It is thus possible to apply the same definition to the economic and social entrepreneur in these general behavioural respects. Moreover, we might question the belief that entrepreneurs are driven by pure economic motives. Entrepreneurs are primarily driven by challenges, the funds generated often being viewed as a measure of their success, and many do consider themselves to have mixed motives, including those of attempting to ‘make a difference’ – as they might phrase their pro-social motivation.”

Chell 2007, 16

• “However, our argument suggests that the entrepreneur is able to frame a situation in both an economic and/or social way; the drivers and differential emphases may vary depending upon circumstances such as the primary mission of the enterprise and the ability to make sufficient to sustain the enterprise, reinvest in the business and create stakeholder value.”

Chell 2007, 17-18“Social and community enterprises aim to create social value rather than personal wealth for the leader-manager. Because they have valued social ends, such enterprises have been able to attract grant aid to pump-prime their activity. So is the process of social and community enterprise different from that of a privately owned entrepreneurial venture? Should such businesses necessarily operate differently?”

“Social entrepreneurs within this model have the intellectual capacity, the thought processes and the imagination to recognize opportunity based on their technical and/or professional experience; they have the social and personal networks that add non-material, human and social capital resources; and they have the personal ability to make judgements about appropriate courses of action that will result in the pursuit of an opportunity of socio-economic value based on the realization of a competitive advantage. All business opportunities involve customer choice. Competitive advantage confers rarity or some other socio-economic value that social entrepreneurs can create. In these ways social and community enterprises can become self-sustainable; indeed they can create social and economic change through the development of a vibrant form of doing business.”

Construction of agency (of individual entreprepreneur

• Social psychology as contributing to the study of how, and if, individuals in different contexts and settings construct entrepreneurial agency for themselves?

•

Construction of agency (of individual entreprepreneur

• 1. Discources as tools and constraints; 2. individuals as constructors of their agency; 3. social contexts as arenas in which the construction process occurs and is realized

• 1: structure-discourse position of the individual; variety of available discourses

• 2. discoursive practices (action-talk), self-construction

• 3. networks, transactions, markets,

Construction of agency (of individual entreprepreneur

• Three aspects of self• A relational conception of agency: executive

and principal side in the agency aspect (comp. Baumeister, Milgram); ”Making it happen … …. for whom?”

• -> Framing the principal side of agency as a self-reflection process and as a relational function

2. Social construction approach… Conclusion

• Social construction of entrepreneurial self? (comp. Baumeister) -Reflection: Individual reflects upon her action and agency, on her relations with others, (e.g. identity, self-efficacy)-Relation: individual must relate to others and to the fact that others perceive and define her (e.g. self-presentation, transaction)-Agency: Individual regulates and governs herself, attempts to influence and control her situation and environment (e.g. utilising contacts and networks, managing impressions)

• In doing all this, -individual uses socially shared tools for thought and communication (language etc.), which include criteria for entrepreneurship (=entrepreneurship discourses, e representations etc.) -and is embedded in social system, which includes transaction relations, controversies, and negotiation processes.