It appears from all the preceding analyses that the act of starting a business is both inseparable from the macroeconomic mechanism of economic and social development and profoundly individual. Can these dimensions be connected? If the microeconomic decision is, to some extent, the foundation of macroeconomic (and social) evolution, isn’t there also a relationship in the opposite direction? As we will see, if the motivations of entrepreneurs – those who innovate by founding an enterprise – are analyzed, social determinants will be found. The expression of an individual identity in the act of starting a business is often the reflection of a social identity.
4.3.1. The entrepreneur’s responsibility
One of the most important individual dimensions is the notion of responsibility, as we emphasized above. If there is a difference between the role of an individual and that of a robot or an administrative procedure, then the individual is the one who decides, “in all good conscience”, in other words, to take on the responsibility of decision-making, by weighing the positive and negative consequences of strategic options (affected, moreover, by different uncertainty factors that are difficult to measure objectively).
To illustrate our point, let us cite the representative case of the two French ministers who had to answer for their actions in court, following a scandal involving the transfusion of blood contaminated by the AIDS virus in the 1980s. It would possibly be an option to accuse the administration of that era of not having foreseen the extent of the risks
connected to this disease (knowledge of which was still quite limited at the time) and to believe that there was a lack of discernment or foresight and that, at the end of the day, a precautionary principle should have been applied by the Ministry of Health – it is always easy to say this in hindsight. However, the Court de Justice de la République, which gave its ruling in 1999, did not agree with the accusation of involuntary homicide. As for the expression “responsable mais pas coupable”, which gained a great deal of popularity
during this time, it is best to refer to the precise declaration made by minister Georgina Dufoix:
“I feel deeply responsible; however, I do not feel guilty, because at the time, we truly made decisions in a certain context that seemed, for us, to be the right decisions.”2 For better or worse, anyone who assumes responsibility for a collective action in a situation of uncertainty in the strong sense provided by Knight is potentially in a
situation to be responsable mais pas coupable if things do not go as well as planned. This is part of the entrepreneur’s function as well as that of a political or administrative head.
In terms of managing complex systems, we can conclude that entrepreneurs undertake a new collective action knowing that they cannot completely control the system they are establishing. In particular, they must delegate decisional functions. It is thus a matter of designing a partially autonomous (and thus non-deterministic) system and accepting responsibility while knowing that it is hard to plan and not perfectly controllable.
4.3.2. The entrepreneur’s identity
To understand the individual act of starting a business, we must turn to the human and social sciences. This is what an entire field of literature does in order to provide more than banal analyses like “the founder of an enterprise poses successive questions
concerning the target market, consumer needs, and internal resources that must be given added value”. The fundamental psychological reasons that push entrepreneurs to start businesses are never a search for opportunities according to this kind of disincarnated procedure.
It is more interesting to return to the issue with the notion of identity. Studies in the field of corporate identity show the interest of a managerial approach that showcases collective identities. What interests us here is the individual identity of the enterprise’s founder, but we will see that this is often linked to a collective identity. Cardon et al. (2009, 2017)
examined the kind of passion that is an impetus for deciding to start a business and perform an analysis in terms of identity. This is how they distinguish:
– the identity of the inventor: passion for activities exploring new opportunities;
– the identity of the founder: passion for activities exploiting new opportunities;
– the identity of the developer: passion for activities making the company grow.
By studying a sample of the founders of enterprises (in the sporting gear industry), Fauchart and Gruber (2011) proposed a three-category classification: Darwinians,
communitarians and missionaries. They base this on a psychosociological analysis that introduces the integration of individuals into communities where individual identities are defined based on the environment according to a mental schema as follows: Who am I?/What is my role? The enterprising act is then interpreted as a way to fulfill oneself regarding this issue – particularly for the last two categories.
Table 4.1. Characteristics of the three types of entrepreneurs
Type Characteristics
Darwinians Reference to the classical economic model:
Seeking personal interest; concentrating on the firm’s competitive advantages
Communitarians Reference to a community:
Supporting the community and benefitting in return from its support Missionaries Reference to a general mission :
Filling a general social role
The approach guided by Emmanuelle Fauchard and Marc Gruber in their field survey with founders of enterprises is a theory of social identity that they developed from the literature on social cognition – a field of social psychology as described by Moscovici’s collection (1972).
This approach allows us to expend the classical understanding of the entrepreneurship phenomenon, particularly through consideration motivations other than a search for long-term personal monetary gain – which is still the theoretical hypothesis of
evolutionist authors or at least the founding father, Schumpeter.
The idea developed, based on the theory of social identity, is that individuals who found a new enterprise act in order to remain coherent with their identities:
“(…) founders perceive as opportunities only those situations that are consistent with their self-concepts as they strive for identity-relevant actions in creating their new firms” (Fauchart and Gruber 2011, p. 952).
This is particularly true in the case of “missionary” and “communitarian” entrepreneurs.
The “Darwinians” seem more neutral in terms of identity – except for considering themselves representatives of the liberal norm and playing the role of the habile
businessman meant to grow rich. Insofar as there are potentially infinite occasions to start a new business, it is important to understand the logical foundations of restricting the field of opportunities for starting one. In a classical economic vision, we will believe that the only restricting logic is the probable long-term monetary yield, which is
concretely unrealistic as a criterion for choosing, given the immensity of all imaginable opportunities. This type of economic rationalization is actually of no help in
understanding the concrete phenomenon of entrepreneurship. The social identity
approach, on the contrary, allows the field of imaginable projects to be limited, making the explanation for founding the enterprise more realistic. The best example is that of the
“communitarians”. In fact, they spontaneously focus on opportunities that allow them to support the community they belong to and be supported by it. Here, we find a much more credible principle of explaining the motives for founding the enterprise than the
hypothesis of maximizing future revenues.
Let us take the example of the innovative winemaker who develops a new idea for
growing vines, organic wine-making or selling wine. This is done through a passion for the profession, a love of the land and a will to serve the cause of the local community. In the case of success, the ex post rationalization that involves calculating the long-term yield from productive investments is, we can see, completely artificial. Hayekian
reasoning on market opportunities is hardly more convincing. It is, however, adapted to describing the behavior of the Darwinian category.
4.3.3. Conclusion on the entrepreneur’s motivations
What motivates people to start a business can, as we have just seen, significantly vary.
The social identity explanation of the entrepreneurial phenomenon is a relevant start. It considerably differs from the classical explanations:
– previous knowledge belonging only to the inventor;
– exclusive access to information;
– particular cognitive abilities.
If we revisit the example of the “communitarian” entrepreneur, we will see that what motivates the head of the project is not cold, rational reasoning on the cognitive
opportunities mentioned above, but the will to defend the values of his or her community and to benefit from the help this community provides in return. The community’s forms of contribution are themselves diverse. Some fall under the three categories indicated, e.g.
when they are connected to skills specific to a region (inhabitants’ knowledge and skills, specialized local ecosystem, adapted infrastructure, institutional support through cluster policies, etc.), but this may also concern other fields, such as community funding, the image of the registered designation of origin or a captive market to release the product.
What is reductive in classical explanations is the approach exclusively through
knowledge. The entrepreneur’s creative dimension is not limited to cognitive aspects in the strict sense of the term. Innovation is never just a matter of new knowledge (unlike scientific discovery). It implies a desire to change the world and requires particular
qualities involving risk-taking (for unforeseeable risks) and the pursuit of a dream that is both individual and collective. This does not stop the entrepreneur from hoping to earn money along the way, but without the dimension of a dream and imagination, the
enterprise is not possible. In addition to some knowledge elements, the entrepreneur has a vision. Moreover, his or her motivation is often linked to a desire to play a certain role:
vis-à-vis a community or in relation to general stakes (ethical, esthetic, political, etc.).
Incidentally, in a Weberian interpretation, earning money is also the choice of a particular role in society and the manifestation of adherence to a collective ethic – in a historic
analysis by Max Weber, Protestant ethics with various Lutheran or Calvinist inspirations.