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The impact of culture on national prevalence rates of social and commercial entrepreneurship

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Abstract

This cross-cultural study empirically investigates the cultural determinants of macro-level social and commercial entrepreneurship from a new institutional theory perspective. This study investigates if cultural shifts in cultural values, operationalized through the World Values Survey (WVS), impact the prevalence rates of social and commercial entrepreneurship at the national level. Social and commercial entrepreneurship rates are drawn from the 2009 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) and aggregated for 53 countries in this cross-sectional analysis using multivariate regression. Findings indicate that traditional societal values positively impact commercial entrepreneurship prevalence rates, but negatively impact social entrepreneurship rates. Furthermore, self-expression societal values positively impact social entrepreneurship prevalence rates.

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Notes

  1. This study follows Hofstede (2001), Inglehart (1997), and Schwartz (2006) and infers that cultural value orientations characterize a society by averaging the value priorities of individuals in matched samples from each society.

  2. Inglehart (1997) derived these two dimensions orthogonally from a factor analysis of nation-level correlations among numerous attitudes and beliefs (Schwartz 2006) .

  3. These are often called “higher-order needs” in Maslow’s work (Maslow and Herzeberg 1954). Maslow’s hierarchy of needs makes a basic distinction between the “material” needs of sustenance and physiological security, and the non-material (or psychological) needs such as esteem, self-expression and aesthetic satisfaction

  4. Detailed descriptions of the methods and sampling frame used to generate the GEM database are reported in Reynolds et al. (2005).

  5. www.worldvaluessurvey.org

  6. I ran analysis excluding cases with overlap, and including cases with overlap. There were no significant differences in the mean rates of venturing for social and commercial entrepreneurship at the country level. Since there are no significant differences in the rates, the cases that overlapped with commercial and social simultaneously were kept in the analysis.

  7. To calculate the prevalence rates for social and commercial entrepreneurship the total sample of individual respondents is weighted according to census adult labor force population (18-64) data.

  8. The waves for WVS were completed during the following years: 1981-1984; 1990-1994; 1995-1998; 1999-2004; 2005-2009; 2010-2014.

  9. When interpreting the impact of authority and well being, it should be noted that survival and traditional value are negative scores, and self-expression and secular-rational values are positive value scores. Therefore, a negative score in the coefficient for Authority in the TEA model is actually a positive effect.

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Acknowledgments

A prior version of this work was presented at the 2015 Southern Management Association in St. Petersburg, FL, and I would like to thank participants in that session that provided insightful and developmental feedback that helped improve the quality of this manuscript. Also, I would like to thank Paul D. Reynolds for comments on earlier versions of this paper. Finally, I would also like to thank editor Salvador Rodig and the two highly qualified reviewers, who provided constructive and insightful feedback during the review process.ss

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Hechavarría, D.M. The impact of culture on national prevalence rates of social and commercial entrepreneurship. Int Entrep Manag J 12, 1025–1052 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11365-015-0376-1

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