The purpose of this article is to question the foundations and structure of entrepreneurs' social representation in the French press. Social representations are the result of a perceptive and cognitive construction of reality, which transforms social objects (people, contexts, situations) into symbolic categories (values, beliefs, ideologies), therefore providing a collective significant system for the regulation of cognitions and actions (Ljunggren and Alsos, 2001).Within the consensual reality through which the social world is created and experienced, the press can be emphasized as an entrepreneurial `Greek chorus' (Kets deVries, 2000) playing a key role in the diffusion and transformation of entrepreneurial culture at the local and national levels.We conducted a discourse analysis of 962 articles, from 2001 to 2005, in order to study the press's potential impact on entrepreneurial desirability and feasibility beliefs.We identified three main categories of discourses — the legitimacy discourse, the normativity discourse, and the accessibility discourse, which may impact readers' desirability and feasibility beliefs. This is the first attempt to assess the role of the public discourse in fuelling entrepreneurial intentions in the French context.

This experimental study tests the hypothesis that symbolic role models' impact on entrepreneurial self-efficacy and behavioural intention varies according to whether models appeal to the observers' "ideal self" or "ought self". We measure the effects of exposure to role models narratives appealing to the desire of either self-achievement or self-commitment as motivators to engage in an entrepreneurial project while still in the university and to start a business after graduation. 44 French undergraduate students enrolled in an entrepreneurial curriculum participated to this research during the Fall 2006.

Résumé Les publicités pour produits cosmétiques amincissants mettent en scène des femmes mannequins très attractives, mais ce dispositif persuasif conduisant les femmes destinataires à une comparaison ascendante n’est pas toujours le plus adéquat pour susciter une intention comportementale d’achat favorable, car il peut avoir des coûts psychologiques importants dans certaines situations. En effet, l’impact des stratégies iconiques de comparaison sociale (ascendante, latérale, descendante) sur l’intention comportementale d’achat passe d’abord par le prisme des croyances en « l’efficacité objective » (attentes de résultats positifs) et en « l’efficacité personnelle » (sentiment d’auto-efficacité) des femmes destinataires. Cet impact dépend du degré d’implication par rapport au problèmes de poids (fort vs faible) et il est modulé par le cadrage argumentatif (positif vs négatif) de l’accroche publicitaire.

No abstract

No abstract