Engagement in entrepreneurship in emerging economies: Interactive effects of individual-level factors and institutional conditions

Abstract

This paper examines individuals' engagement in entrepreneurship in emerging economies.We conceive of such engagement as encompassing opportunity discovery, evaluation, and exploitation. We investigate the influence of individuals' household income and level of education on their engagement in entrepreneurship, as well as the interaction effects between these individual-level factors and country-level regulatory, cognitive, and normative institutions.We test our hypotheses on a multi-source dataset from 22 emerging economies using a multilevel analysis technique. Our results indicate that the direct effect of individuals' household income on their engagement in entrepreneurship is persistent, regardless of institutional conditions; but the influence of education level varies contingent upon various institutional conditions.

Untapped Riches of Meso-Level Applications in Multilevel Entrepreneurship Mechanisms

“…In these types of analyses, formal institutions have been most thoroughly studied, since these are arguably the most uniformly explicated in the literature (North, 1990;Williamson, 2000) and also easier to identify and measure across contexts and over time (Andersson & Henrekson, 2014). Generally speaking, institutions are depicted as having relatively stable macro-level attributes which determine the legal, normative, and cognitive scopes of action for actors in society (e.g., Acemoglu et al, 2012;Lim et al, 2015;Scott, 2013).…”

Uncovering the backings to passion: why do small firm owners/managers engage in entrepreneurship?

“…The highest value indicates the individual was highly passionate. Lim et al (2016) and Autio and Acs (2010) focus on financial capital (household income) and human capital (level of education) as two key individual resources. We also employed household income and level of education to measure financial resource and human resource respectively.…”

“…Entrepreneurial engagement involves the discovery, evaluation, and exploitation of opportunities by individuals (Sarason et al 2006;Shane and Venkataraman 2000;Lim et al 2016). A distinction is made between opportunity recognition and opportunity exploitation stages and distinguishing between the stages continues even after a business is established .…”

“…Entrepreneurial engagement involves the discovery, evaluation, and exploitation of opportunities by individuals (Sarason et al 2006;Shane and Venkataraman 2000;Lim et al 2016). Entrepreneurship provides small businesses with the ability to discover new business opportunities and the discovery of new opportunities enhances their differentiation from other firms (Omisakin et al 2016), but some of the owners/managers of established firms are not entrepreneurs.…”

The Young Engineers’ Entrepreneurial Triggering

“…Boulton and Turner [13] and Mellor et al [14] support the hypothesis that entrepreneurship is by no means innate but acquired. The importance of an entrepreneurial training leads the individual to the entrepreneurial venture [15,16]. Léger-Jarniou [17] argues that engineers may change their careers in one way or another.…”