Multipartite attitudes to enterprise: A comparative study of young people and place

Abstract

The article examines young people’s attitudes towards enterprise, comparing prosperous and deprived neighbourhoods and two UK cities. Corpus linguistics analysis identified multi-layered attitudes and variations in how place prosperity and city affect attitudes. High interest in enterprise was associated with weaker place attachment and reduced social embeddedness. Young adults from prosperous neighbourhoods delegitimised other’s enterprises; the ‘deprived’ sub-corpus included more fluid notions of enterprise legitimacy. Liverpool accounts contained stronger discursive threads around self-determination; Bradford accounts included greater problematising of entrepreneurship versus employment. An original Multipartite Model of Attitudes to Enterprise is presented consisting of four layers: attitudes to enterprise generally, attitudes legitimising particular forms of enterprise, attitudes to enterprise related to place and attitudes to enterprise related to self. The conclusion explains why policies and research need to be fine-grained and avoid uni-dimensional conceptualisations of attitudes to enterprise, or deterministic arguments relating entrepreneurship to specific types of places or backgrounds.

Entrepreneurial Experiences of Becoming an Employer: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis

“…This contributes and further extends the work of Parkinson et al, (2020) andParkinson et al, (2017) who find that social and economic deprivation shape a community's relationship with enterprise. Parkinson et al (2017) apply a discursive psychological approach to examine how a community depicts itself as a context for enterprise (or not).…”

“…How to investigate or begin to understand the role and impact of context remains under consideration (Harrison et al, 2020). Most research implicitly assumes a one-way relationship between entrepreneurship and the respective context (Parkinson et al, 2020). Further, notes one of the challenges in theorising context is that they can be enabling and restraining at the same time, thus indicating a bright and a dark side of context.…”

“…In doing so this research contributes to literatures that theorise context as more than the when, the where or the what of entrepreneurship. These literatures examine the way context shapes how individuals engage with entrepreneurship (Parkinson et al, 2020;. This perspective draws upon the Latin origins of the word context (con: together; texere: to weave)…”

“…to indicate the relevance of understanding the construct as a fluid interplay, or weaving together, of circumstances and practices (Parkinson et al, 2020;Gaddefors & Anderson, 2019).…”

“…Parkinson et al (2017) apply a discursive psychological approach to examine how a community depicts itself as a context for enterprise (or not). The authors found that if we -as researchers -do not look beyond entrepreneurs and conventional 'contexts', we will not be able to see how enterprise becomes disabled as well as enabled (Parkinson et al, 2020).…”