A comparison of indigenous and non-indigenous enterprise in the Canadian sub-Arctic

Abstract

Entrepreneurship has conventionally been thought of as a function of opportunity. The problem with such an ethnocentric approach, however, is that it assumes a uniform response to opportunity across cultures. In contrast, this article makes use of ethnographic means in a cross-cultural setting to illustrate that aboriginal and non-aboriginal persons in Churchill expressed fundamentally different concepts of self-employment. The study took place in the Canadian sub-Arctic town of Churchill, in Northern Manitoba, over a period of two years. Rather than base himself on a random sample, the researcher immersed himself in the field and contacted each entrepreneur in town. Findings suggest that the causal variable behind enterprise is not an opportunity, but rather one's cultural perception of opportunity.