Fearful pathways to social entrepreneurship intention: A fuzzy-set qualitative content analysis

Abstract

The context of social entrepreneurship, the constantly evolving challenges that it seeks to resolve, and the accompanying high levels of uncertainty creates a useful opportunity context for us to study the dynamics of fear of failure. Fear of failure has been championed as an ideal construct for developing understanding of entrepreneurial motivation as it impacts on one's level of entrepreneurial intention. Most research has taken fear of failure to be absolute, you either fear failing in entrepreneurship as a whole or you do not. Furthermore, research has largely focused on fear of failure's debilitative effects which can limit our understanding of a rich and complex construct. In this paper we embrace fear of failure's complexity via drawing on contemporary work on both it's situated nature and how it interacts with the entrepreneur-opportunity nexus. We use Fuzzy-set Comparative Qualitative Analysis (fsQCA) on a sample of 173 entrepreneurship undergraduate students in Spain. Our findings uncover the equifinal pathways that can lead to a social entrepreneurship intention.