Going the whole nine yards: founder social identities and the nascent-active transition

Abstract

ABSTRACT What makes nascent entrepreneurs more or less likely to complete the founding process and to actually start their business? To address this fundamental question, we introduce founder social identity and economic prosperity as potential explanatory factors that are still insufficiently understood. Specifically, we theorize that having a Darwinian, Communitarian, or Missionary founder social identity affects the transition from nascent to active entrepreneurship in distinct ways. Furthermore, we expect economic prosperity to act as a relevant contingency factor. We test our hypotheses in a two-wave dataset of nascent entrepreneurs from the GUESSS project and conduct a supportive post-hoc analysis in a sample of nascent entrepreneurs from a longitudinal PSED-type study (SwissPEB). We find support for most of our expectations, namely that having a Communitarian or Missionary founder social identity makes the nascent-active transition more likely and that economic prosperity moderates the Darwinian- and Communitarian-related main effects.