Narrative Founder Identity: Weaving the Past Life Stories Together to Make Sense of Self

Abstract

It is argued that founders’ identities provide valuable insights in understanding differences across those founders’ behaviors and their enterprises. Until recently, however, entrepreneurship literature has been drawn only on two prominent identity theories – social identity theory (SIDT), role identity theory (IDT), and the combination of both. This study suggests that there is an additional stream of identity research that will be helpful in reconciling the discrepancies between the two prominent identity theories and in providing a more coherent sense of oneself. Narrative identity literature, based on social constructionist perspective, suggests that people construct their current identity by reflecting on their past life stories and narratively weaving them together so it can give answers to the question of ‘how I came to be.’ In other words, narrative identity construction provides people with coherent sense of self that runs through temporal horizon of one’s life. SIDT and IDT, respectively, has its advantage in understanding entrepreneurs’ identity based on their belongingness to certain social categories and their assumed roles. However, these two theories do not explain well about the changes over one’s life course. Narrative founder identity will make the field overcome this shortcoming by looking at entrepreneurs’ identity in terms of its temporal integration of discrete social and role identities in certain points in time of their life histories.