Abstract
This paper draws on practice theory to argue that the practiced culture of a society and gender interact to create cultured capacities for social entrepreneurship among entrepreneurs. We combine data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) with the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) and World Bank (WB) to identify what cultural practices are most relevant for female entrepreneurs’ practice of social entrepreneurship across 33 countries. Our findings suggest that female entrepreneurs are more likely to engage in social entrepreneurship when cultural practices of power distance, humane orientation, and in-group collectivism are low, and cultural practices of future orientation and uncertainty avoidance are high, when compared to male entrepreneurs.
Highlights
How does culture enable or constrain social entrepreneurial activity? What, if any, is the role of gender in linking culture and social entrepreneurial activity among entrepreneurs? This study applies practice theory to empirically examine how these factors affect entrepreneurs’ cultured capacity towards social entrepreneurship cross-culturally
We contend that culture and gender are generative schemes that entrepreneurs invoke as tools to inform their actions, which creates a cultured capacity towards social entrepreneurial activity (Swidler 2013)
Our findings suggest that the relationship between an entrepreneur’s gender and the practice of social entrepreneurship varies across a society’s cultural practices, such that female entrepreneurs are more likely to practice social entrepreneurship in societies that are characterized by low power distance, humane orientation, and in-group collectivism, and high future orientation and uncertainty avoidance
Summary
How does culture enable or constrain social entrepreneurial activity? What, if any, is the role of gender in linking culture and social entrepreneurial activity among entrepreneurs? This study applies practice theory to empirically examine how these factors affect entrepreneurs’ cultured capacity towards social entrepreneurship cross-culturally. Practice theory is concerned with the meaningful performance of behavior (Bourdieu 1990) It views culture as a “dynamically stable process of collectively made, reproduced, and unevenly shared knowledge structures that are informational and meaningful, internally embodied, and externally represented and that provide predictability, coordination equilibria, continuity, and meaning in human actions and interactions” We contend that culture and gender are generative schemes that entrepreneurs invoke as tools to inform their actions, which creates a cultured capacity towards social entrepreneurial activity (Swidler 2013). Recent work by Stephan et al (2015) finds that socially supportive cultural practices are more conducive to social entrepreneurship than performance-based cultural practices
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