Varieties of Entrepreneurship on Europe’s Periphery: Illiberal Hungary in Historical Context

Abstract

This paper suggests that a combination of varieties of capitalism (VoC) and entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE) approaches is not only capable of revealing that there is a broader variety of entrepreneurship than currently offered in the literature but also that certain types of entrepreneurship are transnationally interdependent. Historically embedding the case of illiberal Hungary, the paper discusses several models of entrepreneurship via the scholarship of Iván Szelényi, a neoclassical comparative sociologist of social, political and economic transformations in the former Soviet bloc. Szelényi’s contributions span from studying Socialist entrepreneurship of the 1970s and 1980s to investigating transformations in two post-Socialist contexts, first, the post-1990 area when neoliberal transnational entrepreneurship coexisted with domestic neo-patrimonial entrepreneurship, and second, the post-2010 epoch when illiberal transnational entrepreneurship is intertwined with domestic neo-prebendal entrepreneurship. The paper offers conclusions for entrepreneurship research in two respects: first, it underscores the relevance of the transnational dimension, second it puts emphasis on the importance of a more nuanced understanding of agency in the ream of political coordination exercised by political classes in structuring opportunities and constraints both for domestic as well as for transnational entrepreneurship.