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Rethinking entrepreneurship: Developing a psychosocial framework
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In this paper I use the psychological literature on grief to explore the emotion oi business failure, suggesting that the loss of a business from failure can cause the self-employed to feel grief—a negative emotional response interfering with the ability to leam from the events surrounding that loss. I discuss how a dual process of grief recovery maximizes the leaming from business failure.
Migrations, with all the incidental collision, conflicts, and fusions of peoples and of cultures which they occasion, have been accounted among the decisive forces in history. Every advance in culture, it has been said, commences with a new period of migration and movement of populations. Present tendencies indicate that while the mobility of individuals has increased, the migration of people has relatively decreased. The consequences, however, of migration and mobility seem, on the whole, to be the same. In both cases the "cake of custom" is broken and the individual is freed for new enterprises and for new associations. One of the consequences of migration is to create a situation in which the same individual-who may or may not be a mixed blood-finds himself striving to live in two diverse cultural groups. The effect is to produce an unstable character-a personality type with characteristic forms of behavior. This is the "marginal man." It is in the mind of the marginal man that the conflicting cultures meet and fuse. It is, therefore, in the mind of the marginal man that the process of civilization is visibly going on, and it is in the mind of the marginal man that the process of civilization may best be studied.
The top managements of 75 Indian corporate and other organizations were surveyed for their policy orientation. A composite orientation, labelled pioneering innovative (PI), was identified through a hierarchical factor analysis. PI measured policy commitment to pioneering novel, relatively sophisticated products (or services) and technologies, and to innovation and experimentation, risk-taking, flexibility, and creativity. PI seemed to have adequate validity and reliability. Over time, however, there seemed to be a stronger tendency for change from low PI scores to high PI scores rather than vice versa. An analysis of PI scores by ownership (private versus governmental), activity (manufacturing versus service), industry, technology (custom, batch/mass, and process), and size indicated that PI was largely independent of these factors, and seemed, therefore, to be a relatively open strategic choice for managements in developing countries. The significant correlation between PI, the growth rate and some other performance indicators suggests that high values of PI may have instrumental value for poor societies attempting to achieve rapid growth and modernization.