Shirah Eden Foy
Entrepreneurship is a highly contextualized process. Yet, the vast majority of entrepreneurship research has focused on Western contexts, yielding a skewed picture of global entrepreneurial behavior. Moreover, theories of mainstream psychology explaining the development of individual characteristics and worldviews - which have important implications for venture creation - have shown limited transferability to the eighty-five percent of the world's population that does not inhabit Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic societies. Much of this variation in social processes has yet to be explored in organization studies, meaning that our understanding of the vast firm creation activities taking place globally is sorely limited. Contributing to a more nuanced understanding of entrepreneurship, this thesis offers two contextualized empirical studies and a review of the main approaches to studying organizations, their founders and members, across sociocultural contexts. Study I, a qualitative study, develops and presents theory to explain how key venture decisions are shaped by the dynamics produced when entrepreneurs' identities interact with the surrounding social structure. Based on 50 in-depth interviews with Taiwanese entrepreneurs, we show that the (mis)alignment between an entrepreneur's identity structure and the perceived social structure of their environment produces tensions or reinforcement for the individual that frame their overarching attitude toward firm creation. These attitudes fundamentally shape the founder's strategic orientation, offer, production, and distribution. We extend theorizing on founder identity and discuss the limitations of theorizing based on a single sociocultural context or a single period in history. Study II reviews the psychological literature's various approaches to studying culture, presenting four packaged approaches that management scholars may adopt in their studies of organizational phenomena. While compelling evidence of wide variation in psychological orientations across cultures calls for deeper and broader studies of organizations both within and across cultural settings, the diversity of conceptualizations of culture and directives for its study create considerable barriers to entry for management scholars aiming to do rigorous work. In this study, I discuss key elements of the various approaches available, presenting the merits and limitations of each, and providing examples of how management scholars may employ each packaged approach to extend theories of organization. Study III, a qualitative study, examines venturing in the context of grand societal challenges--a context characterized by high complexity, requiring high impact, highly scalable solutions that generally engage multiple institutional actors. In an in-depth, longitudinal study of Swiss celebrity founder Bertrand Piccard and the Solar Impulse Foundation, we discover latent hybridity at play as the organization accelerates its sustainable mission with the brand of its celebrity founder--a brand which requires maintaining over time in order to provide continued support to the organization. We refine the concept of latent hybridity and develop a model of organizational awakening and response to latent hybridity, extending the literature on hybrid organizing as well as entrepreneurship in the context of grand challenges.
EPFL2020
