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Entrepreneurial identity and agency: The identity work and discursively constructed agency of entrepreneurs in Helsinki
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School of Business |
Master's thesis
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en
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104
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Entrepreneurship and Startup-culture has seen significant growth both within Aalto University and Finnish society as a whole. Manifestations of this can be seen in the emergence of Startup growth accelerators, entrepreneurship societies, and Startup events such as SLUSH. Consequently, the meanings and practices of startup entrepreneurship have increasing cultural significance in relation to consumer society.
This study examines the identification and identity work of entrepreneurs within the Aalto entrepreneurial ecosystem through the ways that they talk about themselves as entrepreneurs and engage in discursive identity work. Through this discourse, this study aims to investigate how entrepreneurs establish themselves as having and acting with agency in an environment that is both infused with expectations of enormous growth and loaded with pitfalls and structural constraints.
A constructionist ontological perspective is adopted in order to investigate how individuals themselves construct their reality and identity through discourse. This perspective is by nature open to subjectivities, and care is taken to present informants’ views with minimal and managed author bias. Long interviews were conducted with twelve informants in an unstructured fashion with a list of themes and prompts in order to ensure that findings represented informants’ own thoughts.
Informants’ identity talk regarding their entrepreneurial identification reflect a division between informants who construct themselves as entrepreneurial through achieving measurable success in KPIs, triumphing over obstacles, and developing themselves as entrepreneurs, as well as informants who construct themselves as entrepreneurial through an engagement in collective problem-solving, creating social impact, and selffulfillment. This division of strategies – though with some overlap – reflects how informants seek to construct themselves as entrepreneurs either through a capacity for individual agency or through a communion and interaction with other entrepreneurs.
The environment in which many entrepreneurs operate is laden with dangers of personal and financial failure and constraints, and in attempting to discursively construct themselves as agentic – a virtual prerequisite in entrepreneurship – many entrepreneurs encounter a tension between their reality and entrepreneurial discourse. The themes of agency and communion emerge as methods for informants to be entrepreneurial and agentic, and in discursively constructing themselves as having agency also achieve a sense of personal and entrepreneurial agency. The increasing influence of entrepreneurial thought in postmodern society highlights the significance of understanding how entrepreneurial discourse necessitates the appearance and sense of agency in spite of any constraining realities.