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The influence of national culture on entrepreneurial processes: peliminary evidence from Turkey and the United Kingdom

Bulakeri, K. (2013) The influence of national culture on entrepreneurial processes: peliminary evidence from Turkey and the United Kingdom.

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Abstract:“In the game of entrepreneurship, the process is more important than the goal. When you start building a business, you begin a journey, a process. This process has a beginning and an ending and between the beginning and end lays a lot of challenges. You will win only if you remain faithful to the process.” – Rich Dad. As can be understood from the title, this thesis, under the umbrella of the EPICC project, is a research study focusing on the understanding of the influence of national culture on entrepreneurial processes. There is no need to say that national culture of each country has an influence on almost all aspects of life starting from people’s mentality, mindsets and behaviors. As the world turns into a global village, national cultures are paid more and more attention in business arenas. Entrepreneurial processes, with a growing attention within the entrepreneurship research, deal with entrepreneurs’ decision making mechanisms, reasoning and logics throughout the course of turning a business idea into a new venture creation. With Sarasvathy’s fresh theory of effectuation as opposed to already existing causation theories, a new trend has been established in the field of entrepreneurial processes. In contrast to conventional methods such as entrepreneurship education, business plan developments, business courses, market research etc. the scholars of this new stream assert that entrepreneurs start off with three basic questions: “Who am I? What I know? Whom I know?”. which serves as the fundamentals of an effectual thinking. Despite an aggregated attempt to investigate culture’s impact on entrepreneurship in the course of recent decades, research on the influence of culture directly on entrepreneurial processes is lacking. This theoretical gap between two very important concepts is the set-off point for this project. In this study, 22 student entrepreneurs from both Turkey and the UK are researched. With the think-aloud methods, verbal protocols are collected and coded based on Sarasvathy’s schema. Subsequently, the hypotheses are constructed upon Hofstede’s national culture dimensions and a possible link is sought after between these dimensions and the components of entrepreneurial processes. Results however show, with single exception, no significant difference between two sample groups with respect to the tested elements; therefore there is insufficient evidence to conclude a positive correlation between culture and entrepreneurial processes. Yet, a number of discussion points are found and there is a lot of room for improvement in further research. Key Words: National Culture, Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, Entrepreneurial
Item Type:Essay (Master)
Faculty:BMS: Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences
Subject:85 business administration, organizational science
Programme:Business Administration MSc (60644)
Link to this item:https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/63417
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