Exploring the Behaviours of Small Business Entrepreneurs in the Gastro-Dining Industry: Risks, Relationships and Gourmet Chefs in Action

Abstract

A growing number of chefs are setting up their own businesses to offer a gastro-dining experience in places without an extensive gastro-dining tradition. In this context, our purpose is to explore the behaviours of entrepreneurs of small businesses in the newly developing Turkish gastro-dining market. We adopted a qualitative research design to gain insight into the perceptions of ten entrepreneurs. Our findings demonstrate that the participants’ entrepreneurial behaviour can be explained through effectuation logic. This manifests itself through control over consumption, learning and improvising within the flow of life as well as the exchange of informal and positive relationships with stakeholders. Furthermore, we discovered that those entrepreneurs with gastronomy training also exhibited entrepreneurial behaviour in terms of aiming to become a brand, with a causation logic along with effectuation.