CONTEXTUALIZING ENTREPRENEURIAL INTENTIONS: ECONOMIC DYNAMISM AND CULTURE IN MULTILAYERED RELATIONSHIPS

We examine how economic dynamism, along with the cultural orientation of individualism vs. collectivism shape the multilayered relationships between perceptual variables—self efficacy, attitude, social capital and perceived opportunities—and entrepreneurial intentions (EI). For the first time, we introduce economic dynamism as a national context variable for EI. We also join a group of entrepreneurship scholars to apply a multilayered approach to account for the multiple interactions among individual and contextual variables. We test our hypotheses using country-level aggregates of GEM data. For comparison purposes, we consider four nations differentiated along the dimensions of economic dynamism and the cultural trait of individualism vs. collectivism, namely, China, Italy, Japan and the United States. The results show that self-efficacy predicts EI across all four nations; the interactive effects between perceived opportunities and attitude and between social capital and attitude are contingent upon national contexts in terms of economic dynamism and individualism vs. collectivism. Although economic development long has been a popular contextual variable in the study of EI, there remains a lack of empirical support. One reason is economic development assumes a stable state, when in fact changes in an economy may be more critical in impacting entrepreneurial intentions. In the current study, we replace economic development with that of economic dynamism. Future research needs to refine the construct and develop a measure of it.