USASBE 2011

Entrepreneurial Narrative

USASBEPlenary Session

8:30 to 9:45 AM14 January 2011

William B. GartnerArthur M. Spiro Professor of Entrepreneurial Leadership

College of Business and Behavioral Science345 Sirrine Hall

Clemson UniversityClemson, SC 29634-1345

[email protected]

Let’s Start With A Story

“This is a test of imagination, one form of intelligence. I am going to show you some pictures, one at a time; and your task will be to make up as dramatic a story as you can for each. Tell what has led up to the event shown in the picture, describe what is happening at the moment, what the characters are feeling and thinking; and then give the outcome. Speak your thoughts as they come to your mind. Do you understand? Since you have fifty minutes for ten pictures, you can devote about five minutes to each story. Here is the first picture.” (Murray, 1943, p. 3)

What is a Narrative?

A story…

What is a Narrative?

“Story construction is a process of creating reality in which self/story teller is clearly part of the story. Narratives are relational realities, socially constructed, not individual subjective realities. Narratives are situated—they are con-textualized in relation to multiple local–cultural–historical acts/text. Inquiry may articulate multiple narrative and relations. Change-work works with multiple realities and power relations, for example, to facilitate ways of relating that are open to possibilities.”

Hosking and Hjorth (2004: 265)

The Narrative Approach

“The imaginative application of the narrative mode leads instead to good stories, gripping drama, believable (thought not necessarily “true”) historical accounts. It deals in human or human-like intention and action and the vicissitudes and consequences that mark their course. It strives to put its timeless miracles into the particulars of experience, and to locate the experience in time and place. Joyce thought of the particularities of the story as epiphanies of the ordinary. The paradigmatic mode, by contrast, seeks to transcend the particular by higher and higher reaching for abstraction, and in the end disclaims in principle any explanatory value at all where the particular is concerned.” (Bruner, 1986: 13)

The Narrative Approach

“You have to learn to think with stories.” (Cruickshank,1994)… To think about a story is to reduce it to content and then analyze the content. Thinking with stories takes the story as already complete; there is no going beyond it. To think with a story is to experience it affecting one’s own life and to find in that effect a certain truth of one’s life.” (Frank, 1995: 23)

Why Entrepreneurial Narrative?

A story about entrepreneurs telling their stories and the students who listen to them.

My Recent Journey

Gartner, W. B. (2007). Entrepreneurial narrative and a science of the imagination. Journal of Business Venturing. 22 (5): 613-627.

Gartner, W. B. (2010). A new path to the waterfall: A narrative on the use of entrepreneurial narrative. International Journal of Small Business. 28 (1): 6-19.

Aside: PSED

Reynolds, P. D. & Curtin, R. T. 2009. Business creation in the United States: Entry, startup activities, and the launch of new ventures. In The Small Business Economy. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, pp. 65-240.

Ruef, M. 2010. The Entrepreneurial Group. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

PSED Bibliography: http://www.psed.isr.umich.edu/psed/documentation

Learning from “The Toy Story”

Ellen O’Connor (2007) “Reader beware…”

Stories have an author, and, authors have agendas. What is Terry’s agenda?

Denise Fletcher (2007) “The narrative world…”

Stories influence and are influenced by readers. How do we take away what we take away from stories?

Learning from the “Toy Story”

Helene Ahl (2007) “Sex business…”

Feminist studies focus on the “unvoiced.” Who is not “named” in the story, and why?

Ted Baker (2007) “Resources in play…”

Bricolage told from other points of view. Why might others be involved and what are their stories?

Learning from the “Toy Story”

Hjorth (2007) “Lessons from Iago…”

The entrepreneurial moment. What do entrepreneurs say about it and and how do others engage in it?

Steyaert (2007) “Of course…”

The context of a story matters. What are the cultural and master-narratives at play?

ENTER: Table of Contents

Sean Williams – A rhetorical theory of transformation in entrepreneurial narrative: The case of The Republic of Tea

Alice de Koning and Sarah Drakapoulou Dodd – Tea and understanding

Benyamin B. Lichtenstein and Beth Kurjanowicz - Tangibility, momentum, and the emergence of The Republic of Tea

ENTER: Table of Contents

Kevin Hindle - Skillful dreaming: testing a general model of entrepreneurial process with a specific narrative of venture creation

Paul Selden and Denise Fletcher – ‘Narrative dreamworlds’ and ‘small stories:’ ‘Narrativeness’ and the practical story of entrepreneurial becoming in The Republic of Tea

Steffen Korsgaard and Helle Neegaard – Sites and Enactments

ENTER: Table of Contents

Karen Verduyn – Continuing to move entrepreneurship

Bruce T. Teague – A narrative analysis of idea initiation in The Republic of Tea

Helene Ahl and Barbara Czarniawska – Many words about tea…

http://www.clemson.edu/cedp/cudp/pubs/enter/index.html

Esau

What is our legacy worth to us?

How will we find out about what we are doing and thinking?

ACORN

www.clemson.edu/cedp/cudp/pubs/acorn

Back to Your Stories…

Re-ReadingThe Achieving Society

McClelland, David C. (1961). The Achieving Society. New

York: The Free Press.

McClelland, 1961: ix: It is important, therefore, to understand at the outset the simplicity of this book – what it can accomplish and what it cannot. What it does try to do is to isolate certain psychological factors and to demonstrate rigorously by quantitative scientific methods that these factors are generally important in economic development.

McClelland, 1961: 11: The modern economist has become even more insistent in his belief that the ultimate forces underlying economic development lie, strictly speaking, outside the economic sphere. As Meir and Baldwin put it, half humorously, “economic development is much too serious to be left to economists.” (1957, p. 119)

ApperceptionEducated as we already are, we never get an experience that remains

for us completely nondescript: it always reminds of something similar in quality, or of some context that might have surrounded it before, and which it now in some way suggests. This mental escort which the mind supplies is drawn, of course, from the mind's ready-made stock. We conceive the impression in some definite way. We dispose of it according to our acquired possibilities, be they few or many, in the way of 'ideas.' This way of taking in the object is the process of apperception. The conceptions which meet and assimilate it are called by Herbart the 'apperceiving mass.' The apperceived impression is engulfed in this, and the result is a new field of consciousness, of which one part (and often a very small part) comes from the outer world, and another part (sometimes by far the largest) comes from the previous contents of the mind. (James, 1925: 123)

Apperception is Providing Meaning to What is Perceived

“… based on the well recognized fact that when someone attempts to interpret a complex social situation he is apt to tell as much about himself as he is about the phenomenon on which his attention is focused. At such times, the person is off his guard, since he believes he is merely explaining objective occurrences. To one with “double hearing,” however, he is exposing certain inner forces and arrangements, wishes, fears, and traces of past experiences.” (Morgan & Murrary, 1935: 390)

The Apperception of “Need for Achievement”

McClelland, 1961: 40: It may be worth considering for a moment why fantasy as a type of behavior has many advantages over any other type of behavior for

sensitively reflecting…

The Apperception of “Need for Achievement”

McClelland, 1961: 70

Coding Children’s stories 23 + 40 = 63 countries, random sample of 21 stories each. All stories (“over 1,300 in all”) coded: n achievement, n affiliation, n power, and values.

Stories in Appendix 1.

Apperceptions in Your Stories

Looking for “Need for Achievement”

Prime test criteria:

1. Competition with a standard of excellence.• Winning, or doing as well as or better than others is

actually stated as a primary concern.• If not actually stated, then affective concern over

achievement (vis-à-vis other) is evident.• The competition may be with a self-imposed standard of

excellence, rather than with others.2. Involvement with a unique accomplishment3. Involvement in attaining a long-term goal.

Stories Matter!

McClelland, 1961: 104-105 “Psychologically speaking, what such findings seem to mean is that n achievement is not only more frequently present in stories from more rapidly developing countries but when it is present, it is more apt to be “means” oriented rather than goal oriented. The achievement sequence more often dwells on obstacles to success and specific means of overcoming them, rather than on the goal itself, the desire for it, and the emotions surrounding attaining or failing to attain it. The adaptive quality of such a concern with means is obvious: a people who think in terms of ways of overcoming obstacles would seem more likely to find ways of overcoming them in fact.

Stories Matter!

McClelland, 1961: 104-105 “At any rate that is precisely what happens: the “means” oriented stories come from countries which have managed to overcome the obstacles to economic achievement more successfully than other countries… These results serve to direct our attention as social scientists away from an exclusive concern with the external events in history to the “internal” psychological concerns that in the long run determine what happens in history.”

Stories Matter!

McClelland, 1961: 417 “One study suggests that the most effective way to increase n Achievement may be to try simply and directly to alter the nature of an individual’s fantasies.”

Stories Matter!

“The crucial test of a story might be the sort of person it shapes.”

(Hoffmaster, 1994)

Questions and Comments

References

Bruner, J., 1986. Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Cruickshank, J. 1994. Comments in a panel “Learning from our elder’s stories: Indigenous women and the narrative tradition.” University of Calgary, March 17.

Frank, A. W. 1995. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness and Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gartner, W. B. 2007. Entrepreneurial narrative and a science of the imagination. Journal of Business Venturing. 22 (5): 613-627.

Gartner, W. B. 2010. A new path to the waterfall: A narrative on the use of entrepreneurial narrative. International Journal of Small Business. 28 (1): 6-19.

Hoffmaster, B. 1994. The forms and limits of medical ethics. Social Science and Medicine. 39 (9): 1161.

References

Hosking, D., Hjorth, D., 2004. Relational constructionism and entrepreneurship: some key notes. In: Hjorth, D., Steyaert, C. (Eds.), Narrative and Discursive Approaches in Entrepreneurship. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, UK, pp. 255–268.

James, W. (1925). Talks to Teachers: On Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals. New York: Henry Holt and Company.

McClelland, David C. (1961). The Achieving Society. New York: The Free Press.

Murray, H. A. (1943). Thematic Apperception Test Manual. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Morgan, C. D. & Murray, H. A. (1935). A method for investigating fantasies: The thematic apperception test. Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry. 34: 289-306.

References

Reynolds, P. D. & Curtin, R. T. 2009. Business creation in the United States: Entry, startup activities, and the launch of new ventures. In The Small Business Economy. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, pp. 65-240.

Ruef, M. 2010. The Entrepreneurial Group. Princeton: Princeton University Press.