Page 117 - 1-Entrepreneurship and Local Economic Development by Norman Walzer (z-lib.org)

106 Thomas S. Lyons, Gregg A. Lichtenstein, and Nailya Kutzhanova

have failed to produce any consistent evidence as to the existence of unique
entrepreneurial characteristics that differentiate entrepreneurs from the gen-
eral population.
Another critical weakness of personality research is that an entrepreneur
is portrayed as a person with inherited talents that can be easily expressed
within an entrepreneurial venture. The dynamics of entrepreneurial
processes and the unevenness of entrepreneurs’ career paths are not ac-
counted for in the personality perspective frame.
The inability of the personality perspective on entrepreneurship to pro-
duce a consistent profile of an entrepreneur is not the only shortcoming of
this perspective. Perhaps an even more important consideration involves
the policy decisions that follow from this personality perspective. The as-
sumption that entrepreneurs are born makes attempts to encourage and de-
velop entrepreneurs virtually meaningless. This has manifested itself in a
variety of ineffective policies for fostering entrepreneurship that range from
“hands off,” free market approaches to government and nonprofit inter-
ventions that assume entrepreneurs know where to find the help offered
when they need it. Conversations with a wide variety of entrepreneurs have
revealed that one of their biggest challenges is knowing where to go for rel-
evant help when they need it, which suggests that entrepreneurs are not
merely “naturals” who always “figure it out” on their own.
The personality perspective on entrepreneurship offers a very stagnant
approach to entrepreneurship. Business performance is viewed as a func-
tion of some set of innate psychological characteristics. Yet, why do some
entrepreneurs improve over the course of their lives and their entrepre-
neurial experience? The whole system of social environments, with family
history, social background, networks, and different experiences throughout
a lifetime that seem important to an entrepreneur, is not included in the
personality perspective on entrepreneurship. These relevant factors are sim-
ply ignored.
The personality perspective has also fallen short in accounting for the dif-
ferent stages of business development that actually translate into the diverse
roles entrepreneurs play in their businesses (Cope 2005). It has failed not
only because it was not able to find consistent characteristics that would de-
scribe an entrepreneur, but also because of its inability to incorporate other
important factors into the analysis, to explain the dynamic nature of entre-
preneurship, and to step beyond personal characteristics as explanatory
variables.
At its essence, this argument is yet another manifestation of the endless
debate that pits nature vs. nurture. Are entrepreneurs born or are they
made? Some champions of the “entrepreneurs are born that way” para-
digm, in an effort to perpetuate their beliefs under intensifying scrutiny,
have sought to couch their argument in an acknowledgment of the role of