Social identity theory and entrepreneurship
Social Identity Theory originated from the experiments of Henry Tajfel and John Turner (1979), which showed that the slightest priming of group membership creates prejudice.
“Blue eyes, a preference for the paintings of Wasily Kandinsky over those of Paul Klee... were sufficient to produce a preference for fellow group members and to elicit discrimination against outsiders” (Huddy, 2001:132).
The Core Concept
Social identity theory explains why human personalities and behaviors seem to be context-specific. A given individual may act differently depending on which groups they perceive themselves to belong to.
The theory suggests that personal identity plus environmental conditions shape social identity, which in turn leads to the categorization of others into in-groups and out-groups.
Application to Entrepreneurship
Obschonka et al. (2012) argue that individual beliefs and attitudes are unlikely to be the only drivers of entrepreneurship. Rather, they use social identity theory to suggest that individuals take on the norms of the groups they join.
For example, if a scientist joins a faculty department with a strong culture of commercialization, they are more likely to consider entrepreneurship as a career route. This stands in contrast to many psychological theories of entrepreneurship that look only to individual attitudes to predict intentions.
The Interaction with Locus of Control
The study by Obschonka et al. (2012) of hundreds of German scientists found two distinct paths to entrepreneurship:
- High Social Identification: Individuals who strongly identified with their peer groups were more likely to become entrepreneurs if their peer group had entrepreneurial norms.
- Low Social Identification: Individuals who did not identify with their peers were more likely to engage in entrepreneurship only if they had a high internal locus of control.
They explain that a higher level of social identification appears to be associated with lower internal locus of control, causing individuals to rely on group norms as
