Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Cultural Meaning of Entrepreneurship

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The Cultural Meaning of EntrepreneurshipAbstract: This project will adopt a comparative lens to uncover and contrast what it means to be an entrepreneur in China and the U.S., the two largest economies in the world at different economic development stages with drastically different cultural orientations to entrepreneurship, and to investigate how this meaning has evolved over time. Situated in economic sociology and cultural sociology, this dissertation will contribute to the literature of entrepreneurship by directing attention to the under-studied role that culture plays. It will also enhance understanding of the contemporary meaning of work as well as the globalization of capitalism. There are few issues that are more crucial than understanding the meaning of work, given that we spend most of our awake time pursuing one type of work or another. Understanding the fundamental question of what work means to people will inform public discourses on job motivation, satisfaction, and work-life balance. Furthermore, this study will have practical implications for public policies aiming to encourage innovation and economic development. Led by the enormous success of Silicon Valley, entrepreneurial fervor in the 1980's has spread across countries and cultures. Chief among them is the recent phenomenal rise of entrepreneurship in China. In 2015 alone, venture capitalists poured a record $37 billion into Chinese startups, making China second in the global league (Ernst and Young 2016). Such rapidity of the rise of entrepreneurship is puzzling. Unlike Protestant ethics, for more than a millennium, the Chinese traditional culture valued intellectual pursuits rather than market opportunistic behaviors. Business people were perceived as low status, and capitalists were even punished under Mao. It was only after Deng's open and reform policy in the late 70's that China gradually relaxed its constraint on private businesses, and it was not until 2000 that China emerged as a global hotbed for entrepreneurship. Given this traditionally unfavorable if not outright hostile environment, how did entrepreneurship grow to today's vibrancy? Particularly, how did the cultural environment change, and how do entrepreneurs in China make sense of their identity and their role in the society? How are these understandings different from or similar to those in the U.S.? Using interviews and participant observations, this project seeks to uncover the current cultural meaning of entrepreneurship. This dissertation will also take advantage of cutting-edge machine learning techniques and topic modeling to analyze large media text corpora in order to examine how the meaning of entrepreneurship has evolved over time.