ABSTRACT
Entrepreneurship – both serial business creation and long-term business ownership (e.g., Schumpeter, 1934) – provides young people with a unique opportunity to engage in mutually beneficial relations with their communities. That is, successful entrepreneurship builds local economies while also promoting personal development and fulfillment (Clifton, 2011; Damon & Lerner, 2008; Hisrich, Peters, & Shephard, 2005). Entrepreneurship therefore represents an important conduit for promoting youth thriving. Like any developmental process, entrepreneurship does not exist preformed in the genome (Lerner, 2002, 2006). Promoting entrepreneurship requires an integration of individual strengths, contextual demands that can be met by the application of those strengths, structural supports and a socio-economic climate that promotes free enterprise, and personal agency for venture creation. Accordingly, scholars from across disciplines have dedicated substantial energy to understanding the structural conditions that foster free enterprise (e.g., see Xavier, Kelley, Kew, Herrington, & Vorderwülbecke, 2012 for a brief overview), and psychologists in particular have investigated the personal characteristics that encourage entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial success (e.g., Schmitt-Rodermund, 2004). Although young people’s development is substantially more plastic (malleable) than that of adults (Lerner, 1984), previous research has typically focused on understanding the qualities that mark entrepreneurship in adulthood (e.g., Duval-Couteil, Gotch, & Yi, 2014; Fairlie & Holleran, 2012). By not focusing on young people, researchers may assume that the qualities underlying adult entrepreneurship extend equally to youth. However, there is little empirical support for such a proposition. Very few studies have investigated the factors underlying the nature and promotion of entrepreneurship among young people. The study of youth entrepreneurship is, therefore, in its infancy (Damon & Lerner, 2008). This research deficit is troubling, especially given that young people show a strong interest in entrepreneurship that appears to wane by the time they reach adulthood. Nearly half of American youth plan to start their own businesses (Gallup & Operation HOPE, 2012), but only about 10 percent of American adults are actually engaged in entrepreneurial activities (Kelly et al., 2012). More research is therefore needed to understand the factors that promote the development of entrepreneurial
qualities in young people, rather than focusing on the qualities adult entrepreneurs already exhibit. As we have noted elsewhere (e.g., Geldhof, Malin, et al., 2014; Lerner & Damon, 2012), previous research on entrepreneurship has relied on static, trait-like approaches to entrepreneurship, and such approaches are a major obstacle to attaining a comprehensive understanding of entrepreneurship as a flexible phenomenon that can be promoted across the life span. Entrepreneurship is often reduced to a set of stable personality characteristics (e.g., Rauch & Frese, 2007a) or a specific gene (e.g., Nicolaou, Shane, Cherkas, Hunkin, & Spector, 2008). By extension, such perspectives that emphasize immutable characteristics also minimize the possibility of development. These assumptions therefore negate the idea that entrepreneurship can be cultivated by engaging youth in specific experiences. In response, researchers have called for a dynamic understanding of entrepreneurship and its development (e.g., the work of Schmitt-Rodermund and colleagues, e.g., 2004, 2007). These scholars have noted that such a paradigm shift is critical for taking the development of entrepreneurship seriously. Drawing on this emerging foundation, we propose that entrepreneurship cannot be defined by characteristics of individuals and contexts alone. Entrepreneurship instead emerges from the actions that fuse individuals and their ecologies into a bi-directionally interdependent system (Damon & Lerner, 2008; Lerner & Damon, 2012). Characteristics of the individual help promote entrepreneurial actions, and yet these actions are both contingent upon and driven by the resources and demands presented by the context. The Relational Developmental Systems metamodel (Overton, 2010, 2013, 2015) provides fertile ground for establishing a dynamic understanding of entrepreneurship, one that emphasizes person and context as fused components of a single system. From this perspective, researchers must investigate how the confluence of personal strengths and contextual resources promote entrepreneurship rather than simply understanding the personal strengths exhibited by entrepreneurs. Specifically, contextual factors, such as the presence of mentors and role models, coact with personal factors (e.g., purposes, goals, personal agency) in laying the foundation for successful entrepreneurship during youth and beyond. Although we have noted the relatively greater plasticity evinced by young people as compared to adults, researchers who adhere to a Relational Developmental Systems perspective acknowledge that developmental trajectories remain malleable at all ages (e.g., Lerner, 1984, 2015). A relational approach to the development of youth entrepreneurship must therefore simultaneously acknowledge the possibility for entrepreneurship to emerge at later ages. This possibility manifests perhaps most strongly by the concept of “second careers” and in the fact that entrepreneurship can develop well into adulthood (Freedman, 2007). Although the call for relational approaches to the development of entrepreneurship is echoed by scholars across several fields (e.g., Gartner, 1989; Kelley, Singer, & Herrington, 2012; Peneder, 2009; Ripsas, 1998; Obschonka, Silbereisen, & Schmitt-Rodermund, 2011; Schmitt-Rodermund, 2007; Schoon & Duckworth, 2012), little empirical research has been conducted using such approaches. In this chapter, we summarize the most relevant findings that have stemmed from research conducted using this perspective; space limitations prevent us from providing a comprehensive review of the relevant literature. As a consequence, we briefly discuss how entrepreneurship is manifested in adolescence and young adulthood. We then describe the personal characteristics that promote young people’s entrepreneurship; in particular, we highlight self-regulation skills as a critical strength that helps young entrepreneurs integrate their personal strengths with the resources afforded by their contexts. We then describe the presence of adult mentors as an exemplary contextual resource that promotes youth entrepreneurship. Finally, we discuss the implications of a Relational Developmental Systems approach
for the study of youth entrepreneurship and for improving youth development outcomes related to entrepreneurship.
