Societal Influence on the Cognitive Aspects of Entrepreneurship

Introduction

Although entrepreneurship is mostly associated with the fields of administration, management and economy, in fact it is an interdisciplinary subject. Entrepreneurship and enterprise as being a broad subject and conceptual field was studied within the field of psychology, at least at the beginning, more than the fields of economy, administration and management. The studies of psychology over entrepreneurship have played an important role for a detailed consideration of the concept and in giving the concept the broader meaning that is used now. One of the first studies of psychology over entrepreneurship was conducted in the second half of twentieth century by McClelland (1961); Atkinson & Feather (1966). According to them, the motivation of individual and society is one of the most important factors that explain entrepreneurship and individual’s becoming an entrepreneur depends on the highest possibility of achievement (Korpysa n.d.). In other words, when the possibility of achievement gets higher, entrepreneurial propensity rate increases. Studies in the field of psychology have focused on the details of the factors that play a role in entrepreneurship’s achievement (Baron, 2000). These studies stated that entrepreneurial ability of individual is connected with societies’ perception of success and to what extent individuals are affected by this perception. However, even if it was stated that culture influences entrepreneurship, it was observed that individual differences have important effects on entrepreneurship despite cultural commonality (Baporikar, 2015). Psychology’s extensive interest for the subject matter of entrepreneurship at the beginning is closely associated with periodic interest to understand psychological dynamics of human behaviors. Determining methods and details of training programs to educate entrepreneur individuals has become very important for social development so multidimensional analysis of entrepreneurship has also become more important. Thus, entrepreneurship has not remained a research field of general psychology anymore. It has become the subject matter of subfields of psychology as organizational psychology started to study entrepreneurship (Frese, 2009). As a result, entrepreneurship research which has been carried out in different contexts, psychology tend to define ‘entrepreneurship’ as an individual behavior or attitude with a tendency to challenge thereby leading to creation of new facts, circumstances which not only improve existing conditions, but also has a societal influence. This mutual effect of psychological or cognitive aspect of entrepreneurship on society and societal influence in return on the psychology of entrepreneurship termed as ‘entrepreneurship psychology’ is emerging as a new field among subfields of psychology. Hence, through grounded research and content analysis, the core of this paper is to sketch out and help in comprehending the societal influence on cognitive aspects of entrepreneurship.