To profit or not to profit: Founder identity at the intersection of religion and entrepreneurship

Abstract

For more than a century, discussion of the connections between religion and entrepreneurship has pointed to what we would now label questions of identity. Our study of 25 participants in a program in Northern Kenya that aimed to introduce and stimulate capitalist entrepreneurship within extremely poor pastoralist communities shows that differences in participants' religious social identities strongly shaped whether or not they adopted new roles and role identities as capitalist entrepreneurs. This process also shifted the domains in which their religious and collectivist social identities were salient and helped to explain the emergence of important and contested changes in social and economic relations. We contribute to the development of founder identity theory by building research at the intersection of entrepreneurship and religion and at the intersection of entrepreneurship and poverty alleviation.