An Investigation of the Social Construction of the Entrepreneurial Personality by Means of the Critical Incident Technique

Abstract

This paper introduces an alternative theoretical approach to understanding the nature of the ‘entrepreneurial personality’. It argues for placing wealth creation at the heart of entrepreneurial behaviour, and establishes criteria for distinguishing within a population of business owner-managers the entrepreneurs from the rest. As there is no psychometric tool for measuring such characteristics, a grounded methodology is suggested, termed social constructionism. This method is applied to five case studies.