CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2008
| Author | Cucu, Alina-Sandra |
|---|---|
| Title | Business Out of Nothing? The Case of Entrepreneurs in Postsocialist Romania |
| Summary | The present research is a qualitative insight into the emergence of the entrepreneurs in Romania after 1990. The paper is an attempt to explain the decision to become a business owner for people with low social origin and no managerial position during the socialist period, from an action-based perspective. I challenge some of the widely-agreed theories about entrepreneurship, stating that in the postsocialist context the act of starting a business cannot be explained through individual personality features like creativity, or low risk aversion. I argue that the choice to found an enterprise was the outcome of a mixture between the need to avoid downward mobility and the possession of resources like various types of knowledge and social capital. I see entrepreneurial action as being embedded in the practices and the routines of the individuals, in their networks, and in personal streams of action, in which each action determines the space of possibilities and of constraints for the next ones. Therefore, the most interesting aspect of the research was to explore the structure of possibilities and constraints opened for the social actors in the postsocialist period, and to see how these spaces of action constituted in time foundation of entrepreneurial action. |
| Supervisor | Balasz Vedres; Vlad Naumescu |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2008/cucu_alina-sandra.pdf |
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