MOS Workshop
Tuesday, April 18th 2017 (Room N231 – 10:00 a.m in Cergy - 4:00 p.m in Singapore)
Professor Jan Lepoutre
ESSEC Management Department
will present his paper:
Theme: “FOOL, FOUNDER OR FAMILY MEMBER? THE ROLE OF SOCIAL IDENTITY IN EXPLAINING THE SOCIAL MEANING AND ALLOCATION OF FINANCIAL RESOURCES”
Abstract: We conducted a field study of 7 small, founder-run firms in a poverty setting to build an understanding of how and why entrepreneurs vary in the allocation of microfinance loans to business and non-business related applications. We discovered that founders developed different interpretations of the firm financial resources to be able to achieve what was important to them in running their firms. Bridging two formerly disparate psychological and sociological theories of resource allocation, we find that resource allocation is driven by patterned differences in how social identity translated ambiguous resource allocation templates into the construction of social cognitive resource allocation schemata and firms’ resource allocation. The paths we describe help explain responses to financial resource constraints in poverty settings and also provide a platform for research that may generate new insights into the role of founder characteristics in the social construction of resources.
