National Culture and Entrepreneurship

This chapter focuses on the main challenges and issues associated with the research on the relationship between national culture and entrepreneurship. It shows that scholars have used two different approaches to defining national culture: culture as values, and culture as norms and practices. The chapter analyzes the literature that is related to each approach. It also highlights its limitations and considers it as a starting point for proposing a more coherent approach to defining and measuring national culture in entrepreneurship research. A long-standing tradition in entrepreneurship studies measures cultural values by the use of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions. By examining how culture as an exogenous factor influences perceptions and cognitions, it is possible to develop plausible, testable and nontautological models of a culture’s influence. The chapter concludes by proposing fear of failure as one of the cognitive variables able to capture the mechanisms through which national culture influences entrepreneurial behavior.