Social entrepreneurs narrating their careers: A psychodynamic-existential perspective

Abstract

This study aims to improve our understanding of social entrepreneurs’ careers through narrative analysis of their life stories. Narratives are an important part of the study of career-related transitions, as they form, revise, and reconstruct identities, and drive agency. For this purpose, 24 in-depth semi-structured narrative interviews were conducted with Israeli social entrepreneurs. The findings point out a process which takes place in different spheres and moulds the life story of a social entrepreneur: the personality sphere; the family sphere, including family dynamics and significant childhood experiences; the social sphere, including formative events outside the family; and the moral sphere, which includes attitudes and ideologies. The entirety of spheres generates a consistent meta-narrative which promotes a theoretical integration between psychoanalytical and existential psychological theories and offers a deeper understanding of how and why people become social entrepreneurs.

Keywords

Social entrepreneurs existential theory career development narrative identity psychoanalytic theory

Introduction

The term “social entrepreneurship” emerged in the 1990s (Bornstein, 1998, Dees, 1998, Leadbeater, 1997) and became a very popular buzzword (Bruyat & Julien, 2000) despite still being ill-defined (Danna & Porche, 2008; Van-Ryzin, Grossman, DiPadova-Stocks & Bergrud, 2009; Weerawardena & Sullivan, 2006). Broadly defined, it is the development of innovative, mission-supporting, income earning, job creating or licensing ventures undertaken by individuals, non-profit organizations, or non-profit organisations in association with for-profit organisations (Pomerantz, 2003, p. 25). It challenges existing paradigms and conceptions and offers innovative solutions to complex social problems (Sullivan, Weerawardena & Carnegie, 2003). A narrower definition is that social entrepreneurship applies business expertise and market-based skills such as innovative income earning initiatives in the non-profit sector (Reis & Clohesy, 1999; Thompson, 2002). Common across all definitions of social entrepreneurship is that the underlying drive for social entrepreneurship is to create social value, rather than personal and shareholder wealth (e.g., Thake & Zadek, 1997). Accordingly, based on the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM; Bosma & Levie, 2010) and work by Wei-Skillern, Austin, Leonard, & Stevenson (2007), we define social entrepreneurship as innovative, social value creating activities that can occur within or across the non-profit, business, or government sectors. Innovation is expressed by using a business methodology,¹ and a social entrepreneur is a founder of an initiative whose purpose is to promote a social cause through the use of business methodology (Bull, 2007; Dart, 2004).

Social entrepreneurs are the first and main component of “social entrepreneurship” (Leadbeater, 1997; Light, 2008) and are the decisive variable for success or failure of any social enterprise (Sharir & Lerner, 2006). But who are they? The literature to date does not indicate who social entrepreneurs are and how they became so (Bornstein, 2004; Drayton, 2005). For this purpose, a narrative inquiry about the entrepreneur’s life story is in order.

Conceptual framework: Narrative identity through an existential and psychoanalytic lens

Self-identity is formed in a narrative (Ezzy, 1998). Individuals use narratives to build and uphold a sense of selfhood and purpose from their life experiences (Singer, 2004). According to McAdams and Cox (2010), the self-as-actor, which is the child observing their social performances and dispositional traits, provides a foundation for the self-as-agent who sets personal goals and plans. Later, the self-as-author converts these elements into a coherent narrative, which provides meaning for one’s life. The narrative gives lived experience a clearer, richer meaning, but it is not determined by lived experience. The life-story narrative interweaves historical events and the narrative plot within which events are interpreted (Ricoeur, 1988). This conception of narrative identity is hermeneutic since it defines a cycle whereby subjective retelling of “objective” past events shapes present decisions that are then refigured into the narrative, in a sort of a causal chain (Rosenwald, 1992). Narratives are not a representational method but rather a condition which drives agency (Somers, 1994).

Self-narratives help people revise and reconstruct identities during work transitions, as such transitions are facilitated by the coherent adjustments of the narrative in line with the new role identity (Ibarra & Barbulescu, 2010). Narratives have been part of the study of career-related transitions in general and of the study of business and social entrepreneurs (Down & Warren, 2008; Jones, Latham & Betta, 2008; Lindgren & Packendorff, 2009), as well as in altruistic and service behaviour (Cox & McAdams, 2012).

Early narrative identity literature relied on psychodynamic theories, but recent research is related to theories that see individuals as essentially meaning seekers (Singer, 2004). We offer an analytic framework that interprets the career narrative by combining psychoanalytic and existential psychologies. Psychoanalytic theory emphasizes the role of childhood experiences, family dynamics, early relationships, and unconscious desires on career choice and development. The unconscious determinants of any vocational choice reflect the individual’s personal and familial history. People choose an occupation that enables them to replicate significant childhood experiences, gratify needs that were ingrained in their childhood, and actualize occupational dreams and professional expectations passed on to them by their familial heritage (Pines, 2000; Pines & Yanai, 2000). When career choices involve such significant issues, people make them with very high hopes and expectations, ego involvement, and passion. Clinical experience seems to suggest that the greatest passion is typically located where some unresolved childhood issue (or “metaphoric wound”) lies (Pines, 2000). For example, entrepreneurs and managers reported an absence of emotional communication and a chaotic family climate in their childhoods (Kaplan, 2007). Strenger and Burak (2005) found fatherlessness as a driving force of entrepreneurs and argued that they must come to terms with fatherlessness to be effective entrepreneurs, and not “self-destroyers out of unconscious guilt, or grandiose dreamers” (p. 103).

Current psychoanalytic accounts of career development are less deterministic. According to Axelrod (2005), people shape their world both consciously and unconsciously, and the psychology of the adult cannot be reduced to childhood factors. The existential theory assumes that the root of career choice lies in human need for meaning (Pines, 1993, 2000) as a way of coping with their existential anxiety (Khalil, 1997). Cohen (2003) proposed a model for career choice where individuals seek opportunities for authentic existence and personal meaning, and career development is portrayed as a decision-making process for a vocational choice that would achieve that. Similarly, Amundson, Borgen, Iaquinta, Butterfield, and Koert (2010) found personal meaning to be one of three foci of conscious decisions guiding career choice, alongside relationships and livelihood. Frankl’s logotherapy (1976) stressed the motivational power of “striving to find meaning” (p. 154) and is useful in career development counselling (Schultze & Miller, 2004).

Integrating psychoanalytic and existential ideas is a way to understand career choices as decisions made consciously but affected by unconscious processes, and driven by unresolved childhood issues, particularly those regarding the relationship with a parent, in a search for a sense of existential significance that can partially heal early childhood emotional wounds (Pines & Yanai, 2001). Accordingly, we set out to study childhood experiences of social entrepreneurs, and how they address them in their search for meaning.

The social entrepreneur

There is little research concerning social entrepreneurs’ life stories to date. The literature describes them as people who seek “to satisfy some unmet need that the state welfare system will not or cannot meet” (Thompson, Alvy, & Lees, 2000, p. 328), motivated by pull factors such as awareness of social injustice (Yitzhaki & Kroop, 2011).

From research about commercial entrepreneurs, we learn that they are generally first-borns (Bennet & Dann, 2000; Pines & Schwartz, 2008), ethnic minority and low to middle class (Kets de Vries, 1996; Pines, 2003), with prior management, business, or military experience (Robert, 1989). Their fathers are often self-employed or are themselves entrepreneurs (Bennis & Nanus, 1985), and they demonstrate ambivalence in their identification with their fathers and in most cases have experienced an absent father and ambivalent relationship with their mother (Kets de Vries, 1996; Zaleznik & Kets de Vries, 1975). Similarly, analyses of social entrepreneurs (e.g., Barendsen & Gardner, 2004; Sarel & Bar Shalom, 2011) often found some kind of trauma or deeply transformative experience at an early age, such as poverty, neglect, loss of a parent, and illness (e.g. Sarel & Bar Shalom, 2011; Yunus, 2007). Other studies report former social activities, business family background, or a mentoring process (e.g. Burns, 1978).

Social entrepreneurs have a distinctive personality trait profile (King & Solomon, 2003; Llewellyn & Wilson, 2003; Martin & Osberg, 2007). They are described as leaders, makers of alliances, pragmatic visionaries, and charismatic. They are able to create highly cohesive partnerships and teamwork (Leadbeater, 1997). They are also able to envisage, engage, enable, and enact transformational change efficiently in the face of scarce resources, risks, and diverse contexts (Thompson, Alvy, & Lees, 2000). They are likely to be happy, interested in politics, extroverted, open to experiences (Koe Hwee Nga & Shamuganathan, 2010), giving to charity, and hold liberal ideologies (Van-Ryzin et al., 2009). Yet, there is no one type of social (or commercial) entrepreneur (Bornstein, 2004; Miner, 2000). Some are charismatic speakers, energetic, and polished, while others are soft-spoken and quietly persistent (Barendsen & Gardner, 2004).

The aim of this study is to analyse social entrepreneurs’ life stories and how they use them in constructing their identity as social entrepreneurs. The main contribution of this article to the literature is threefold. First, it provides a comprehensive meta-narrative of the emergence of entrepreneurs. Second, it focuses on social entrepreneurs, which are a specific group for which such analyses are dearly missing. Finally, and most importantly, it offers an interpretation of their narratives that integrates two psychological career choice theories – psychoanalytic and existential.

Methods

Research tools and procedure

Psychological research in the field of life story, personality, and career choice is often performed using narrative research (McAdams, Josselson, & Lieblich, 2001; Nasby & Read, 1997). Narrative study is based on verbal reports of people about their experiences (Josselson & Lieblich, 2001), used to understand how people create meaning and experience their lives (Hoyle, Harris, & Judd, 2002). Narrative, in-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted by the first author based on an interview guide. The interviews opened with the question “Please, tell me about yourself.” If the interviewees had difficulty starting, we added: “You can start anywhere you choose,” or later: “Can you tell me more about that?” Follow up questions dealt with significant experiences, qualifying environments, parent-children relationship, and prominent characteristics. At the end of the interview, the entrepreneur was requested to suggest a metaphor for a social entrepreneur.

The interviews were flexible and dynamic, and after the participants finished telling their story, the interviewer went through the interview guide with them to verify that all the topics were discussed. Interviews lasted between one and two hours; three interviews were completed in two sittings. In most cases, the interviews were conducted at the entrepreneur’s office, three in a café, and one at the entrepreneur’s home. Efforts were made to enable a private and quiet environment. Each interview was audio recorded to allow for transcription. The research was approved by the authors’ Faculty Internal Review Board, and participants signed an informed consent form which promised confidentiality and anonymity. Each interviewee also filled a short questionnaire with demographic information.

Participants

We interviewed 24 social entrepreneurs (see Appendix 1). The age range was 24 to 80 (M = 43.54, SD = 13.4), since one was an 80 years founder of a prominent social change and development organization. Eleven were women and thirteen were men, with 15 years of schooling on average. Nineteen were married with children, and all were between middle to high-middle class. Professional backgrounds included mostly social and educational occupations. Few came from the business sector. Although we reached theoretical saturation after 15 interviews, we decided to increase the sample in order to better validate our findings and to account for the great diversity among social entrepreneurs.

Participants were located using a list of social enterprises in Israel (Gidron & Yogev, 2010), a website of social enterprises and referrals by other entrepreneurs, and screened according to the GEM definition (Bosma & Levie, 2010): the participants were selected if they (a) self-identified as a social entrepreneur, (b) define their organization as a social enterprise, cooperative or a non-profit, (c) which engages in innovative activity, (d) aims to support itself, and (e) had been active at least three years.

Data analysis

The reading and analysis followed the narrative approach and focused on subjective meanings (Josselson & Lieblich, 1999). We performed both holistic and categorical analysis, looking at each story as a single unit first, and then conducting categorical analysis which included a division of the information into categories and analytically reorganizing the categories to reveal themes and meanings. In order to enhance the reliability of the research, various measures were taken, following accepted criteria for judging qualitative research (Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Seale, 2002): rich transcription; rereading the text repeatedly until reaching saturation; verbatim quotations; triangulation through the comparative analysis of the entrepreneurs and the accounts of significant others, and finally, conducting a reflective research journal (Bogdan & Biklen, 1998). Furthermore, we returned to five of the social entrepreneurs in order to receive a second opinion about the findings, selected from participants who expressed interest to address the research results, while maintaining their heterogeneity in terms of gender, age, and type of enterprise.

The authors are both academics and social activists on issues of welfare and society. Our motivation in this study stems from a deep interest in social innovation and change, and a belief in innovative forms of social initiatives. The first author is a trained social worker who has experience also in business development and in qualitative psychological research of entrepreneurship and management. Due to our affinity with the field of social entrepreneurship, we needed to deal with tensions between taking an insider or an outsider role in the dialogue. This affinity contributed to the advancement of the interview due to the common denominator between the interviewer and the interviewee, though we were concerned that it might lead to incorrect assumptions and possibly omitting significant details. Second, since the content of the study concerned complex and sensitive subjects such as relationship with parents and children – it sometimes drew the interview to the therapeutic route. In the analysis of the interviews, these potential effects were considered and contemplated to limit their effects on the interpretation of the interviews.

Findings

Despite having diverse backgrounds and life stories, our participants’ life stories present an almost identical structure, which incorporates a stable narrative of their early childhood as well as a progressive narrative of their engagement in the social arena. The beginning of the process is in difficult childhood experiences, followed by formative experiences in youth, and ends in choosing an entrepreneurial career as reconciliation with critical childhood events.

Other recurring elements of the entrepreneurs’ narratives include at least one significant mentoring figure. The maturation process is fraught with questions of identity and search for meaning and its end is in the creation of resilience, expressed in an entrepreneurial career. All this emerges on the foundation of a specific personality structure that incorporates drive, risk taking, creativity, pioneering, value and alliance making, ability to lead, and a strong personal and social ethic. This personality structure emerged from explicit statements, and implicitly from episodes and events in their interviews.

This process takes place in four spheres – personality, family, social, and moral.

The personality sphere includes personal characteristics and personality traits that emerged from the interviews and were found stable and consistent both along individual interviews and across different participants: courage, openness for experiences, extroversion, creativity, independence, optimism, high ability to recover from failures, and an internal locus of control. Michelle (29, developed an initiative for people with special needs²) described her courage: “I have always been a rebel. What characterizes me the most is starting things from scratch, and doing it ‘big’. It is easier for me to take a big risk than a small one.” Avi (44, Youth at risk): “After high school, I felt that I had no idea what life is about… I just took a stick and went into the unknown.” Abigail (45, disabled persons): “I am very rebellious; I have an extravagant personality, even in my military service I was thrown to a cell because I provoked rebellion.”

Nora (49, women in distress) described her stubborn character: “For me a wall is just a wall, I can go through the window, if not through the window I will go through a chimney,” but also optimism and creativity: “…there is a crisis… and in all the depression I manage to assign it another meaning, it is a beam of light that always shines in me… an eternal optimism.” Simona (56, women in economic distress) emphasized her internal locus of control: “I believe that a person can determine her destiny; I do not believe in managing… I influence myself and I made myself.”

A somewhat darker side involves extremism, totality, inconsistency, disorder, volatility, impulsiveness, and difficulties in close relationships. As Michelle said:

I am in constant need for admiration, of feedback and appreciation… I am not a social person… I would be happy if it was possible to exist without contacts but I wish to expand and that is the only way to survive as self-employed. I am enough for myself.

Nora too said: “needing someone is like death to me.”

In the family sphere, almost all the entrepreneurs described a non-normative childhood, fraught by feelings of estrangement and loneliness. While a few told of normative childhoods, the majority described their family dynamics as complex, characterized by deprivation and an absent father. In the words of Elijah (28, cooperative communities):

I try to prove to my father that I am capable and although I don’t do what he wants I still succeed. Father did not want me to go for a Year of Service (a year of voluntary community work, done before army service) but to go study computer science. He claimed that it was less reputed and he used to say to me – I have given you good genes and you go and study politics and rubbish. It has reached a peak when he wanted to decide where I should get married… Today we speak mainly by text messages.

Others said similar things: “Dad had nothing to offer to me, I am not like any of them, not mom nor dad. If it were up to him I would not do anything… They always want me to bow before authority” (Simona); “My father and I had a difficult relationship, for him everything is money and everything is about money” (Abigail, 45, persons with disabilities).

The difficult childhood experiences were accompanied with a strong feeling of not belonging, of being an outsider: For example, Nathaniel (50, urban kibbutz founder and head of social change projects):

At the beginning of twelfth grade my needs were different from those of most my friends. I had not accepted the rules and had experiences that were almost forbidden. It was a difficult time… If you are an exception, they sneer at you, you’re surrounded by cynicism…

I grew up in a slum but my family was advanced. My parents were socialists but everybody in my neighbourhood were liberal. We were secular and everybody was religious, we were different. All my life I felt different, I lived in slum where I do not belong but also in the University I don’t belong. I was an outsider. (Ora, 34, disadvantaged women)

The place where I grew up was considered very poor. I was in a school that was considered underprivileged, I felt underprivileged; nevertheless I was a good student. I became a friend of the richer kids, but I felt that I do not belong. (Naomi, 40, psychiatric patients)

Omer (25, entrepreneur of cooperatives) describes many transitions and the need to adjust repeatedly to a new reality:

I always had to adjust to new places… Israelis are much less polite than the Belgians, and then at the end of fourth grade we flew to Greece. You know, very rich people, private school, and then coming back to a different school, I was new, I felt I no longer belong.

Nathan (30, neighbourhood sustainability centre) tells about his feelings of being different: “In high school I was like isolated, looking, searching… My parents thought that I was suicidal…… I was unconventional, I was different…”

The social sphere includes significant events that occurred in social environments until the age of early adulthood, through which they discovered their own leadership skills and resources related to their ability to take key roles in social and educational environments:

Joining the youth movement was a big difference. I instructed, I was instruction coordinator, I organized events… the movement has given me a face, when I joined the movement I felt much empowered. It has given me a stage. I was the branch coordinator, I did new things. (Elijah)

Nora mentioned social activities at school: “In high school I was fighting injustice. I was in the student council and fought against everything that I did not like or agree. I even won most of the time.” The same theme arises from Nathaniel with respect to the formative value of his military service: “Military service allowed things to happen inside me, for the first time I felt that the sky is the limit.”

Another recurrent theme that emerged in the social sphere was role models or significant figures who accompanied the participants in the early stages of their lives or in formative career moments. These figures were involved in empowerment, training, role modelling, and mentorship, both on the personal and emotional level and on the professional level. In most cases, they were real persons that accompanied the social entrepreneurs, such as a teacher, a relative, a counsellor in the youth movement, a manager, a friend, or a social worker. In some cases, these were more distant and abstract figures such as known philosophers, activists, and politicians. Nathaniel:

After graduating from school and after the military service was such a void in my life I was looking for something to hold onto, something… and I found it- it was my science teacher in the fourth grade… He took me and helped me make a serious metamorphosis… from man who dreams and doesn’t know how to realize – to a man who fulfils…

Simona compared her grandmothers to militant leaders

I had two leader grandmothers, the women in my family have it in the blood, combativeness. My father’s mother fought so that every child has a chance to study. When a child was thrown out of school she would go from place to place and fight for him.

Michaela (64, disadvantage women) told of Shulamit Aloni (a late Israeli politician and civil rights activist) as a life-long model for her “… in the way that she protected civil and women’s rights, in her pluralism and her humanity.” Avi (44, youth at risk) mentions Muhammad Yunus as a role model: “after reading his book I said- it’s exactly what I want to be.” Some of our participants had “collections” of significant role models. Nathaniel said it outright: “I collect figures throughout my life, significant ones”; and Reli (44, psychiatric patients) used the Jewish concept of “Aseh lecha rav” – “Make for yourself a Rabbi”: “…each time I have another rabbi for a temporary period. For me, the rabbi is a way I learn a particular topic…”

In the moral sphere, a common theme that emerged in all the interviews was a search for meaning and essence since childhood, accompanied by a strong sense of free choice. Naomi said:

As a child I believed that I will be entitled to live only if I would do something meaningful with my life. It is on the level of the most fundamental right to exist. My feeling of worth is not introverted… I know that it is extreme but I constantly require meaning in my life

and Nathan said:

The first time I heard about sustainability – I felt that this is the right thing; I know and feel that I’m doing the right thing. People do not respect the land, humanity, life. Humanity is not focused on the right thing. Our chase is futile

The feeling of free choice emerged in Nora’s words: “I am a person who lives with a very strong experience of choice; I truly believe that I invite into my life whatever happens to me, I invite it and choose it.” Similarly, Michaela said: “Philosophical texts, philosophical literature. They are the basis of my being, I mean spirituality. ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’… knowing that there is always an option – I can choose.”

The most dominant theme across all the participants was their feeling of being exceptional and a lack of belonging. The sense of exceptionality is experienced both internally in their distinctive self-perception, nonconformism, and their need for meaning, and externally by actual experiences of estrangement, namely, being an “outsider.”

Discussion

This article joins a growing body of narrative identity literature in the study of entrepreneurship (Down & Warren, 2008; Downing, 2005; Lindgren & Packendorff, 2009; Jones, Latham & Betta, 2008). In line with this literature, we find that social entrepreneurs use narratives to build and uphold their social entrepreneur identity and use that narrative and identity to give meaning to past experiences and to generate a sense of coherence (Singer, 2004). In addition to this literature, we were able to reveal a common meta-narrative of the social entrepreneur’s career, which is strongly consistent with an integrated psychodynamic-existential theory of career choice.

The entrepreneurs’ narratives show surprising similarities and converge into a consistent meta-narrative which delineates the course of the development of the social entrepreneur’s identity. As in Rosenwald (1992), this common narrative identity is hermeneutic since it constitutes a cycle where the individual generates a causal explanation of their entrepreneurial career. The retold past is given meaning by the choices of the present, and present choices and action help vindicate and resolve childhood conflicts. Gergen and Gergen (1986) present a typology of narratives that express progression, regression, or a combination between the two. The narratives here express progression, which begins in difficulty and struggling as children, continues with a search for meaning and ends with an experience of empowerment, a sense of resilience, and professional choice (see Figure 1). The narrative provides a coherent story, meaning, and interpretation to the entrepreneur life. Even the specific nature of their social enterprise is explicated by past events, and is seen as a remedy to the metaphoric wounds of their childhood.

Figure 1.

Narrative structuring of social entrepreneurial identity.

The structure and content of the entrepreneur’s narratives and the profile and development that they describe can be better understood using a combination of existential and psychoanalytical theories, consistent with previous studies about entrepreneurs (e.g., Barendsen & Gardner, 2004; Yunus, 2007; Yitshaki & Kroop, 2011). The entrepreneurs’ narratives first and foremost refer to childhood experiences, family dynamics, and parent-children relationships, and then to critical experiences of empowerment in early and late adolescence, mentoring processes, and a search for meaning. The main childhood experience of our entrepreneurs was a lack of belonging, estrangement, and loneliness. They describe themselves as outsiders in their families and environments. Their outsider experiences are mostly an outcome of challenging life circumstances and severe events such as loss, violence, poverty, and migration. The theme of “the insufficient parent” is repeated in the entrepreneurs’ narratives, and mostly the father is portrayed as absent and rejecting. The early experiences of rejection, parental inconsistency, and control are assumed to result in considerable controlled rage, hostility, guilt, and suspicion of authority (Kets de Vries, 1996; Pines, 2002; Zaleznik & Kets de Vries, 1975, 1976). This is resolved by the choice of an entrepreneurial career, which as the founders of their own organizations and the ones with the ultimate authority, allows the entrepreneurs to avoid facing significant authority figures (Pines, 2002).

Seemingly, the entrepreneur's nonconformist personality contradicts the prominent part that role models play in their narratives. In fact, these are mutually reinforcing elements. Entrepreneurs seek role models that validate their values and their exceptionality. They learn and acquire values from their mentors, but the expressions of those values are congruent with their unique character.

The specific expression of their social entrepreneurship is posited as targeted healing of childhood experiences: an entrepreneur who experienced severe loneliness in childhood is active in establishing cooperative communities, and an entrepreneur who had suffered poverty is engaged in the economic empowerment of women. Social entrepreneurs, whether explicitly or not, return excluded populations to the mainstream (Gidron & Abbou, 2014), and in doing so, they assist in resolving their own sense of exclusion. As Ora said: “I know that I try to return the girls to the mainstream, as I have never been there, and maybe this way I would find out where I belong.”

In the entrepreneurs’ narratives, their ability to resolve childhood conflicts and transform them into a successful social entrepreneurial career is facilitated also by specific personality attributes, such as openness to experiences, extroversion, optimism, sense of choice, and self-confidence (Abu Elanain, 2008; Amit, Popper, Gal, Mishkal-Sinai, & Lisak, 2006; Burns, 1978; Koe Hwee Nga, & Shamuganathan, 2010; London, 2002; Mayseless & Popper, 2007).

According to existentialist theories of personality individuals assign significance to things around them, are the ones who create their own lives, and are responsible for their own life choices (Cohen, 2003). Authentic and meaningful life exists only when a person is in a state of “maximal openness” – aware of the infinite possibilities concealed in one’s environment, and holds a sense of freedom to choose and the understanding that one is the sole responsible person for one’s life. These beliefs are formed and strengthened during formative events in youth. The entrepreneurs pour meaning into those experiences, master them, and create resilience; the meaning they assign to events assists them in coping with the emotional ramifications of these events, and charts the story of their life and their identity. In the social entrepreneurs’ narratives, positive leadership experiences in their youth and supportive mentorship create a feeling of control, engagement, self-efficacy, and meaning. These findings are supported by previous studies that focused on the impact of psychological processes of adolescence as a source of motivation and a sense of capability (Schneider, Paul, White, & Holcombe, 1999; Zacharatos et al., 2000), as well as to studies that show a relation between experiences in leadership at a younger age and an expression of leadership in adulthood (Amit et al., 2006). The role of the narrative is to create meaning that puts the entrepreneur’s past and present in context and connects them into one whole hermeneutic life-story. It also assigns meaning to the specific choices concerning which social enterprise to establish, what audience to help, and what social change strategies to engage.

The main contribution of this study is that it reveals the common narrative by which social entrepreneurs form and explicate their professional identities and careers. It points out the connection between life events, family patterns, narratives, and professional choice. It reveals the crucial contribution to professional choice and development of early childhood experiences and unconscious processes and of conscious meaning seeking. In doing so, it also provides a theoretical foundation that explains this process and its specific content, through a combination of psychoanalytical and existential theories.

On the practical side, our study can assist to identify, understand, and cultivate social entrepreneurs. It highlights the importance of early entrepreneurial and leadership experiences, the impact of mentorship, and the crucial role of developing self-efficacy and a sense of individuality amongst nascent entrepreneurs, and to nurturing the importance of noncoformism and exceptionality. This insight can help plan training programs that fit social entrepreneurs’ needs and attributes.

It is important to add that our research took place in Israel. Israel is a small society under continuous threat where values such as national pride, community, and social solidarity are usually highlighted. Those values are transmitted to the youth in the framework of preparatory programs that are unique to Israel, such as youth movements, pre-military prep programs, military and national service. This fact constitutes a significant element in understating the context that influenced the moral sphere of the social entrepreneur.

Three limitations of our study should be noted and considered for possible future research. First, the research was based on retrospective memories which do not always reﬂect objective reality (Widom, Raphael, & DuMont, 2004). Second, this study was based on a small purposive sample. However heterogeneous our sample was, any selection of participants naturally reduces the possibility of addressing different aspects of the phenomenon. For example, we were not able to interview a new immigrant or an ultra-Orthodox social entrepreneur. Finally, this study is not comparative, so it cannot be concluded with certainty that our findings are unique to Israeli social entrepreneurs. Similar studies among managers (as opposed to entrepreneurs) of non-profit organizations and business entrepreneurs, and with social entrepreneurs elsewhere, are clearly needed.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors are indebted to the late Prof. Ayala Malach Pines, RIP, teacher, mentor and friend, who was part of this research. An early draft of this paper was presented at the 4th EMES International Research Conference on Social Enterprise, 1 July–4 July 2013, University of Liege (Belgium).

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Appendix 1

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