Abstract
Amidst considerable debate on the relationship between entrepreneurship and economic inequality, scholarship only indirectly addresses how entrepreneurship informs individuals’ relative well-being. We theorize on the nuanced relationship between entrepreneurship and equality of eudaimonic well-being through the lens of New Institutional Economics. Drawing on theories of human flourishing, we suggest that entrepreneurial action is an underappreciated mechanism by which individuals pursue well-being. Equality of well-being is thus influenced by a society’s entrepreneurial accessibility: the freedom of individuals to choose to engage in entrepreneurial action. We present a multilevel framework in which institutional factors enable entrepreneurial action by promoting entrepreneurial accessibility—a factor, that, in turn, affects well-being for individual entrepreneurs as well as societal eudaimonic equality. The ex ante conditions for equality of well-being entail institutions that yield broad entrepreneurial accessibility. Our work highlights the institutional prerequisites for human flourishing in the entrepreneurial society beyond (unequal) economic distributions.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1061-1079 |
| Number of pages | 19 |
| Journal | Small Business Economics |
| Volume | 59 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Oct 2022 |
Keywords
- Entrepreneurship
- Eudaimonia
- Inequality
- Institutions
- Well-being
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Business, Management and Accounting
- Economics and Econometrics