Highlights how entrepreneurs initiate and justify their illegal venturing to begin to link a specific form of entrepreneurship under adversity with destructive entrepreneurship.
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Explains how entrepreneurs claim both high and low agency in justifying their illegal venturing, which is important because it extends arguments on the use of moral disengagement.
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Details how the entrepreneurs we studied had little trouble claiming both a focus on the self and a focus on others, at least when it came to justifying their illegal venturing.
Abstract
While entrepreneurship can generate economic and social benefits, it can also be a source of negative outcomes. We need to gain a deeper understanding of how individual entrepreneurs interpret their context and engage in entrepreneurial action that can generate substantial negative outcomes. In this paper we shed light on the entrepreneurial process at the micro-level by exploring how bunkerers—oil thieves—engage in, justify, and persist with entrepreneurial action that, while generating some benefits for the entrepreneurs and the local community, causes substantial destruction to the local environment, community, and the entrepreneurs' health. By inductively generating a personal adversity model of justifying entrepreneurial action that generates substantial negative outcomes (for the local community and environment), we provide new insights into (1) the link between aspects of entrepreneurship under adversity and substantial costs (and some benefits) experienced by local communities already facing adverse conditions, (2) how entrepreneurs' claim varying levels of agency in the same justification of the same action and its negative consequences, and (3) how entrepreneurs entangle the self and others to justify their actions and its costs.
