ENTREPRENEURIAL MINDSET DEVELOPMENT IN POST-COMMUNIST ROMANIA: FAMILY ROLE AND EARLY MARKET PARTICIPATION
ENTREPRENEURIAL MINDSET DEVELOPMENT IN POST-COMMUNIST ROMANIA: FAMILY ROLE AND EARLY MARKET PARTICIPATION
Patricea Elena BERTEA, Mălina-Mihaela CHELARU, Armand Florin BERTEA
1 Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași, Iași, Romania
patricea.bertea@gmail.com
malina.chelaru@uaic.ro
armandbertea@gmail.com
Abstract: Many researchers have shown that the family is the most important factor in the development of the entrepreneurial mindset. Children who grow up with entrepreneurial parents are much more likely to become entrepreneurs themselves. However, most of this research was done in Western countries where private business was never interrupted. This paper looks at what happens when entrepreneurial family tradition was destroyed, as it was in Romania during about forty years of communist rule. During that period, private business was forbidden, parents could not pass on entrepreneurial values to their children. This study is based on thirteen semi-structured interviews with Romanian entrepreneurs who were born between 1988 and 2001, meaning they grew up after communism ended but their parents lived most of their lives under it. The data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. The study found two main ways in which entrepreneurial mindset developed without the support of an entrepreneurial family. The first way, which was the most common, is that participants did not want to live the same kind of life as their parents. Their parents were capable people who were prevented by the communist system from becoming entrepreneurs, and many of them ended up with regrets. Seeing this, the participants decided they would not repeat the same trajectory. The second way involves early experience with real money and real markets, such as selling products at agricultural markets, renting objects to neighbours, or earning money independently as teenagers. These experiences gave participants the practical understanding of business that family entrepreneurial tradition would normally provide. The findings show that the post-communist rupture of intergenerational transmission produced a generation that developed entrepreneurial dispositions through alternative pathways.
Keywords: entrepreneurial mindset; intergenerational transmission; postcommunist entrepreneurship; negative identification; early market participation.
JEL Classification: L26; M13; P20.
