Entrepreneurial Action by Métis and First Nations entrepreneurs in Saskatchewan: Similarities and differences with established notions of Entrepreneurial Action

• Main Author: Goswami, Ketan
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Scholarship@Western 2021
• Subjects: Entrepreneurial action; Indigenous entrepreneurship; institutional inequality; coping; volition; conation; Business Administration; Management; and Operations; Entrepreneurial and Small Business Operations; Canada; Turtle Island; First Nations
• Online Access: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/7869; https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/context/etd/article/10338/viewcontent/auto_convert.pdf

Entrepreneurial actions, i.e., activities like hiring, marketing, financing, hustling (even bribing!), etc., requisite for building small businesses are less studied than antecedent opportunity recognition processes. The two most common form of contexts in which entrepreneurial actions are studied are opportunity-driven (Silicon-Valley type) and necessity-driven (poverty contexts). While there is a fair amount of research on community-based and band-driven Indigenous entrepreneurship, less is known about entrepreneurial actions by individual self-employed Métis and First Nations entrepreneurs in Canada/ Turtle Island. Métis and First Nations entrepreneurs face a differential set of obstacles in their pursuit for economic self-determination compared to their non-Indigenous counterparts. This dissertation endeavours to understand entrepreneurial actions undertaken by individual Métis and First Nations entrepreneurs and their similarities and differences with dominant notions, more specifically the extant notions of opportunity-driven and necessity-driven entrepreneurial actions. I do so abductively by leveraging qualitative methods, in the context of Métis and First Nations self-employed entrepreneurs in the Canadian Prairies (more specifically, Saskatchewan). Findings highlight that the entrepreneurial actions of Métis and First Nations entrepreneurs differ compared to dominant notions along three dimensions, namely – motivation, liabilities, and the actions themselves. I submit that this has both theoretical and practical implications as my findings make a case for explicitly accounting for a role of self-regulatory coping and volition as foundational micro-components of entrepreneurial action, in addition to knowledge and motivation already prescribed in extant literature.