Shaping masculine entrepreneur identities through fictions

Robert Smith

Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, 2025, vol. 37, issue 7-8, 1028-1050

Abstract: This exploration of masculine entrepreneur-stories as a genre explores the linkages between entrepreneurship, imagination and fiction, focusing on selected ‘American’ novels which can be categorized as entrepreneur novels. This study pays particular attention to narrative-exposition and seeks to address the research question - How does an appreciation and understanding of entrepreneur-stories as a literary genre influence our imagination and perceptions of entrepreneurial identity”. This theorised exposition covers the related topics of fiction and novels as they relate to our socially constructed understanding of entrepreneurs, their character and characterization in their portrayal as storybook-entrepreneurs which follows a scripted narrative of storybook-structuration. Using close reading methodology to identify expositions and interrogate the novels, the study identifies common masculine character flaws played out in novels which shape and influence public perceptions of entrepreneurship. A socially constructed storybook-entrepreneur formula or structuration process emerges with stereotypical storylines and expected structures. This forms an anthology of common entrepreneur-storylines which shape and inform our understandings of entrepreneurship because we are socialized in our readings to expect such storylines which have more to do with imaginative fiction than theory.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/08985626.2025.2483009

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