Cultural values and start-up rates in the Spanish provinces

Abstract

Countries with similar economic situations exhibit persistently different entrepreneurial activity levels. Cultural values have been called for to explain this difference. They may condition individuals' behaviour and significantly affect the society's entrepreneurship rates. Nevertheless, few empirical studies have focused on this relationship at the regional or local level. This paper tries to fill this gap in the literature by analysing how specific cultural values (as defined by Schwartz, 1999) can influence the number of start-ups in the different Spanish provinces. Findings indicate the effect to be significant, contributing to explain up to 65.6% of the variance in start-up rates.

Are students’ mindsets those of typical start-up founders?

“…Estonian start-up founders were similar to Dutch entrepreneurs (Gorgievski et al, 2011): for both, the highest values were found for "self-direction" and "benevolence". These results also overlapped with results from the Spanish study (Fernández et al, 2013) for "stimulation", "self-direction" and "hedonism", but only partly with the results for "achievement" and "power"; Russians, the local minority, exhibited a greater overlap with Spanish results than Estonians did (Tulviste et al, 2014). In Turkey (Çakmakçı and Karabatı, 2008, p. 700), the values results for students and managers differed significantly for all ten values, while in Estonia there were significant differences in half: "tradition", conformity', "security", "hedonism" and "self-direction" (Table I).…”

“…The results for values indicated that the start-up founders were more on the openness and self-enhancement parts of the continuum than the typical student (who was closer to "power" and "achievement"; Lindeman and Verkasalo, 2005;Myyry and Helkama, 2001), in line with start-up founders' values ("self-direction"; Fernández et al, 2013;Gorgievski et al, 2011). The value that the mean student called "like me" was "benevolence" (M ¼ 2.33; this is representative of Estonia; Tulviste et al, 2014) and, for start-up founders, it was "self-direction", as expected (M ¼ 2.15; Fernández et al, 2013;Gorgievski et al, 2011). The value that was most "not like me" for the students and the start-up founders both was "tradition" (M student ¼ 3.71; M start-up founder ¼ 4.29).…”