Modelling Pathways to Entrepreneurship: A Life Course Perspective

We conceptualise life course pathways to entrepreneurship embedded in the resource-based view of the small enterprise. As a partial test, we propose a specific pathway structured by class and mediated by gender relations. This is operationalized employing 18 waves of the British Household Panel Survey and event history random effect logistic regression modelling. Findings suggest a primary, class-structured pathway to entrepreneurship, emergent from the inter-generational transmission of resources from family of origin. This fosters continued resource accrual in higher class (although not highly credentialed), remunerative and satisfying careers that tip into business founding as a sustained route of class privilege or, for education failures and carers with reduced entrepreneur labour capacity, a defence against downward social mobility. Lower social classes avoid entrepreneurship except as a necessity when household income is low or when labour can compensate for other resources. We suggest new research directions.