ABSTRACT

The stories and experiences provide accounts of both the institutional and cultural support structures encountered by entrepreneurs, with an emphasis on contrasting the different experiences in high- and low-entrepreneurship communities. This chapter covers the methodology used, and then presents the findings from each community studied. It also presents the synthesis of the findings that identifies key themes discriminating between high- and low-entrepreneurship communities. Differences in entrepreneurship levels are expected to be associated with differences in individual-institutional-opportunity interaction, so R. K. Yin's suggestion about "predictable differences" between case sites is most applicable in this study. What constitutes an entrepreneur is one of the most contested, multifaceted, and long-standing discussions in entrepreneurship research, despite the fact that an entire field of research is dedicated to its study. The institutions are manifestations "of the entrepreneurial population" rather than imposing regulations "over the entrepreneurial population."