ABSTRACT
The need to conserve the structure of purposes which makes life meaningful does not in itself preclude the development of new skills or the exploration of new experiences. Rather, as I suggested in the first chapter, growth rests on the durability of the expectations we have already learned to trust. The more secure we feel, the more open to experience, so long as we believe it will enlarge rather than undermine our understanding. We can readily accommodate to changes, so long as they can first be assimilated to our existing patterns of thought and attachment. But the changes we initiate are not always conceived as extending and elaborating the already established principles of our lives. Some seem deliberately to repudiate habitual assumptions, overturning expectations and questioning relationships, in ways which are disruptive to ourselves as well as others. Why, if we so often vehemently resist such changes, and succumb to them with grief,
Since the line of thought I want to follow was first suggested by a study of African businessmen in Kenya, which Anthony Somerset and I made a few years ago, I will begin by describing briefly this instance of entrepreneurial innovation. Even if such small African enterprises are not yet in themselves very influential, economic entrepreneurship is, in general, one of the most obvious agents of disruptive social changes; and it is characteristically autonomous-a spontaneous initiative never wholly determined by economic circumstance, nor predictable as the expected development of talent or resources. Entrepreneurs provide, then, an example of change apparently not accountable in terms of a conservative impulse, nor related to any loss, yet too unsettling, too fraught with risks, to be treated simply as the extension of a confident personality. I want to show, however, that the African entrepreneurs we studied were in a sense reacting to loss after all, and had to struggle with problems of identity analogous to the process of grieving. If so, the question remains whether the same might be said of entrepreneurship elsewhere; and indeed of other kinds of innovation. Is innovation itself, paradoxically, an attempt to restore the continuity of expectations?
