ABSTRACT
Entrepreneurship is an activity of individuals, but the individuals who engage in that activity are never the mere homo œconomicus of much economic theory, even if they make rational choices based on rational economic calculation. Rather, they are always individuals whose goals, aspirations, and worldviews, and the strategic and tactical choices which flow from them, have been formed in particular social and cultural circumstances. It is in those specific social and cultural contexts, which are the product of particular historical experiences, that the patterns and outcomes of entrepreneurial activity are determined. This is true of all forms of entrepreneurial activity, including those cases where persons are engaging in forms of market exchange where the goal is the acquisition of profits through trade or manufacturing: even in those cases, rational, quantitative, pursuit of economic and monetary gain coincides with motivations of a far more qualitative and culture-bound nature. Weber’s identification of the affinity between the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism in early modern Europe was probably the earliest recognition of this factor in social science. Value-based motivations become even more important in those cases where entrepreneurial activity is not driven by specific profit-seeking or monetary gain, but is rather motivated by desires to reconstruct a devastated society, or to enhance the educational prospects of a neglected region, or to bring about cultural changes that might enhance prospects for lasting peace and development in the country in which that entrepreneur is located. These are some of the motives and goals which have driven the founding and continuing consolidation of Sierra Leone’s first private university, the University of Makeni (UNIMAK), a product of cultural entrepreneurship in the peculiarly difficult and contested context of post-civil war Sierra Leone. In this chapter, I give an account of the perspectives and worldviews behind UNIMAK’s birth and development,1 as they were revealed in interview data with the university’s founder and present Vice-Chancellor, Father Joseph Turay.
