ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a number of situated entrepreneurial stories of people in Spain and Ireland. As Holt and Macpherson argue, entrepreneurship is not a state, but a process based on the collaborative and on-going reconciliation of multiple views and voices. As Bruner suggests, narratives help to institutionalise social practices by giving legitimacy to the known and expected. The research strategy involved a qualitative methodology to gather both personal entrepreneur narratives, as well as public sphere representations of entrepreneurs, both in Spain and Ireland. The narrative analysis of the Irish and Spanish necessity entrepreneur material presents some clear commonalities with the existing media analysis for those respondents who engage in the entrepreneurial Quest narrative. Indeed, with governments seeking to encourage unemployed people to become entrepreneurs, and with policy based on the entrepreneur-as-hero trope, we are in need of a more nuanced view of both entrepreneurs and the entrepreneurial process.
