“Heroic” Entrepreneurship and Other Variants: Building Culturally Competent Paradigms

Abstract

19th Century English historian Thomas Carlyle envisioned an heroic minority transforming the world. Although his views were repudiated by social scientists, Fredrick Jackson Turner and Elbert Hubbard revived such thinking in the New World by connecting entrepreneur-like responses with American individualism. Today, a popular vision continues to connect entrepreneurship with towering individuals. Culturally competent models and perspectives that view entrepreneurship more broadly have a significant role in avoiding ethnocentrism through the development of appropriate perspectives.