CHAPTER 9
What Is the Context? Fostering Entrepreneurial Leaders’ Social Awareness
We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.
—Anaïs Nin
BY THE END OF CAITLYN’S FIRST EVENING IN THE COUNTRY, THE Ghanaian fishmongers had reduced her to tears. Caitlyn had traveled to Ghana excited about the opportunity to advise Ghanaians on how to improve their businesses. During her first evening of consultations, however, the women in her small group openly mocked her. Whenever she offered a new idea, the women laughed, “What do you think this is— America?”
The next day Caitlyn took a different approach. She asked questions and listened intently. The women slowly opened up and explained the entire process—from how fish are caught to how they are sold at the market. More importantly, they helped Caitlyn understand how the community operates and the social relations and practices that surround the fishing industry. Although Caitlyn did not solve these business owners’ problems, by listening and learning about the Ghanaian context she was able to advise the group in a way that was consistent with the social processes that make the Ghanaian fishing industry work.
It is not radical to argue that understanding self- and social context is a prerequisite to addressing social problems, embarking on new expansion opportunities, and making global business initiatives work at the local level. This principle forms the basis of many organizational strategies. For example, HSBC, which brands itself as “the world’s local bank,” built this idea into its ubiquitous “Different Points of Value” 2009 ad campaign (Financial Brand 2009). Building on its belief that “differences create value,” HSBC developed a highly successful ad campaign that challenged the viewer to consider personal points of view on a number of topics and to recognize the many contradictory points of view that exist around the world.
For example, one print advertisement features three identical photographs, arranged side by side, of a finely detailed Persian carpet. The word décor is superimposed over the first, souvenir over the second, and place of prayer over the third. In another print ad, freedom is superimposed over the photo of a classic American sports car zooming down a tree-lined road, status symbol is over the second photo, and polluter is over the third. HSBC has stated that this ad campaign echoes the same dilemmas the organization faces as it tries to be aware of and responsive to the viewpoints and the practices of local communities (Green 2008).
As these examples illustrate, it is not enough for entrepreneurial leaders to simply recognize different viewpoints and the contextual differences of the local environment; they must also know how to engage this understanding to guide their actions. To develop this understanding, we work with students to reflect on their own identities, biases, and assumptions of the way the world works and to consider how this worldview compares with that of the context in which they are operating. When entrepreneurial leaders consider the unique perspectives and practices that embody a local context, they are able to successfully and responsibly discover avenues for change.
In chapter 8 we outlined the innovative approach we take to nurture entrepreneurial leaders’ self-awareness. In this chapter we expand beyond the individual focus to explore the importance of cultivating social awareness.
The Need to Consider Social Context
Over the past 20 years, we have moved from a single view of the “objective” reality of business and management practices to an increased emphasis on how individual perspective and culture shape our “objective” realities. Behavioral economics, for example, arose out of the recognition that individual desires, emotions, and psychological traits have an impact on economic decision-making (Kahneman and Tversky 1979; Simon 1996). This has expanded into broader recognition of the roles that culture and social norms play in determining what individuals consider valuable during economic interactions.
The work of the French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher Pierre Bourdieu has been particularly influential in enhancing our understanding of the relationship between individual action and the construction of society. Seeking to bridge arguments about the relationship between individual action and social structure, Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) begin with the idea that most of what we do every day is governed by informal rules and unconscious decision-making. Our individual actions reflect our socialization into the diverse “fields” in which we act; a “field” can be anything from a community to an academic discipline to a corporate department to a country.
Students, for example, easily recognize that their goals and behaviors in a nightclub on Saturday differ from those with their families on Sunday, which differs from those in the classroom on Monday. They also realize that they generally do not consciously think about how they act in each setting. Thus for entrepreneurial leaders to understand how individuals conceive of their interests, it is critical that they learn about the beliefs, norms, and perspectives that shape perceptions of behavior.
Bourdieu’s views on the relationship between the individual and the social structure are already embedded in many important management principles. For example, when academics and managers discuss organizational culture, they are referencing the relationship between the individual and the social structure. In connecting culture to strategy, we are educating students on how cultural values and norms guide individual behavior toward collective action. In discussing socialization, we teach managers how to proactively introduce individuals to the organizational context and help them quickly and easily adapt their actions to fit that context (Rollag, Parise, and Cross 2005).
These discussions are useful for introducing management students to the concept of context, but they often don’t go deep enough. Entrepreneurial leaders need to develop the skills and the knowledge to fully understand how social identity is created, how identities are important to the construction of social networks, how rules and institutions shape behavior, and how context affects decision-making. By understanding the ways in which social identities—both our own and those of others—are constructed, entrepreneurial leaders explore the normative assumptions and behaviors that affect their ability to move new ideas forward.
Better Place CEO Shai Agassi, for example, has railed against groupthink in the auto industry. He believes that major car companies assume that the way people use cars will remain the same. As a result, companies are overly focused on increasing fuel efficiency and maintaining financial models based on selling cars. Agassi argues that electrification of vehicles could cause a paradigm shift in the way people use and fundamentally think about cars. We use the term cognitive locks to describe situations in which decision-making fails because individuals, individually or collectively, fail to examine an issue in an innovative way. When cognitive lock sets in, an individual will simply try harder rather than recognize that the causal effects of our actions may be historically or culturally contingent and our actions may need to change in light of changing contexts (see, for example, Blyth 2001).
Moreover, socially constructed identities create advantages and disadvantages when entrepreneurial leaders try to move an opportunity forward. Understanding the privilege granted to some perspectives means becoming aware that certain kinds of knowledge, insights, and ways of acting have been undervalued or even silenced. This is also true when thinking specifically about social positioning, which has significant implications for individuals’ ability to access various social networks, for how social networks can be used as a resource, and for how resources can be mobilized through social networks. For example, organizational initiatives around diversity and inclusiveness are about recognizing the value of those who historically have been marginalized, and they provide insight on what we are losing by not having networks that include diverse perspectives.
Developing a deep understanding of identity and context is therefore important to releasing creativity in problem solving. In this respect it is important to note that Bourdieu speaks not just of how our actions reflect and reinforce social norms but also how we can act in ways that modify and challenge such norms. Entrepreneurial leaders need to view culture and social practice as both a constraint and a resource. Thus when embarking on new endeavors, entrepreneurial leaders can decide whether to accept culture as a constraint or to act in ways that can modify existing social practices and beliefs.
Teaching Entrepreneurial
Leaders Social Awareness
While it is clear that entrepreneurial leaders need to understand their identities and develop their social awareness, the challenge is that these ideas are rarely taught in business schools or management development programs. The lack of deep understanding of social context and perspective is at the heart of recent criticisms of management education that focus predominately on maximizing economic profit.
One reason for the dearth of contextual learning opportunities in business curricula is the suspicion with which the related research in the realms of management context, organizational culture, and employee perspectives is regarded. For researchers to capture, study, and translate the gray area of context, they usually have to do so through qualitative, ethnographic research methods. As quantitative research remains the dominant paradigm in most management disciplines, this qualitative research is often dismissed as anecdotal. Until management disciplines learn to embrace and value qualitative social science methods, we do not expect that management students will find many learning opportunities that will enable them to investigate a corporate or industrial context through a contextual lens (Van Maanen 2011). Of course, another possibility is to open up management education to other disciplinary perspectives such as the social sciences, design research, or courses like the ones described later in this chapter.
We recognize the complexity of teaching any individual, particularly management students, how to consider identity, context, and perspective in their decision-making. As students learn about perspective, they must acknowledge their own biases and assumptions and be willing to challenge them in light of new data. As such, learning opportunities regarding perspective and context must be well crafted to achieve these goals. This chapter focuses on learning opportunities that are designed to build social awareness through encounters with “exotic” cultures, yet we want to acknowledge that it is also possible to create these same experiences close to home.
For example, in our course The Enlightened Entrepreneur, we have found that local cultural studies provide a powerful learning opportunity. In one exercise students choose a person to investigate and inquire about the frequency of a particular behavior, such as study or eating habits. After a week of observing that specific behavior, students discover the discrepancy between statements about behavior and the actual behavior. As a class we discuss what motivates people to consciously or unconsciously misreport and how those tendencies are socially constructed and embedded in notions of what is acceptable or desirable in a given culture.
This exercise conveys the essence of storytelling truth—that a narrative can be as much about what we want as it is about what is. The exercise prepares students to then approach, infiltrate, and shadow the daily activities of a local social venture to capture the essence of the lived world of social entrepreneurs. In this “familiar” context, students anticipated that they would not discover anything new because they had read about social entrepreneurship and believed they knew the terrain. This exercise proves to be a valuable lesson in accepting text as only one of the many crucial sources in their search for understanding the world around them.
In the next section, we highlight two other learning programs we created to teach future entrepreneurial leaders how to be aware of and responsive to social context. One course engages a liberal arts orientation and the other a business orientation. As such they are designed differently and follow different conceptual structures. Despite these differences, you will notice many parallels between the programs. Both start with on-campus meetings to provide an overview of context and then follow with a short trip to explore another country and context. While in-country, students are encouraged to observe, listen, and engage. In this way the programs encourage epiphanies and reflection. The natural toggling between being an observer and being a participant helps students identify the exotic in the local and the everyday in the global and to fully examine the social construction of local norms and values. By developing an understanding of the origin and the nature of identity and behavior, it became possible for these future entrepreneurial leaders to imagine creating new ways of interacting within both their own and very different contexts.
Supporting Local Development
Opportunities in Ghana
For five years we have run a short course in which our students teach entrepreneurship and basic business planning in Sekondi-Takoradi, Ghana. Most course participants encounter a social context in Ghana that is radically different from their own, forcing them to question and reconstruct some of their basic beliefs about business and entrepreneurship. They learn that their knowledge about what constitutes economic rationality, marketing success, and financial management is culturally contingent. In other words, what are assumed to be universal laws in the United States, or even in developed countries, simply do not work in a Ghanaian town.
This overseas course is structured around a one-week experience in Ghana during which participants work in high schools, teaching students how to write a business plan and preparing them to participate in a business plan competition created for the program. Course participants also provide business consulting to adults. Outside of the program requirements, participants have also established a microfund and expanded an existing program for local high school students to teach elementary school students the importance of saving and other basic economic lessons.
Prior to traveling to Ghana, participants attend three weekend preparation classes in which they are introduced to the historical, political, and cultural context that surrounds Ghana and Africa more broadly. Discussions focus on the broader theoretical perspectives on state capacity, contentions between identity groups, and evolving debates on development. Finally, we discuss the business climate and the educational system in Ghana, as these are the aspects of the social context with which participants will interact most. While these discussions provide background, we know it is difficult to fully appreciate differences in context and perspective until one confronts those differences in person. As such, when one is focused on helping entrepreneurial leaders understand perspective and context, it is essential to provide them with opportunities to experience different social contexts firsthand.
There are a number of unique ways in which we structure the program in Ghana to help participants develop skills to recognize and respond to differences in context and perspective. Participants confront myriad situations that do not conform to their own mental maps of how the world operates. The entire experience provides these provocative challenges to students’ entrenched ideas. Reflecting on his experience teaching high school students, one participant said:
Before leaving, I mapped out how to teach our Ghanaian students entrepreneurship. However, as with any journey of discovery, at some point you must leave the map behind. It was not enough to simply understand entrepreneurship or to know there would be differences in culture and values. We had to understand our Ghanaian students. What motivates them to learn? What do they value? How do they view the world in which they live? What events have shaped their lives? Only after asking ourselves questions like these could we truly stand before our students and engage them.
Working with the adults also fosters intense learning opportunities. During these sessions course participants are on their own with individuals who have businesses that they and their families depend on for survival. Below we share two such learning moments to illustrate how these situations enabled participants to break out of their cognitive locks and understand the importance of social awareness to engaging in entrepreneurial leadership.
In the first situation, course participants consulted with a woman who sold chips made of flour and butter. The woman put the chips into small bags, placed the bags into a giant bowl that she carried on her head, and, like many women in town, wandered around selling them. She asked the consultants to help her explore how to better promote her business without spending any money.
In considering this issue, the students initially focused on the fact that there was no company name, no location, and no way to differentiate the product. The business was so unlike any that the students studied that branding and marketing lessons were irrelevant. The woman’s complete lack of financial resources only compounded the problem. She was selling just like everyone else in town and had a difficult time imagining another approach. As the students focused on the woman’s identity and context, they moved away from a predictive orientation to a creation orientation to consider the resources that she could garner. Because the woman had a beautiful voice, the students encouraged her to use this resource and sing during her route so that she might be easier to find and could become known as the “gospel-singing chip lady.”
In another situation, course participants worked with a woman who bought shoes in town for 5 Ghana cedis (GhC) and sold them in rural areas for 5.50 GhC. All of her customers wanted to purchase shoes on credit, however, and promised to pay her in two weeks. Two weeks later her customers would tell her they could not pay the full amount but would pay in another two weeks. Everyone paid eventually. In the meantime the woman had no cash to buy more shoes or to buy food for her children. If she didn’t sell on credit, she believed that her customers would buy from another vendor who would sell on credit. While this was difficult for course participants to understand, as they asked more-insightful questions they identified a deeper issue: the woman was fundamentally afraid that people would call her a bad Christian and ostracize her if she didn’t sell on credit. Because the norms of selling were a constraint that could not be changed, participants explored with her ways she could better save money to create a cushion.
Through a process of questioning and reflective listening, participants came to understand the different role that religion plays in Ghanaian culture. Ghana has few active civil society organizations outside the church or mosque, particularly in the region where the course operates. Low crime rates and enforcement of contracts, as this example illustrates, seem to reflect religious values and the ability of churches and mosques, instead of civic culture, to enforce norms on members. Religion is also central to Ghanaian social networks. Over the years multiple Ghanaians have told the students that while they do not really trust anyone in their own church, they would never even consider going into business with someone of another faith. For North American students who rarely consider how religion and religious context factor into a business decision, understanding the importance of religion enables them to explore fundamentally different solutions to the problems facing many Ghanaian entrepreneurs.
Through these experiences students also learn why contextual differences exist. While some reflect primarily differences in the role of religion or the fact that most people are perpetually short of cash, others arise due to differences in government policy. For example, very few people in Ghana maintain business records. Because sole-proprietor businesses in Ghana do not have to pay taxes or comply with other regulations that would necessitate bookkeeping, it does not occur. Consequently, businesses are often extensions of the household.
For example, if one has a “provisions store” (often a tiny kiosk in front of the house that sells such things as beverages and soap) and the children are thirsty, they take a soda from the store. As there is no accounting for what the household consumes, it is difficult to determine the profitability of this business. Our students learn that how they respond to these local differences will vary depending on whether the actions are connected to social behavior, government policy, cultural history, or some other contextual factor. This learning is essential, as it helps students establish strategies for how to respond to differences in identity and context.
The final component of the program design occurs when participants return home. After the overseas experience, they are required to write a paper that explores themes from the previsit work in conjunction with their observations, interviews, and experiences in Ghana. As most of the student-selected topics are related to issues of social practice, it gives students a focus for their observations and provides a route to engage Ghanaians in conversation about their lives. This paper cements students’ learning, as it forces them to critically reflect on their experience and really explore the deep and diverse perspectives that exist in Ghana. As one student noted, “Only after reflecting on our experiences could the lessons we learned be truly appreciated.” With a little distance from the experience, participants can reflect on their own assumptions about Ghana and explore how they will approach context and perspective differently in the future.
Encountering Social Entrepreneurship in Turkey
In another short-term offshore elective, we have used a different learning experience to teach students the importance of social and contextual awareness. In this elective, which is centered in cultural anthropology, participants spend three weeks in Turkey doing research with a for-profit social venture, çöp (m)adam. At çöp (m)adam women who have never worked for pay learn to make marketable goods out of garbage. While the explicit program objectives are to learn about social venture and Turkish culture, the implicit focus is to teach participants to recognize the complexities in unfamiliar contexts, to suspend judgment, and to take action. As such there are a number of social experiments designed into the course to facilitate this learning.
Before leaving for Turkey, course participants attend a number of workshops designed to illustrate some of the implicit assumptions students are making about the program and their own value and impact on the women who work at çöp (m)adam.
For example, in one session we discussed the concept of reciprocity and how we could contribute to these women who are opening up their lives for three weeks. As this course is explicitly about social entrepreneurship, some students suggested that they could provide the most value to these women by teaching them about entrepreneurship. This response yielded a lively discussion about some of the implicit assumptions we make about the needs of others to be entrepreneurs and the importance of recognizing that these assumptions are not universally held. The students eventually realized that they needed to ask questions to understand how best to help someone else. As a result, they considered identity and social awareness through discussions that engaged others’ perspectives and reality.
In a later session, when students posed their questions to one of the founders of çöp (m)adam, Tara Hopkins, she responded to their offers of assistance by suggesting that they could help the most by collecting corks. There was a palpable drop in energy level when students heard that their biggest contribution would be serving as cork mules. These budding entrepreneurial leaders wanted to go to Turkey to change lives, to make a difference. They were not ready to ponder the possibility that the country would change them, that the experience would change their perspectives and their lives.
Upon arriving in Turkey, students participate in another ethnographic experiment designed to further complicate their understanding of social context. The students participate in a citywide scavenger hunt in which a small group is paired with a local Turkish-speaking university student. When the group reconvenes, participants share adjectives that they believe describe Istanbul. With one student group, the list that was generated included:
Crowded
Clean
Old
Lots of soccer
Lots of miniskirts
Beggars
Rich
Ghetto
Huge
Lots of headscarves
Dirty
Lots of poverty
As we reviewed our joint description of the social context, we asked participants if they agreed that these adjectives described Istanbul. Not surprisingly, they were quick to point out their disagreements with the list. The participant from Pakistan thought Istanbul was clean, while the participant from New Hampshire thought it was filthy. The participant from North Dakota saw a great deal of wealth, while the participant from New York City saw poverty. Through this discussion participants understood how their own individual identity affects their interpretation of the social context. This reiterates the importance of understanding one’s own identity before one can understand others’.
Course participants also come to understand the variance of experience that underlies a social context. Those who visited more-conservative neighborhoods were thrilled to hear about pierced navels, hot pants, and rock music on the other side of town. Those who traveled to the wealthier districts were surprised to learn that their nascent understanding of Istanbul as a beautiful city of yachts and luxury shopping malls did not reconcile with those who reported seeing begging women with undernourished children.
While participants may have been initially applauding themselves for paying attention to the social context, they soon recognized the diversity of experience that underlies any situation; they also realized that they made uninformed assumptions about the context and that if they wanted to understand a local context, they needed to engage those who went beyond their own experiences. Participants learn that there is no one truth to the context and that it is possible to look at something without really seeing it. Through these experiments students develop the skills to ask questions and engage others to understand the variance of the social context before they begin a course of action.
Once students understand the concept of differing perspectives, they must develop the skills for suspending judgment as they explore those perspectives. For example, one course participant was interested in learning how one woman’s life had changed as a result of new employment and income. When she asked an interpreter for help asking this question, the interpreter checked to make sure that the student meant to convey her unquestioned assumption that change had indeed occurred. A response to this question would require the interviewee to report change. What if she had not experienced change? The student learned to rephrase the question without bias by asking, “Has your life changed since you started working for pay?” Through this experience the student not only learned about how to pay attention to context but also how to develop the skills for learning about contextual differences in a way that is not laden with value.
Often contextual learning cannot be predesigned by the professor; rather it emerges from the situations in which participants find themselves. In one conversation a student mentioned her anger and deep frustration that these women live in a “state of oppression” as indicated by their clothing and headscarves. After discussing the multiple ways in which female dress in Turkey is a type of cultural text that can convey political beliefs, regional identity, family position, religious beliefs, or just aesthetic preferences, we encouraged this student to explore this issue with the women who came to work at çöp (m)adam. In discussions these women stated that they preferred being covered up. The student, however, still did not fully believe they were basing their responses on a conscious personal choice.
Later, during a visit to Bergama, a shopkeeper invited the student to sit in his tent and have a glass of tea. As he spoke to her in broken English, he approached her and stood over her left shoulder. When she turned to look at him in conversation, she realized that he was staring straight down her tank top. Disgusted, she got up and left, returning to the group and reporting in a derogatory manner, “That perv was staring straight down my tank top!” In a small town in Turkey, where genders seldom mingle between puberty and marriage, the choice for a female tourist is between dressing modestly or being ogled in a most obvious way. This young American in shorts and a tank top, traveling through small-town Turkey, was now in a position to understand how women in different societies have, and must negotiate, very different choices.
Conclusion
Entrepreneurial leaders consider their impact on their community, understand the potential of their talents, and are mindful of their potential impact as members of society. The examples in this chapter highlight the creative approaches that educators can take to develop entrepreneurial leaders who consider context and perspective and understand how that knowledge is central to their actions. These examples rely on similar pedagogical tools to encourage students to appreciate the context under examination and to explore how their own identities and context affect how they view the problems and the feasible solutions.
Entrepreneurial leaders must be conscious of the roles of different types of learning, including participant observation. They must be prepared to observe, listen to, and engage individuals in conversations on perspective and practice. In both learning experiences discussed here, the initial response of many course participants to epiphanies about context was anger: “Why aren’t they more rational?” “Why aren’t they like us?” Only through further reflection do they realize how they have privileged their own perspective—that their beliefs and behaviors may not be “right” but simply one set among many. It is then that the students are on their way to becoming “enlightened” entrepreneurial leaders.
Through these experiences entrepreneurial leaders come to understand that their focus on enthusiasm and passion, while important, is not the entire story for imagining an entrepreneurial solution to a problem. Even when considering SEERS, entrepreneurial leaders cannot just assume what other people want and value. Context and perspective are fundamental to a solution, and the wrong kind of solution can be offered too easily for the right reasons. Entrepreneurial leaders must develop the skills to explore perspective and context, to understand deeply entrenched but unexamined behavioral patterns, and to consider how to deconstruct and reconstruct behaviors and attitudes in useful ways. The experiences described in this chapter enable entrepreneurial leaders to develop such skills.
References
Blyth, M. 2001. “The Transformation of the Swedish Model: Economic Ideas, Distributional Conflict, and Institutional Change.” World Politics 54 (1): 1–26.
Bourdieu, P., and L. Wacquant. 1992. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago.
Financial Brand. 2009. “HSBC ‘Different Points of Value.’” FinancialBrand.com, July 6. http://thefinancialbrand.com/6361/hsbc-brand.
Green, S. 2008. “A Conflict of Interests? Reconciling the Interests of Shareholders and Stakeholders.” Speech given to RiskMetrics Conference, Lausanne, Switzerland.
Kahneman, D., and A. Tversky. 1979. “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk.” Econometrica 47 (2): 263–91. http://www.princeton.edu/~kahneman/docs/Publications/prospect_theory.pdf.
Rollag, K., S. Parise, and R. Cross. 2005. “Getting New Hires Up to Speed Quickly.” MIT/Sloan Management Review 46 (2): 35–44.
Simon, H. A. 1996. The Sciences of the Artificial, 3rd edition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Van Maanen, J. 2011. “Ethnography as Work: Some Rules of Engagement.” Journal of Management Studies 48 (1): 202–18.