A Postcolonial Analysis of Entrepreneurship in Africa
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Global measurement of entrepreneurial activity shows that entrepreneurship in Africa is growing. Similarly, research on African entrepreneurs and their entrepreneurial behaviour appear in an increasing number of scholarly articles. However we note an obvious neglect of a context sensitive approach to both the measurement of entrepreneurial activity and researching entrepreneurship in Africa. In this theoretical paper, we use postcolonial theory, and more specifically Edward Said’s idea about the misrepresentation of the Orient by the Occident, to illustrate how existing global measures of entrepreneurial activity fail to provide a real account of entrepreneurship for Africa. We then propose postcolonial theory as a useful analytical tool for researching Africa’s case. To justify this proposal, we analyse the region’s colonial history, large informal sector, heterogeneous population of entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurship and current geopolitical changes. We then use Homi Bhabha’s concept of the ‘third space’ and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s concept of subalternity to critically analyse entrepreneurship research in Africa. To end, we propose a shift towards methodologies which are more context sensitive, recognise the postcolonial setting of Africa and allow agency to emerge during fieldwork.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it