Entrepreneuring as existential transformation: a review of entrepreneurial identity with a typology of career and personal change
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Emancipatory entrepreneuring, the actions taken to liberate oneself from work and life constraints, transforms the lives of entrepreneurs’ and has implications for entrepreneurial identity. However, this phenomenon is poorly understood. In this conceptual paper, we draw from literature of entrepreneurial discovery and emancipatory entrepreneuring to develop a typology of entrepreneurial transformation experienced by nascent entrepreneurs, thereby contributing to existing work on constructions of entrepreneurial identity. The main contribution of this paper is the conceptualization of four types of entrepreneurial transformation (minimal, career, personal, and existential) involving changes to the entrepreneur’s personal life, career, or both. The fourth quadrant of this typology—Existential Transformation, shows the highest level of transformation to both the personal and career lives of the entrepreneur. In this quadrant, we see emancipatory entrepreneuring as a fully agentic exercise, with one dually focusing on the identification and pursuit of change at the level of self to become the person one wants to be, integrated with the pursuit of a successful entrepreneurial venture that aligns what one does for a living with whom one wishes to be. We discuss all four types of entrepreneurial transformation, the factors that induce them, and implications to theory and practice.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".