A new approach to understanding Faith integration in Entrepreneurship

Brett R. Smith, Michael J. Conger, Jeffery S. McMullen and Mitchell J. Neubert, "Why believe? The promise of research on the role of religion in entrepreneurial action", Journal of Business Venturing Insights, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbvi.2019.e00119.

This new article by Smith, Conger et. al. (2019) comes out of the excellent work being done at Baylor University on the interaction between faith and entrepreneurial action. At the individual level, their recent work "extends prior research focused beyond business and personal economic motivations (e.g., Shepherd and Patlzelt, 2017)", to ask the question as to why people of faith engage in entrepreneurial activities. They land on the idea that integration of action and belief is a major motivator - but what are the positive, and the potentially negative (the 'dark side') aspects of this sort of integration? The authors identify a number of religious antecedents of opportunity beliefs  along with a range of motivating outcomes for Christian involvement in entrepreneurial activity. The antecedents include:

• knowledge
• development
• identity salience
• calling

The motivating outcomes include:

• financial gain for others,
• prosocial service of others,
• sharing religion,
• honoring God

This, and the necessary variation between individuals, is an indicator of why current entrepreneurial modelling in the economic literature is inadequate. Individuals vary not only on whether but also on how to integrate religion in entrepreneurship – ranging from values of a founder to an integrated business-as-mission view (Miller et al., forthcoming).

This presents both a problem and an opportunity for the literature. There is, the authors indicate, a growing variation in the range of individuals within the entrepreneurial ecosystem [i.e., entrepreneurs, investors, accelerators and clergy], who are seeking to integrate religion and entrepreneurship, leading to an initial foundation for what they call ‘religious organizing.’ The authors suggest that there are three theoretical perspectives (identity, sensemaking, and boundary) that may contribute to a stronger theoretical foundation for advancing research on religion and entrepreneurship.

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