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Social Backgrounds of the Bogotá Entrepreneur*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Aaron Lipman
Aaron Lipman*
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida
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Extract

A sample of Bogotá entrepreneurs suggests that their social origins and backgrounds differ markedly from those of the general Colombian population. The entrepreneur is well-educated, urban, and comes from a predominantly middle class background, in a society that is mainly rural, has a low educational level, and an overwhelmingly large lower class.

As Weber and Tawney have pointed out, the emergence of the entrepreneur is inevitably affected by his cultural milieu. Motivations and goals making profit desirable are derived from the society which socializes him; he makes decisions which are influenced by the residues, values, and restraints which society places upon risk, risk-taking, and freedom of economic choice. The entrepreneurial role, with its behavioral expectations, occupies a status granted it by a society—a status not fully derived from the power of wealth or capital manipulation, but from traditional prestige values and traditional concepts of the “good life” and the definition of the individual's proper relationship to his society. Some societies appear to breed entrepreneurs more readily than others, and encourage their appearance through offering differential rewards and incentives.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Inter-American Studies , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , April 1965 , pp. 227 - 235
Copyright
Copyright © University of Miami 1965

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Footnotes

*

Paper presented at the Southern Sociological Society meetings in Asheville, N. C., April 1964. (My thanks are due to Dr. Bryce Ryan for valuable assistance in the preparation of this paper. A.L.)

References

1 Turner, Ralph, The Great Cultural Traditions, I (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1941), 284.Google Scholar

2 Ibid., p. 144.

3 Linton, Ralph, The Tree of Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955), p. 308 Google ScholarPubMed.

4 Cf. Asher N. Christensen, “A Changing Society and Economy,” p. 52, and Clagett, Helen L., “Law and Court Systems,” p. 349, in Davis, Harold E., ed., Government and Politics in Latin America (New York: Ronald Press Company, 1958)Google Scholar.

5 Orlando Fals Borda, El hombre y la tierra en Boyacá (Bogotá: Ediciones Documentos Colombianos, 1957), p. 213.

6 See Hagen, E. E., On the Theory of Social Change (Homewood, Illinois: The Dorsey Press, 1962), p. 30.Google Scholar

7 In his mimeographed study, “Values and Personality in Extension Work in Latin America.”

8 Alexander, Robert J., Today's Latin America (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1962), p. 189.Google Scholar

9 Ibid.

10 Newcomer, Mabel, The Big Business Executive (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), p. 43.Google Scholar

11 Wm. Warner, Lloyd and Abegglen, James C., Occupational Mobility (Mineapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955), p. 90 Google Scholar.

12 Anuario General de Estadística, Colombia, 1962, p. 220.

13 Orlando Fals Borda, La educación en Colombia (Bogotá: Facultad de Sociología, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 1962), p. 28.

14 Warner and Abegglen, op. cit., p. 85.

15 Lauchlin Currie, Operation Colombia, Bogotá May 24, 1961, p. 3.

16 See for example, Riesman, David, The Lonely Crowd(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950)Google Scholar, who sees a historical process of development in the individual from tradition to inner-to other-direction, reflecting changes in the social structure; also, Georg Simmel, The Metropolis and Mental Life, from K. Wolff, trans'., The Sociology of Georg Simmel (Glencoe, III.: The Free Press, 1950), speaks of the effects of the metropolis on the psychic life of the individual.

17 Lipset, Seymour and Bendix, Reinhard, Social Mobility in Industrial Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), p. 134.Google Scholar

18 Merton, Robert K., Social Theory and Social Structure (Glencoe, III.: The Free Press, 1957), p. 359.Google Scholar

19 Ibid., p. 367.