Cultural Achievement Values

How does national culture influence entrepreneurship? Three perspectives dominate culture-entrepreneurship research –the internalized cultural values, legitimacy, and social support perspectives– that articulate distinct theoretical mechanisms, yield partially contradictory predictions, and are difficult to disentangle from one another. We offer a fresh approach to culture-entrepreneurship research by drawing on McClelland’s seminal work (1961) on country-level cultural and individual-level personal achievement values to decouple the theoretical mechanisms proposed by the internalized cultural values perspective from other cultural perspectives and contextual influences. We use second-generation immigrants who were born and live in a specific country but were raised in families of different ancestries as our empirical context. This empirical design allows us to hold constant the normative and formal institutional mechanisms associated with the legitimacy and social support perspectives, and to focus on the internalized cultural values perspective. We argue that second-generation immigrants are more likely to be entrepreneurs if their country-of-ancestry culture is characterized by high levels of cultural achievement values—and that this relation is mediated by individuals’ personal achievement values. Data on 4,380 second-generation immigrants of 32 ancestries support these propositions. This study highlights the relevance of the internalized cultural values perspective, underscores the importance of disentangling the distinct theoretical mechanisms through which culture influences entrepreneurship, and sheds light on how culture matters—for entrepreneurship and beyond.