{"id":{"repo_id":"uiuc","oai_identifier":"oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/31152"},"canonical_url":"https://search.dev.ndltd.org/etd/uiuc/oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/31152","repository":{"repo_id":"uiuc","name":"University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign","base_url":"https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh"},"display":{"title":"No soy conformista: reassessing necessity and opportunity motivations for micro entrepreneurship in Lima, Peru","abstract":"Increasingly, in the field of entrepreneurial studies, venture creation is dichotomously conceived as an activity willfully undertaken to seize a business opportunity or reluctantly performed as a last resort in the face of a weak and/or inaccessible labor market. This schema purports that an entrepreneur’s disposition is fixed at the moment of business start-up, and is indicative of future performance. Opportunity types are more likely to reap substantial profits, expand, hire more workers, and ultimately contribute, on a macro-level, to higher rates of economic growth. Necessity types are subsistence-oriented, survival is the goal, and thus their contributions to national wealth are negligible. My findings, derived from open-ended, unstructured interviews with twenty-seven migrant micro entrepreneurs in Lima, Peru, complicate the “necessity-opportunity model”, and its implications. Participants’ narratives demonstrate that motivations co-exist, and tend to shift as firms and their founder’s develop; cultural and social dimensions are often just as influential as economic forces in inducing venture creation; human, social, and financial capital are the more relevant variables determining a firm’s growth potential. I also delve into entrepreneurial theory and use historical analysis to challenge the necessity-opportunity model’s theoretical foundations. I conclude by demonstrating how policy recommendations based in the dichotomy are misguided, and how they threaten to undermine the socio-economic advances made by Andean empresarios over the last two decades.","abstract_html":"Increasingly, in the field of entrepreneurial studies, venture creation is dichotomously conceived as an activity willfully undertaken to seize a business opportunity or reluctantly performed as a last resort in the face of a weak and/or inaccessible labor market. This schema purports that an entrepreneur’s disposition is fixed at the moment of business start-up, and is indicative of future performance. Opportunity types are more likely to reap substantial profits, expand, hire more workers, and ultimately contribute, on a macro-level, to higher rates of economic growth. Necessity types are subsistence-oriented, survival is the goal, and thus their contributions to national wealth are negligible. My findings, derived from open-ended, unstructured interviews with twenty-seven migrant micro entrepreneurs in Lima, Peru, complicate the “necessity-opportunity model”, and its implications. Participants’ narratives demonstrate that motivations co-exist, and tend to shift as firms and their founder’s develop; cultural and social dimensions are often just as influential as economic forces in inducing venture creation; human, social, and financial capital are the more relevant variables determining a firm’s growth potential. I also delve into entrepreneurial theory and use historical analysis to challenge the necessity-opportunity model’s theoretical foundations. I conclude by demonstrating how policy recommendations based in the dichotomy are misguided, and how they threaten to undermine the socio-economic advances made by Andean empresarios over the last two decades.","abstract_has_math":false,"creators":["Duffy, Daniel"],"institution":"University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign","degree_name":"M.A.","degree_level":"Thesis","degree_discipline":"Latin American Studies","degree_department":null,"school":null,"contributors":["Orta, Andrew"],"advisors":[],"committee_chairs":[],"committee_members":[],"year":2012,"date_issued":"2012-05-22T00:31:23Z","date_published":"2012-05-22T00:31:23Z","updated_at":"2026-07-22T22:25:30Z","subjects":["Microenterprise","Entrepreneurship","Necessity","Opportunity","Lima","Peru"],"languages":["en"],"rights":["Copyright 2012 Daniel Duffy"],"rights_urls":[],"identifier_entries":[]},"links":{"outbound_url":"http://hdl.handle.net/2142/31152","outbound_label":"Handle","outbound_source":"dc:identifier"},"metadata_groups":[{"id":"people","label":"People","entries":[{"key":"dc:contributor","label":"Contributor","values":["Orta, Andrew"]},{"key":"dc:creator","label":"Author","values":["Duffy, Daniel"]}]},{"id":"academic_context","label":"Academic Context","entries":[{"key":"dc:date","label":"Dc Date","values":["2012-05-22T00:31:23Z","2012-05"]},{"key":"dc:type","label":"Dc Type","values":["text"]},{"key":"thesis:degree_discipline","label":"Discipline","values":["Latin American Studies"]},{"key":"thesis:degree_level","label":"Degree Level","values":["Thesis"]},{"key":"thesis:degree_name","label":"Degree Name","values":["M.A."]},{"key":"thesis:institution_name","label":"Thesis Institution Name","values":["University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign"]}]},{"id":"subjects_keywords","label":"Subjects and Keywords","entries":[{"key":"dc:subject","label":"Dc Subject","values":["Microenterprise","Entrepreneurship","Necessity","Opportunity","Lima","Peru"]}]},{"id":"language_rights","label":"Language and Rights","entries":[{"key":"dc:language","label":"Dc Language","values":["en"]},{"key":"dc:rights","label":"Dc Rights","values":["Copyright 2012 Daniel Duffy"]}]},{"id":"identifiers","label":"Identifiers","entries":[{"key":"dc:identifier","label":"Identifier","values":["http://hdl.handle.net/2142/31152"]}]},{"id":"additional","label":"Additional Metadata","entries":[{"key":"dc:description","label":"Description","values":["Increasingly, in the field of entrepreneurial studies, venture creation is dichotomously conceived as an activity willfully undertaken to seize a business opportunity or reluctantly performed as a last resort in the face of a weak and/or inaccessible labor market. This schema purports that an entrepreneur’s disposition is fixed at the moment of business start-up, and is indicative of future performance. Opportunity types are more likely to reap substantial profits, expand, hire more workers, and ultimately contribute, on a macro-level, to higher rates of economic growth. Necessity types are subsistence-oriented, survival is the goal, and thus their contributions to national wealth are negligible. My findings, derived from open-ended, unstructured interviews with twenty-seven migrant micro entrepreneurs in Lima, Peru, complicate the “necessity-opportunity model”, and its implications. Participants’ narratives demonstrate that motivations co-exist, and tend to shift as firms and their founder’s develop; cultural and social dimensions are often just as influential as economic forces in inducing venture creation; human, social, and financial capital are the more relevant variables determining a firm’s growth potential. I also delve into entrepreneurial theory and use historical analysis to challenge the necessity-opportunity model’s theoretical foundations. I conclude by demonstrating how policy recommendations based in the dichotomy are misguided, and how they threaten to undermine the socio-economic advances made by Andean empresarios over the last two decades.","Item withdrawn by Mark Zulauf (zulauf@illinois.edu) on 2012-04-24T13:59:02Z Item was in collections: University of Illinois Theses & Dissertations (ID: 1) No. of bitstreams: 2 Duffy_Daniel.pdf.docx: 160514 bytes, checksum: 65f63f3ec876747eafeb71f802fb9671 (MD5) Duffy_Daniel.pdf: 562647 bytes, checksum: 6a0cb142e03f6709116b2437fc21a96a (MD5)","Made available in DSpace on 2012-05-22T00:31:23Z (GMT). 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Opportunity types are more likely to reap substantial profits, expand, hire more workers, and ultimately contribute, on a macro-level, to higher rates of economic growth. Necessity types are subsistence-oriented, survival is the goal, and thus their contributions to national wealth are negligible. My findings, derived from open-ended, unstructured interviews with twenty-seven migrant micro entrepreneurs in Lima, Peru, complicate the “necessity-opportunity model”, and its implications. Participants’ narratives demonstrate that motivations co-exist, and tend to shift as firms and their founder’s develop; cultural and social dimensions are often just as influential as economic forces in inducing venture creation; human, social, and financial capital are the more relevant variables determining a firm’s growth potential. I also delve into entrepreneurial theory and use historical analysis to challenge the necessity-opportunity model’s theoretical foundations. 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