Entrepreneurship and birth order: fact or folklore

Abstract

Prior research into the birth order of entrepreneurs has supported the commonly held belief that entrepreneurs tend to be first–born children. Traditional birth–order theory and our research question this belief and its supporting research for three fundamental reasons. First, conceptually, birth order does not facilitate the prediction of entrepreneurial tendencies nor does it enable us to influence an individual in the direction of entrepreneurial pursuits, two basic goals of social science theory and research. Second, conclusions from research on entrepreneurs and birth order are inconsistent with and do not support the predictions of traditional birth–order theory. Finally, birth–order research in the area of entrepreneurship has been plagued by poor methodological control of intervening variables such as family size, socio–economic level, and education levels. An empirical test using the necessary methodological controls was conducted. As hypothesized, no relationship was found between entrepreneurship and birth order.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.