The crafting of African entrepreneurial legends: motivation, ideology and futures

Abstract

Entrepreneurs contribute to society in ways other than the production of new products and services, such as through philanthropy. Emergent African entrepreneurial philanthropy draws on entrepreneurship and transferrable knowledge techniques to pursue the development of social wealth. It has been argued that contemporary entrepreneurial philanthropy involves the application of multiple forms of capital in the pursuit of resolving pressing social and economic problems. Conceived of in this way, capital theory (Bourdieu, 1977, 1986, 1998) was identified as an appropriate conceptual lens through which to analyse the philanthropic activities of present day emergent African entrepreneurial philanthropists. According to Harvey et al. (2019) it is argued that situated within the philanthropic arena, entrepreneurs make use of their significant wealth (economic capital), entrepreneurial know-how (cultural capital), know-who (social capital) and reputations or brand (symbolic capital) to create innovative solutions to deep-seated social problems. To a lesser extent, entrepreneurial philanthropists imagination of a formal vehicle to convey philanthropy in the future via the use of many dimensions of projectivity (Mische, 2009) including reach, breadth, clarity, contingency, connectivity, expandability, volition, sociality and genre. The goal of the research is to clarify and comprehend the phenomena of emergent African entrepreneurial philanthropy. It focuses on: emergent African entrepreneurs' motives for giving; emergent African entrepreneurial philanthropy's philosophy; and the many kinds of imaginations actively deployed by emergent African entrepreneurial philanthropists to conceptualise a future transition to a career in philanthropy. The relationship between emergent entrepreneurship and philanthropy in sub-Saharan Africa is investigated in this exploratory study. The vast majority of entrepreneurial philanthropy have been conducted in Western countries. As a result, Africa, remains an understudied area of research. This study use a qualitative research method to accomplish this goal. Fifty-one entrepreneurial philanthropists were interviewed in semi-structured qualitative interviews across three sub-Saharan African countries among the ten with the largest economies in Africa. The countries selected were Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa. This thesis provides two significant additions to this field of inquiry based on the data obtained. The study adds to the entrepreneurial philanthropy database empirically, particularly in the context of Africa, by mirroring the work of Eleanor Shaw, Jillian Gordon, Charles Harvey and Mairi Maclean, 2019. The context only makes it harsher, bigger and more convoluted by uncovering the motives of the entrepreneurial philanthropists, as well as other variables that contribute to entrepreneurs' involvement in philanthropy (Vearrier, 2020; Li and Zhang, 2020); it contributes to our understanding of entrepreneurial philanthropy's ideology, which is centred on promoting and sustaining entrepreneurship as a means of empowering individuals, communities, and societies to thrive independently. (Amaeshi & Idemudia, 2019). It adds to our understanding of the transferability of entrepreneurial practises to philanthropy by demonstrating how the attitude, behaviour, tools, techniques, and practises of entrepreneurship may be used and modified in a different environment (Harvey et al., 2019); it has identified the projectivity dimensions (theory of projectivity) required to conceptualise a future of social and economic transformation (Mische, 2009). The study contributes to the debates on entrepreneurship and philanthropy and specifically to the capital theory (Anheier et al., 1995; Bourdieu, 1986; Erikson, 2002; Firkin, 2003; Gorton, 2000; Harvey and Maclean, 2008, Harvey et al., 2020). And to a lesser extent, it also contribute to the projectivity theory by highlighting entrepreneurial philanthropists who imaginatively create a future in formal philanthropy capable of increasing their position and influence in society by perpetuating an entrepreneurial culture that fosters social mobility (Mische 2009, 2014). The study discovered a number of variables that encourage and drive emergent African entrepreneurs to get involved in philanthropy by demonstrating how techniques from entrepreneurship to philanthropy may be transferred and adapted.. The study demonstrates that emergent African entrepreneurial philanthropy's ideology is founded in africapitalism and the replication of an entrepreneurial culture, both of which are thought to contribute to a healthy and productive civil society. Finally, the study concluded that the deployment and accumulation of various types of projectivity dimensions is critical to emergent African entrepreneurial philanthropists' ability to effect social and economic change, via an imagined formal vehicle, at both the micro and macro levels in the future.