The Social Representation of Entrepreneurs in the French Press

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to question the foundations and structure of entrepreneurs' social representation in the French press. Social representations are the result of a perceptive and cognitive construction of reality, which transforms social objects (people, contexts, situations) into symbolic categories (values, beliefs, ideologies), therefore providing a collective significant system for the regulation of cognitions and actions (Ljunggren and Alsos, 2001).Within the consensual reality through which the social world is created and experienced, the press can be emphasized as an entrepreneurial `Greek chorus' (Kets deVries, 2000) playing a key role in the diffusion and transformation of entrepreneurial culture at the local and national levels.We conducted a discourse analysis of 962 articles, from 2001 to 2005, in order to study the press's potential impact on entrepreneurial desirability and feasibility beliefs.We identified three main categories of discourses — the legitimacy discourse, the normativity discourse, and the accessibility discourse, which may impact readers' desirability and feasibility beliefs. This is the first attempt to assess the role of the public discourse in fuelling entrepreneurial intentions in the French context.