Media Makes Entrepreneurs? the Inspirational Effect of Exposure to Media on Entrepreneurial Engagement in China, 2003-2012

This paper asks whether and under what conditions mass media contributes to the construction and perpetuation of the motivation to engage in entrepreneurial activity. Sociological literature of entrepreneurship has extensively studied how social factors facilitate entrepreneurial engagement by creating relevant opportunities and resources, eliminating barriers, constraints and transaction costs, and setting up favorable conditions that make entrepreneurial endeavors less challenging and more promising. This line of thought could be called the instrumental view on the social making of entrepreneurship. However, scholars since Joseph Schumpeter have also claimed that the question whether to start or work for nascent businesses is not only a question of assessing the difficulty of doing so, but also a question of individuals’ internal motivations. In order for people to participate in start-up companies, a motivating mentality must be in place. From this perspective, social institutions could also shape entrepreneurial engagement by constructing and perpetuating this mentality, making people more audacious towards taking risks and favorably defining the normative nature of entrepreneurship. This perspective could be called the constitutive view. Using the institution of public media as a case, this paper tries to solidify the constitutive view, which has been relatively understudied in previous studies of entrepreneurship.

In accordance with the constitutive view, the paper argues that aside from supplying essential information, exposure to media coverage on entrepreneurial success facilitates entrepreneurial engagement by changing actors’ perception of and mental orientation towards entrepreneurial activity, offering emotional encouragement that makes them more audacious and determined to take risks, and perpetuating the so-called “entrepreneur spirit”. Drawing upon the communications literature on how media influences attitudes and behaviors, the paper advances the claim that media contents not only exert influence by distributing the information people access, but also by maneuvering the framing and presentation of information that shapes values and evokes emotional responses. That is, media coverage not only has an informational effect, providing key informational resources as the instrumental view implies, but also possesses an inspirational effect, inducing the types of personality most conducive to entrepreneurship. The paper aims to empirically capture this inspirational effect.

Whether this inspirational effect becomes salient, however, is contingent upon the larger social context within which media messages are framed and received. It is likely to be more pronounced when the media contents are packaged in frames of discourse that relate to prominent issues that bear upon the “common fate” of the community with which the audience identifies and when the predominant social sentiments make the audience more receptive to such frames. In the context of contemporary China, significant and favorable changes regarding both dimensions took place around 2009.

Thus, the paper hypothesizes that in China, media exposure did exert an inspirational effect on entrepreneurial engagement after 2009, but such effect was less pronounced or nonexistent before then. Using an eight-wave, repeated cross-sectional dataset collected during 2003-2012 in China, the analyses yield findings that support this hypothesis, showing significant inspirational effect of media exposure on entrepreneurial engagement only after 2009.