Identificando oportunidades de emprendimiento: un enfoque desde el buen vivir
- Authors
- Palacios Hidalgo, Andrea Sof?a
- Format
- MasterThesis
- Status
- publishedVersion
- Description
This research thesis links three main themes: entrepreneurship, community development and wellbeing. Combining these concepts, the focal research question is: How can communities undertake entrepreneurship in a way that maximizes their wellbeing? A key argument that is developed is that wellbeing could represent a promising framework to guide entrepreneurial opportunity formation within community settings. Existing literature does not address how communities can coordinate their entrepreneurship in ways that foster improvement across multiple components of human wellbeing including economic, social, psychological, spiritual, cultural, physical, material and environmental. Indeed, the concept of wellbeing itself is fragmented in the literature where different disciplines fail to link and understand how the different components of wellbeing interact. This thesis brings these literatures together to construct an integrated conceptualization of wellbeing. This integrated view, which explicitly considers how the multiple components of wellbeing interact, is also required to overcome harm caused by traditional community development approaches. The latter places primacy on economic development; an approach that fails to take into consideration how economic development can either enhance or harm other aspects of wellbeing. To help communities identify entrepreneurial opportunities based on their wellbeing, this thesis reports the field-testing of a new scale purpose-built for the identification of community entrepreneurship wellbeing opportunities. The research had three objectives: 1) trial the wellbeing test within a small Ecuadorian community to measure the wellbeing of that community as well as understand strengths and weaknesses of their wellbeing across eight components; 2) trial the wellbeing test within the same small Ecuadorian community to identify entrepreneurial opportunities; and 3) assess issues relating to test administration. Thirty members of a community in Ecuador were part of the sample for this study. The results support the view that community wellbeing does have the potential to inform entrepreneurial opportunities. The findings also indicate that lowest levels of wellbeing are not always reliable alerts for entrepreneurial action. More specifically in relation to the three objectives above, key results included: 1) the total wellbeing of the sample community was (65%) in respect to the maximum wellbeing possible. The lowest areas of wellbeing were economic, social and cultural wellbeing; moderate level areas of wellbeing were the physical and material components. The highest wellbeing areas were spiritual, environmental and psychological. 2) The highest-priority entrepreneurial wellbeing opportunities (EWO) existed in economic, environmental and psychological areas. Moderate-priority EWOs were in material and physical components, while the lowest in the ranking of EWO were social, cultural and spiritual. 3) In terms of formatting, suggestions were made with regards to the question wording of how respondents were asked to rate the vulnerability to loss of components of wellbeing, as well as the wording of questions testing components such as economic, social, spiritual, psychological and physical. Additionally, descriptive adjectives in the scale anchors are considered as beneficial to future amendments to the scale to provide a more ample range of responses. Changes in the question ordering with respect to the social and economic components were suggested to avoid priming effects. The 11-point scale, English-Spanish translation and paper-based survey mode were recognized as strengths during the questionnaire trial. Extended training in wellbeing to participants is recommended to improve future validity of responses. In sum, a key contribution of this thesis is progress towards both the conceptualization and measurement of a wellbeing-based approach to community entrepreneurship.
Esta tesis de investigaci?n establece una relaci?n entre tres temas principales: emprendimiento, desarrollo comunitario y buen vivir (bienestar). Combinando estos conceptos, la pregunta focal de investigaci?n es: ?como las comunidades pueden realizar actividades de emprendimiento en una manera que maximice su Buen Vivir?. El argumento clave que se desarrolla es que el buen vivir o bienestar puede representar un marco prometedor para guiar el proceso de formaci?n de oportunidades de emprendimiento en contextos comunitarios. Esta tesis sostuvo tres objetivos: 1) testear un instrumento nuevo para la medici?n del buen vivir en una peque?a comunidad en el Ecuador para medir el nivel de buen vivir de la comunidad; as? como, evaluar las fortalezas y debilidades en su buen vivir a ocho componentes diferentes (social, espiritual, sicol?gico, material, econ?mico, ambiental, cultural y f?sico). 2) testear el instrumento para la medici?n del ?ndice de buen vivir para identificar oportunidades de emprendimiento. 3) Evaluar posibles problemas con la administraci?n del instrumento. Por lo tanto, una contribuci?n clave de esta tesis fue un progreso significativo hacia la conceptualizaci?n y la medici?n de un enfoque desde el buen vivir para el emprendimiento comunitario.
- Publication Year
- 2015
- Language
- eng
- Topic
- DESARROLLO COMUNITARIO
SUSTENTABILIDAD
EMPRENDIMIENTO SOCIAL
BUEN VIVIR
- Repository
- Repositorio SENESCYT
- Rights
- openAccess
- License