A new perspective to understand entrepreneurship 73
the field. However, the intrapreneur who, in comparable conditions, initiated the project, managed to convince his superiors and some of his colleagues, and managed to gather the necessary resources, should naturally be considered as an entrepreneur.
The same goes for the ageing company founder and manager who has entrusted a successor with the operational management tasks in order to enjoy semi-retirement and limit his or her role to monitoring and advice. What we suggest here is that the notion of ownership does not seem to be a necessary and sufficient condition to define the entrepreneur. Those who put forward the notion of ownership generally refer to the notion of ‘owner-manager’.
The dialogic can only take place if it involves the individual’s strategic will and a certain freedom of action. To illustrate this remark, we propose the following case:
A was, until he started his own business, a lorry driver, employed by a foodprocessing company, located in a rural zone, isolated from urban centres.Of rural origin, married and father of three, he worked for the firm in the morning, while he also kept, with his wife, a farming activity of breeding. His employer, having met serious economic difficulties, decided to sub-contract his transport activity (collection and distribution) and gave his drivers the choice of either starting their own businesses or being made redundant. A accepted, for lack of a better option, the first proposal. He bought the lorry off his former employer, and signed a contract binding him to his only client. In practice, one single thing had changed for him: his income as a lorry driver had become uncertain. (Bruyat 1993)
Is A an entrepreneur with regard to his transport business? He has not taken the initiative, nor defined the modalities of his activity. Besides, if he sees himself as self-employed for his farming activity, he considers himself as an employee (without the benefits any longer) as regards his activity as a driver. Still, he is considered as a business founder, and sometimes, as such, as an entrepreneur. However, from our perspective, he is not an entrepreneur as there is no dialogic individual/value creation, because A is not indispensable to the creation of value. In the graded forms of the dialogic individual/object, the boundaries of the field are blurred. However, cases in which no identifiable individual can be considered as necessary to the new value creation do not belong to the field we have defined. This vision is consistent with Bird’s