Enterprising Families: An Embeddedness Perspective on Offspring’s Entrepreneurial Career Preferences, Cognitions, and Actions

We present an “enterprising family embeddedness” perspective and its association with offspring’s entrepreneurial outcomes (i.e., career preferences, cognitions, and actions). Cognizant of the lack of empirical evidence on the embeddedness of entrepreneurship in a family where at least one individual is an entrepreneur, i.e., the enterprising family, we exploit a rich dataset of university students in multiple countries from the GUESSS project. We offer an overview of how different combinations of factors at the interface of the individual, family, and family business domains relate to entrepreneurial intentions, cognitions, and founding experience of individuals. This perspective provides the opportunity to illustrate high degrees of heterogeneity in the association between the enterprising family and offspring’s entrepreneurial outcomes and to open several new research directions.