“Living in the fishbowl”. Generating an entrepreneurial culture in a local community in Argentina

This paper traces the main lines of a process of ‘entrepreneurization’ of a local community in Argentina. It highlights how the development of the community in working spaces generated through the interaction between community members and external actors fosters the creation of an entrepreneurial culture and of new communitarian roles and structures. We further argue that the process of entrepreneurization enables to rethink the construct of community, by illustrating how Gemeinschaft-like mutual and tight relationships within the community are constantly mixed up with Gesellschaft-like interactions with external actors and processes of internal segmentation. If the paper shows the importance of central elements of the ‘traditional’ Gemeinschaft for the community to develop an effective entrepreneurial culture, it also suggests that the emergence of working spaces and the community segmentation into specific “sub-worlds” contributes to foster the capacity of community members to take entrepreneurial initiatives so as to participate in the construction of the structures shaping their future lives.