IMPACT OF RELIGIOUS CULTURE ON INTERNATIONAL TRADE

The Impact Of Religious Culture On International Trade

Chapter 2

Literature review

Introduction

The impact of religion on the development of humanity has long been of interest to social scientists. But while researchers have aggressively examined the correlations between religious orientation and almost every aspect of mental health, human psychology, deviant behaviors, and sociological opinions, discerning the fundamental relationship among religious orientation, entrepreneurial behavior, and economic development has proven much more elusive. This is partly due to the lack of survey-based empirical research in the field and partly due to the complexity of the equation that ties religion orientation to entrepreneurial activity and economic achievement. One line of thought suggests that socio-economic and religion-related research should more closely examine the perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs about how markets and economic institutions function within an entrepreneurial context, and whether these perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs then influence various types of economic behavior. This study falls squarely within this perspective, and offers a preliminary investigation of both the theoretical and empirical relationships between perceptions of market justice, religious orientation and attitudes toward self-employment.

From the early work of Schumpeter, innovation was attributed to the efforts and bold vision of individual entrepreneurs having the insight to see new opportunities and the willingness to exploit them - to force changes onto society in return for economic gains (Schumpeter, 1936). The Austrian school of economics has similarly been predicated on a view of the entrepreneur as the driving force of production and the market, seeking their profit by transforming the economy from one equilibrium and towards another (von Mises, 1949). Although entrepreneurs seek these changes for personal gain, there are indications that much, but not all, entrepreneurship is socially productive (Baumal, 1990). This role of social gain and social productivity in the decision-making of entrepreneurs remains in need of future exploration (Reynolds, 1991).

In recent years the study of the entrepreneurial decision has received increasing levels of attention from the dual perspectives of understanding the emergence and recognition of opportunities and the evaluation and exploitation of attractive opportunities. Opportunity-spotting research has been focused largely on the attributes of entrepreneurs that enable the recognition of emergent opportunities, by developing models that reflect the importance of prior knowledge, experience and education (Shane, 2000). Entrepreneurs see opportunities where others do not, due to cognitive influences and the construction and application of frameworks described by categorisation theory (Palich and Bagby, 1995). But regardless of the opportunity's origins, the entrepreneurial decision begins with an intention to exploit the opportunity to achieve the goals of the entrepreneur (Birley, 1984; Katz and Gartner, 1988; Reynolds and Miller, 1992). The reasons for making this commitment to launching a new business can differ widely among various types of entrepreneurs (Gatewood et al., 1995). These reasons partly reflect the different motives and relative goals among entrepreneurs, and the individually differing personal attributes and perceptions of the prospective entrepreneurs (Shaver and Scott, 1991; Simon et al., 1999; Greenbank, 2001; Segal et ...