Micro-business: a silent revolution?

This text by Professor Michel Marchesnay is published in partnership with the Revue Française de Gestion on the occasion of its 40th anniversary. " La petite entreprise: sortir de l'ignorance?" was ranked among the 19 most influential articles in the journal's history.
Michel Marchesnay, University of Montpellier

The third industrial revolution has entered the "intensive" phase of innovations linked to the digital and cognitive revolution. The hyper-modern "Generation Z" advocates a cosmopolitan, networked individualism, and is challenging both the wage society and managerial doxa. As a result, the entrepreneurial spirit is finding fertile ground for expansion: we read that two out of three "young people" would like to set up their own business, and that micro-entrepreneurship would be a gigantic breeding ground for jobs.

Studying the individual entrepreneur

The entrepreneur, "hunter" or "hunted", invests his or her "capacities", on his or her own account and at his or her own risk, in a more or less innovative (original) project, expecting a return (monetary, personal, social, etc.). They work on micro-projects, either out of constraint (limited resources or proximity to the environment), or out of conviction (singularity of capabilities or market). The"company", organized action, is made up of a maximum of one interactive "team", which, according to the cogniticians, is limited to four people, seven in the case of delegation or partial work.
In fact, the emerging part only includes the million or so sole proprietorships and related businesses, from crafts to the professions, from hi-tech start-ups to food trucks and street vendors. We would have to exclude pseudo-businesses (de facto salaried employees, nominees), and add "undeclared" crypto-businesses, including "illicit" activities (drugs, prostitution, smuggling, etc.). But the digital revolution is constantly extending entrepreneurship to include the networked exchanges of individuals in the collaborative, social and solidarity economies. An entropic number of micro-entrepreneurial activities are being created outside, or even against, the market, inducing a new, non-market conception of exchange.
A systematic program of micro-entrepreneurial research therefore needs to be built. The dominant paragons and paradigms in entrepreneurship favor positivist work, centered on the treatment of facts in order to identify "constant conjunctions" (Hume) likely to "invalidate" (Popper) causalities drawn from the "literature". This logical empiricist approach, stuck in the middle between induction and deduction, has the merit of producing a flurry of "field" research. But it proves inapplicable to micro-entrepreneurship, for an epistemological reason: the approach is primarily individual and subjective, as it focuses on the individual and the team.
However, each individual has his or her own story, his or her own ipsity, which means that no other individual resembles him or her, but also that the same "fact" will not be perceived identically by "the others" - which invalidates the hypothesis of the objectivity of facts and the interchangeability of individuals. What's more, each of us is subject to the contingency of events, so we evolve over time, including our own perceptions.
Finally, we all make a distinction between what we openly declare as persona and what we inwardly think of as anima (Jung), which largely invalidates declarative judgments. In this way, the entrepreneur and his "team" confront their perceptions, self-organize and, through "conversation" (Aristotle), build together, muddling through, the logic and practice of action.

The usefulness of cognitive psychology

Working with micro-businesses (and entrepreneurs) is of prime interest to the next generation. To an increasing degree, trainers and advisors will need to adopt methods in line with the digital and cognitive revolution (e.g. video-conferencing with the entrepreneur and his team). In this spirit, the use of real-life cases - which implies close, ongoing links with micro-entrepreneurs' clubs - is an apprenticeship in maieutics, in the art of "learning by doing".inquiry according to Peirce. In contrast to the French education system, the aim is to detect problems rather than provide "the" solution. In a complex world, dominated by the relativity of causes, the evolutivity of effects and the plurality of problems, participants will have to discover and apply typologies and grids adapted to each singular situation.
Such an approach is indicative of the growing importance in management of the human sciences, in this case cognitive psychology, as a tool for understanding the foundations of decision-making, and thus for improving the "utility" (in the sense of Mill and James) of micro-entrepreneurship. It is through the permanence of the cases encountered that we can eventually expect empirical generalization and - why not? - a general model, an archetype, of micro-entrepreneurship.
Michel MarchesnayProfessor Emeritus, Economics, Strategy, Entrepreneurship, University of Montpellier
Visit original version of this article was published on The Conversation.