Couple’s Entrepreneurship: Who Loves me Follows me

Abstract

By mobilizing the theoretical field of decision-making and the empirical study of 15 cases, this article highlights and analyzes the recurrence of conjugal interactions leading to the decision to undertake as a couple. The results show that the spouse who initiates the project becomes the ‘leader’, while the other positions himself, more or less voluntarily, as a ‘follower’. This decision-making configuration induces a renunciation on the part of the follower, a follower who remains, still today, overwhelmingly the woman. The discussion considers the potential impact of this specific decision-making process on the future governance of the company, in terms of the distribution of roles and powers, the satisfaction of spouses, but also the choice of partner. The movement of the reflexive cursor in a period prior to the copreneurial installation enriches the field of research, almost unexplored, of the decision to undertake as a couple, opens the way to the study of problems of copreneurship through the innovative prism of events that have occurred before its implementation and offers practitioners new keys to understanding the complex dynamics within which they evolve.

Keywords

• family business
• decision
• copreneurs
• entrepreneurship
• couple
• leader
• follower