Cheremenskaia Maria A.

Background. Entrepreneurship in Russia continues to develop. In 2023, Russia registered 1.2 million small and medium-sized enterprises, though there is also a significant number of organizations closed down. While the reasons for business closures often relate to financial or legal issues, there are also socio-psychological factors that hinder an entrepreneur’s development in this field. Entrepreneurial self-determination (ESD) is seen as a journey consisting of professional choices and includes both factors that encourage choosing entrepreneurship and those that deter it. Studying ESD will help identify the challenges in an entrepreneur’s professional path and provide insights into what motivates entrepreneurs to choose this type of occupation from the perspective of social psychology..

Objective. To create a model of socio-psychological factors influencing entrepreneurial self-determination.

Study Participants. The study involved 29 respondents aged 18 to 40 who currently own or have owned a business, as well as 6 entrepreneurship experts..

Methods. Theoretical analysis in the form of systematization and generalization of domestic and foreign research on socio-psychological factors of entrepreneurial self-determination, narrative interviews, expert interviews.

Results. The study allowed to construct the model including 9 stages of entrepreneurial self-determination and 4 crisis stages. Each stage is characterized by a complex of socio-psychological factors that either push towards or pull away from entrepreneurial activity. Socio-psychological factors are divided into groups: environmental factors, including micro- and macro-environmental factors, and personal factors, including behavioral and internal factors.

Conclusions. An entrepreneur’s professional path consists of 9 sequential stages from observation to stability. At each stage, certain socio-psychological factors play a decisive role in the ESD, determining the choice of entrepreneurship as the main professional activity. The proposed preliminary ESD model can serve as a basis for creating a questionnaire for quantitative research into the socio-psychological factors of ESD.

Background. The number of self-employed (people who work "for themselves") is growing in Russia, while there are various forms of self-employment, depending on the specifics of their professional activities. The question of whether the self-employed people's activity can be considered entrepreneurial is important both for empirical research and for practitioners developing various support measures for this population group.

Objective. The study had its purpose to identify the differences between self-employed people (project creators, freelancers, contract self-employed) and entrepreneurs in the representations of their professional activity.

Study Participants. 46 entrepreneurs (mean age = 42 years, SD = 8, 66% — women) and 150 self-employed individuals (mean age = 38 years, SD = 10, 75% — women), engaged in activities primarily in Moscow and the Moscow region.

Methods. Data collection was carried out through online survey. The study implemented the Methodology for Researching Professional Identity (Schneider, 2007); methods of comparative and frequency analysis, exploratory factor analysis, and one-way analysis of variance.

Results. Analysis of the self-employed people's activity allows for classifying this group of population based on the nature of their activities: project creators, freelancers, contract self-employed individuals. A comparative analysis of the data obtained from representatives of these groups, as well as entrepreneurs, demonstrated that in the representations of their professional activities, project creators and freelancers have the semantic cores of "competence" and "independence", while contract self-employed do not have the core of "independence". In terms of professional ambitions (the "entrepreneurial" factor), contract self-employed individuals differ from entrepreneurs (MD = –0.810, p < 0.001), project creators (MD = –0.890, p = 0.004), and freelancers (MD = –0.635, p = 0.003).

Conclusions. Project creators' representations of professional activity most closely resemble those of entrepreneurs, and their activities are most similar to entrepreneurial work. Freelancers' representations also share similarities with those of entrepreneurs, but freelancing only partially reflects entrepreneurship. Contract self-employed individuals' representations significantly differ from those of entrepreneurs, and their activity cannot be classified as entrepreneurial.