Entrepreneurship and Social Change: Implications from a New Zealand Case Study

The actions of entrepreneurial fishermen, and their effects on the social organization of the small community on Stewart Island, New Zealand, are discussed in this paper. An ethnographic approach is taken to exploring the nature of the relationship between entrepreneurship and social change on the island, which is currently experiencing resource decline. The material is used to present an argument that the stress on rational decision making and economic maximization as generators of social form in entrepreneurial models of social change is too great, even in a competitive small business context such as fishing. Although phrased in the context of discussing anthropological models and implications for ethnography, the conclusions—that rationality and maximization are ideologies, imbedded in wider social contexts, whose use cannot be understood without properly relating them to this context—are shown to be relevant to the study of entrepreneurship in any culture.