A Study of the Philosophic Underpinnings of the Motivations and Behaviors of Lifestyle Entrepreneurs

It appears that there is a fundamental difference in the attitudes of large business owners/operators and lifestyle entrepreneurs. This claim rests on an assumption that those owners and operators of large corporate firms generally comply with Milton Friedman’s ideas as presented in his 1970 op-ed in the New York Times titled “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits.” Friedman wrote that business owners are concerned with making “as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of the society.” It seems that corporations in the United States and abroad do comply with Friedman’s attitude. Every time a company resists a minimum wage increase, replaces human beings with automated processes, outsources jobs to cheaper work forces, or generally commoditizes its workers, that company is complying with Freidman’s idea. Our research suggests that lifestyle entrepreneurs deviate from this paradigm, although this study is not a comparison. It is instead an exploration of a number of lifestyle entrepreneurs’ attitudes towards their human capital, work-life balance, expansion, and independence. Simply showing that lifestyle entrepreneurs value certain things is insufficient in understanding them as a demographic. We have identified common qualities and have examined some philosophic principles of David Hume, Plato, Xenophon, and Jean Jacques Rousseau. In so doing, we hope to more clearly define lifestyle entrepreneurship