This paper asks a sharp and important question: if religion and entrepreneurship are related, what actually carries that relationship? The authors argue that the missing link is values.
Instead of assuming religion directly makes people more or less entrepreneurial, the paper says religion shapes what people value, and those value priorities in turn influence whether entrepreneurship feels natural, attractive, or uncomfortable.
This is one of the clearest papers in the religion-and-entrepreneurship literature because it moves beyond vague cultural claims and tests a specific mechanism. Using eight waves of the European Social Survey across 32 countries, the paper examines how religious belonging, human values, and self-employment fit together.
The paper uses Schwartz’s theory of basic human values. This framework groups values into four larger families arranged around two tensions: openness to change versus conservation, and self-transcendence versus self-enhancement.
Openness to change
Novelty, exploration, independence, and trying new things.
Conservation
Tradition, order, stability, duty, and preserving the social structure.
Self-transcendence
Concern for others, benevolence, tolerance, and welfare.
Self-enhancement
Status, achievement, control, prestige, and personal advancement.
Paper’s key contrast
Religious belonging tends to align more with conservation, while entrepreneurship tends to align more with openness to change.
The authors argue that people who belong to a religion tend to prioritize conservation values more strongly than openness-to-change values. Entrepreneurs, by contrast, tend to prioritize openness to change more strongly than conservation.
At the same time, both religious individuals and entrepreneurs often value self-transcendence over self-enhancement. So the relationship is not pure conflict. It is mixed: one value dimension creates tension, another creates overlap.
The study uses eight biennial waves of the European Social Survey from 2002 to 2016, covering 32 countries. Entrepreneurship is measured through self-employment, the most common occupational proxy in empirical entrepreneurship research.
- ReligionWhether respondents belong to a religion or denomination, and how actively they engage in religious life.
- EntrepreneurshipSelf-employment as the core indicator.
- ValuesSchwartz’s value dimensions, especially conservation versus openness to change and self-transcendence versus self-enhancement.
- HeterogeneityDifferences across major European religions, religious engagement, and type of entrepreneurship.
Many earlier papers looked only for a direct relationship between religion and entrepreneurship and often produced conflicting results. This paper is stronger because it studies the mechanism in between — values — rather than stopping at the surface-level association.
The key result is that people who belong to a religion prioritize conservation more than openness to change, while entrepreneurs show the opposite pattern. That contrast in value priorities helps explain why the relationship between religion and entrepreneurship is weaker than some classical theories might suggest.
In the authors’ language, these contrasting value priorities cushion or suppress the relationship between religion and entrepreneurship.
| Dimension | Religious Belonging | Entrepreneurship | Interpretation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Conservation | Higher priority | Lower priority | Main source of tension |
| Openness to change | Lower priority | Higher priority | Main entrepreneurial driver |
| Self-transcendence | Higher than self-enhancement | Also higher than self-enhancement | Important overlap |
| Self-enhancement | Lower relative priority | Lower than self-transcendence | Entrepreneurs are not simply ego-driven in this model |
The broad pattern is fairly stable across the major religions in Europe, which is itself an important finding. But the relationships do vary depending on how actively people practice religion and on the type of entrepreneurship being examined.
What stayed similar
The overall value structure linking religion and entrepreneurship was broadly comparable across Europe’s major religions.
What changed
Intensity of religious engagement and entrepreneurial type altered the strength of the pattern.
Religion often encourages duty, continuity, restraint, and respect for established norms. Entrepreneurship often requires novelty, independence, experimentation, and willingness to break routines. So one part of the value system can discourage entrepreneurial movement.
But religious and entrepreneurial people can still overlap strongly in caring for others, social contribution, and broader human welfare. That is why the relationship is complicated rather than one-directional.
- TheoryThe paper gives the literature a unifying framework by bringing Schwartz’s values theory into religion-and-entrepreneurship research.
- MechanismIt shifts the debate from direct religious effects to mediated pathways, especially values.
- NuanceIt complicates Weber-style assumptions by showing suppression, not simple positive reinforcement.
- FoundersYour work preferences are shaped by deep value priorities, not only by market incentives.
- EcosystemsEntrepreneur support programs should recognize that not everyone reads uncertainty, independence, and novelty in the same moral way.
- TeamsUnderstanding value differences may help in founder selection, leadership, and multicultural collaboration.
- Everyday meaningPeople do not choose careers only for money. They choose them through what feels right, respectable, exciting, or responsible.
- ReligionReligion matters economically even when it does not directly command economic action.
- Social changeAs societies secularize or diversify religiously, entrepreneurship patterns may also shift.
- MeasureThe paper uses self-employment as a proxy for entrepreneurship, which is standard but not identical to all forms of entrepreneurship.
- ContextThe study is European, so the findings may not travel identically to settings like India, Africa, or Latin America.
- ComplexityReligion influences entrepreneurship through several channels beyond values, including social capital, norms, and networks.
This paper is a strong fit for the Religion and Entrepreneurship series because it explains how religion works, not just whether it matters. It is especially useful for connecting abstract moral worlds with occupational choice through a clean theoretical mechanism.