Klaus Weber, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University

A cultural dimension of economic globalization is the proliferation of seemingly universal templates for economic action. One example is “technology-based entrepreneurship,” which is increasingly presented as a recipe for international development and national competitiveness. But what does it mean to perform technology entrepreneurship? The paper develops a micro- phenomenological answer to this question. The case of the nascent Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector in Nairobi shows how participants in this sector construct contrasting templates of entrepreneurship that are coded as alternatively global and local. We use ethnographic and semiotic methods to understand the content of these templates, and the approaches that participants use to manage resulting tensions in interacting with each other. Each approach gives rise to unintended consequences that prevent the full resolution of tensions and prompt subsequent action. As a result we present a model of the generative processes that arise locally in the course of globalization.