Reading Entrepreneurial Hearts: Systematic Evidence for the Emotion-Motivation-Action Framework in European Social Entrepreneurs

This research reconceptualises entrepreneurial motivation by positioning emotions as observable ‘read-outs’ of underlying motivational systems. Through mixed-content analysis combining corpus-level automated analysis of 547 European social entrepreneurs’ life stories with qualitative analysis of a representative subset of 4 cases, and drawing on Plutchik’s eight-emotion framework, results demonstrate that all basic emotions systematically appear across entrepreneurial narratives, with trust, anticipation, and joy most prevalent. Findings reveal that negative emotions catalyse initial social awareness while positive emotions sustain long-term commitment. The analysis provides a unified theoretical framework resolving emotion-motivation conceptual fragmentation, establish a replicable mixed computational and manual qualitative methodology for analysing entrepreneurial narratives at scale, and offers practical insights for entrepreneurship education and policy by establishing emotional literacy as core competency for social venture creation.