Conclusion
This work is conceptual in nature and attempts to clarify how the incorporation of practical knowledge in the analysis of entrepreneurship helps in the understanding of how socially embedded entrepreneurs locate and exploit opportunities.
While building upon Bourdieu's habitus concept without necessarily taking the same ideological colours and applications, a more practical understanding of Kirzner's concept of alertness and opportunity discovery has been provided. A concept positioned as a sophisticated entrepreneurship theory in sociology, wherein individuals' cognition, market and action interrelate. The contextual nature of entrepreneurship and market uncertainties was emphasized via an exploration of culture and how it shapes or constrains action and interacts with social structures. Therefore, judging the entrepreneurialism of individuals must be done by first taking into consideration the context the individual lives within. To the same extent that each context or culture defines the division of knowledge among individuals and the process by which relevant knowledge is acquired and expectations are formed in the economy, it also supplies socio-cultural embedded mechanisms that help the individual to cope with uncertainties and exploit market opportunities. This process is translated into entrepreneurial alertness, or a compatible economic habitus conferring a state of mind to the individual, which then makes spontaneous reflection and non-deliberate searches for information possible. This reality is observable via the “natural” propensity of the individual entrepreneur to interpret opportunities and develop strategies and practical entrepreneurial actions that work. The multidimensional manifestations and actions of a compatible habitus or alert entrepreneurial mind remind us of the absolute necessity of holding a dynamic state of mind to face a dynamic market and society. These conclusions have pointed to new interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological directions with strong empirical implications. The habitus embodiment process made it necessary to view ethnicity as a unit of culture, and to form a realignment in the narrow body of research of ethnic entrepreneurship.The Kirznerian ethnic entrepreneur comprises the economic habitus of ethnic driven entrepreneurs, the compatibility of that habitus within the context of the individual, and the deriving practices. Such a conception goes far beyond the folklorically addressed social capital or social mobility strategies of migrants in the western world. it is therefore necessary to focus on context in order to understand the entrepreneurship process as a manifestation of a cultural process. The developed academic lenses applied, even superficially, to the Sub-Saharan African context led to interesting premises opening a new field of research. indeed, the apparent primacy and legitimacy of the traditional market order over formal economic institutions undeniably requires an alternative approach in the quest for faster economic development within those countries, while fostering an environment allowing the emergence of more dynamic entrepreneurial ecosystems and the exploitation of economic opportunities by a greater number of people. This quest hides yet another as well, which, in opposition to the still unsuccessful mainstream approach aiming at structuring or formalizing the traditional market order, would alternatively aim at structuring legal and bureaucratic institutions around the traditional order instead. Such a solution may require following the steps of the Kirznerian Ethnic Entrepreneur in learning from the process of filing and fixing institutional inconsistencies as alternative strategy for bottom-up institutional re-design. The role of the academic is therefore to structure the discussion and develop theoretical and methodological elements in order to understand and test these insights; this is what has been done with the analytical application of the present concept. The Kirznerian ethnic entrepreneur is a concept that can be helpful in understanding the dynamic of operating between two institutional dimensions characterizing major Sub-Saharan African nations.