Contribution to the study of the entrepreneurial behavior of French engineers.

Summary The thesis provides new data to better understand the entrepreneurial behavior of French engineering graduates. In particular, we attempt to provide answers to two essential questions. The first question concerns the identification of factors that influence (positively or negatively) the entrepreneurial propensity of engineers. It amounts to questioning the identity and characteristics of entrepreneurial engineers. The second question aims to uncover the different pathways or routes that lead engineers to become entrepreneurs. This question leads to another: that of the possible identification of profiles of entrepreneurial engineers, which profiles may have an importance in terms of the types of managerial behavior developed and the types of companies created or taken over. The analytical framework we have chosen is an "interactionist" model which, in order to explain the entrepreneurial behavior of engineers, takes into consideration both the "strategic intetion" of the actor and a logic of action which results from the encounter between an actor, grasped in all its social dimensions, and a situation shaped by the weight of institutions, norms, and power relationships, referring more precisely to the work of H. Le Marois and P. Bernoux, we propose to give the "engineer's action system" three interacting poles: the engineer as actor, his resources and his space of opportunities. They are the basis of the engineer's entrepreneurial logic of action as we conceive it.