Daniel Auguste

Daniel Auguste is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Florida Atlantic University. Daniel earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, after completing his Rotary Peace Fellowship at the Duke-UNC Rotary Peace Center. Daniel earned a BA from Covenant College (USA), with a major in Economics and a minor in Community Development. He has facilitated partnerships between Haitian grassroots organizations and western development workers in the areas of education and healthcare. He has also worked to ensure child development and well-being in Haiti. In 2006, he cofounded a children’s home, Yahve-Jire Children’s Foundation, in Haiti. Daniel’s research interests include entrepreneurship, organizations and inequality. More specifically, his research agenda seeks to understand the structural forces determining who gets what, who participates and to what level they participate in the capitalist production process.

Several key findings emerge from his research:

1) Economic inequality diminishes the importance of an individual’s human and financial capital for entrepreneurial development;
2) In societies characterized by high economic inequality, lower-education and income individuals are more likely than their higher-education and income counterparts to undertake entrepreneurship as a last resort;
3) At early stages of economic development, economic inequality increases entrepreneurial activities, whereas it decreases entrepreneurship at advanced stages of economic development;
4) Stronger cultural beliefs assigning greater competency and rights to valued resources to men lead to greater gender inequality in entrepreneurship in society;
5) Globalization increases income inequality, but government social welfare policies attenuate this effect; and
6) Religious intolerance fuels distrust and racial and ethnic antagonism.

Daniel is currently working on several projects that investigate the importance of entrepreneurship for economic wellbeing among low and-moderate income households in the United States, the role of the state in shaping entrepreneurship development, and the link between religion and economic inequality.