This paper is about sensemaking. By using sensemaking we have derived bankruptcy factors from business leaders’ own statements about their bankruptcies. The focus in this paper is to ensure how business leaders create meaning about the bankruptcies, which is also our research question. To make the study feasible, we used a method that corresponds well to the purpose of our work. The collection of data started with collecting a number of newspaper articles with direct quotes from business leaders. These quotes were, through a model that structures and categorizes empirical datum, aggregated into bankruptcy factors. The factors were then explained with regards to the business leaders’ statements. The factors are also compared with previous studies of bankruptcy factors. Those studies use different approaches then ours, in deriving and explaining their bankruptcies. With regards to that, we found it interesting to analyze similarities and differences in results. The study has shown five bankruptcy factors. These are customer losses, financing, external circumstances, profitability and planning. They are described by a number of underlying causes. The factors we found have shown both similarities and differences with regards to the previous studies.

En nous intéressant aux facteurs qui incitent les individus à devenir chef-fe-s d’entreprise, nous avons analysé le sens qu’ils donnent à l’acte d’entreprendre ainsi que les divers leviers mobilisés pour mener à bien leur projet entrepreneurial. Le propre du travail indépendant est de disposer d’un patrimoine productif transmissible aux générations à venir : l’entreprise. Or, notre recherche montre que l’héritage relatif à l’indépendance professionnelle est multiforme. Pour autant, nous montrons qu’il s’agit toujours d’une place à transmettre. En comparant les trajectoires d’héritier-e-s de l’entreprise familiale, d’héritier-e-s de l’indépendance et de chef-fe-s d’entreprise sans ascendant entrepreneur, nous avons mis en perspective la distinction de sexes opérante dans la famille concernant le patrimoine. En effet, la transmission du patrimoine n’emprunte pas les mêmes canaux pour les filles et les garçons de la fratrie. En somme, cette thèse revient sur l’influence de la transmission familiale sur les trajectoires des entrepreneur-e-s. Les manières d’appréhender le travail, l’entreprise, la vie conjugale et la famille à l’aune de cette dernière ainsi que les représentations qui s’y attachent dépendent des modalités de transmission familiale relatives à l’indépendance et plus précisément de la transmission d’une place professionnelle - de successeur-e, d’indépendant-e - ou non. / In this work, we focus on factors that made some people become business leaders. We analyze how they understand the entrepreneurship and what are the levers used to manage their entrepreneurial projects. The fundamental aspect of self-employment is to have productive assets and a business that you can pass down to the next generations. However, we will show that professionnal inheritance can be multiform even if, in any case, it is about a place to transfer. We compare trajectories of family business inheritors, self-employed inheritors and business leaders without business ancestors and put the difference between genders that occurs in the family about inheritance into perspective. Indeed, inheritance turns out to be different between daughters and sons.