The interplay of context and entrepreneurship: the new frontier for contextualisation research

Abstract

Contextualisation research in entrepreneurship is on the rise. Scholars generally view it positively, as contextualisation allows for a better understanding of the bigger picture, whilst also concerns are voiced. However, contextualisation may lead to an overly fragmented field and its possible disintegration. This calls for ‘the emergence of sensible approaches to contextualisation that provide guidance in balancing its benefits and costs’ as reported by Welter et al. (Small Business Economics 52(2):319–330, 2019) which is the challenge we address in this Special Issue. More specifically, we argue that an investigation of the construction and enactment of contexts provides a path to better understand the identified tension. The aim of this Special Issue ties in with increasing calls in the entrepreneurship literature for going beyond agent centric views towards accounts that theorise the interconnections between agency and structure. Taken together, the articles in this special issue contribute to (1) a stronger grounding for entrepreneurship theories and concepts; (2) a more balanced conceptualisation of both agency and context; (3) a shift from the ‘standard model’ of entrepreneurship; and (4) context sensitive entrepreneurship methodologies and approaches. We end with identifying further research avenues.

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Small Bus Econ
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-023-00770-6
RESEARCH ARTICLE
The interplay ofcontext andentrepreneurship: thenew
frontier forcontextualisation research
CyrineBen‑Hafaïedh · MirelaXheneti·
PekkaStenholm· RobertBlackburn·
FriederikeWelter · DavidUrbano
Accepted: 29 March 2023
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2023
Abstract Contextualisation research in entrepre-
neurship is on the rise. Scholars generally view it
positively, as contextualisation allows for a better
understanding of the bigger picture, whilst also con-
cerns are voiced. However, contextualisation may
lead to an overly fragmented field and its possible dis-
integration. This calls for ‘the emergence of sensible
approaches to contextualisation that provide guidance
in balancing its benefits and costs’ as reported by
Welter etal. (Small Business Economics 52(2):319–
330, 2019) which is the challenge we address in
this Special Issue. More specifically, we argue that
an investigation of the construction and enactment
of contexts provides a path to better understand the
identified tension. The aim of this Special Issue ties
in with increasing calls in the entrepreneurship lit-
erature for going beyond agent centric views towards
accounts that theorise the interconnections between
agency and structure. Taken together, the articles in
this special issue contribute to (1) a stronger ground-
ing for entrepreneurship theories and concepts; (2)
a more balanced conceptualisation of both agency
and context; (3) a shift from the ‘standard model’ of
entrepreneurship; and (4) context sensitive entrepre-
neurship methodologies and approaches. We end with
identifying further research avenues.
Plain English Summary Contextualisation
research in entrepreneurship is on the rise. With
contextualisation we aim to understand the exter-
nal environmental factors impacting entrepreneurial
activities. Many scholars believe it provides a better
understanding of the bigger picture, whereby others
highlight that contextualisation may lead to an overly
fragmented field and its possible disintegration. In
this Special Issue, we argue that by investigating
‘doing contexts’, which are the making, unmaking,
and remaking of sites for entrepreneurial action, we
help to tackle this challenge. Taken together, the arti-
cles of this Special Issue contribute to (1) a stronger
grounding for entrepreneurship theories and concepts;
C.Ben-Hafaïedh(*)
IESEG School ofManagement, Univ. Lille, CNRS, UMR
9221 - LEM - Lille Economie Management, F-59000Lille,
France
e-mail: c.benhafaiedh@ieseg.fr
M.Xheneti
University ofSussex Business School, Brighton, UK
P.Stenholm
Turku School ofEconomics, University ofTurku, Turku,
Finland
R.Blackburn
University ofLiverpool Management School, Liverpool,
UK
F.Welter
University of Siegen and Institut für Mittelstandsforschung
(IfM), Bonn, Germany
D.Urbano
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

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(2) a more balanced conceptualisation of both agency
and context; (3) a shift from the ‘standard model’ of
entrepreneurship; and (4) context sensitive entrepre-
neurship methodologies and approaches.
Keywords Agency· Context· Enaction·
Entrepreneurship· Multi-level· Structure
JEL Classification L26· M13
1 Contextualisation research: tackling
thechallenge of‘doing contexts’
Contextualisation in entrepreneurship research has
received special scholarly attention with numer-
ous studies over the years, challenging the main-
stream Silicon Valley model of entrepreneurship, and
acknowledging and researching both the diversity
of entrepreneurship and the entrepreneurial efforts
in constructing and enacting contexts (see Welter,
2011; Welter etal., 2017; Welter & Gartner, 2016;
Zahra, 2007; Zahra et al., 2014; Zahra & Wright,
2011). After an initial focus on the economic (Nakara
et al., 2019) and technological factors, other facets
of context have been examined, including the his-
torical (Wadhwani et al., 2020), spatial (Müller &
Korsgaard, 2018), temporal (Lippmann & Aldrich,
2016), cultural (Morales et al., 2019; Shaw et al.,
2017), disruptive (Ho & Teo, 2022), social (Thorn-
ton etal., 2011; Welter & Xheneti, 2015), and institu-
tional (Urbano etal., 2019; Urbano & Alvarez, 2014).
Their interactions in shaping various forms of entre-
preneurship — innovative, women, informal, migrant
— have also been subject of research exploring the
interplay of social, spatial, and institutional and pol-
icy contexts (Clarysse etal., 2014), formal and infor-
mal institutions (Audretsch etal., 2021; Webb etal.,
2020; Welter & Smallbone, 2011; Williams & Vorley,
2017), or the spatial and the social (Alshareef, 2022;
Kibler etal., 2015; Lang etal., 2014) amongst other
forms of interaction.
In parallel to the rise of contextualisation in entre-
preneurship research, concerns have also been voiced
regarding an overly fragmented field and its possible
disintegration (McMullen etal., 2020). Hence, Wel-
ter et al. (2019, p. 327) suggest that contextualisa-
tion would actually allow for a better understanding
of the bigger picture and argue for ‘the emergence of
sensible approaches to contextualisation that provide
guidance in balancing its benefits and costs’.
We conceived of this Special Issue as a potential
contribution to tackling this challenge. More specifi-
cally, our call for papers argued that further investiga-
tion into the construction and enactment of contexts
provides a path to leverage the identified tension. This
aim ties in with increasing calls in the entrepreneur-
ship literature to go beyond agent centric views and
towards accounts that theorise the interconnections
between agency and structure. For example, exam-
ining entrepreneurial innovation, Garud etal. (2014)
suggest a movement towards constitutive approaches.
Likewise, Baker and Welter (2020) perceive a similar
shift in the progress of contextualisation in entrepre-
neurship research and emphasise the importance of
‘doing contexts’: the making, unmaking, and remak-
ing of sites for entrepreneurial action. Context and
entrepreneurship are interconnected pointing out the
need to research the temporal and processual aspects
of such interplay.
We subsequently issued a call reflecting these
anticipated contributions and received 34 full papers.
The Guest Editorial Team sent 25 submissions out
for full peer review. After the first round of reviews,
9 papers were granted a revise and resubmit deci-
sion, and 6 articles were finally accepted for this
Special Issue. Our final selection comprises both con-
ceptual and empirical papers that employ a range of
approaches and concepts and a mixture of methodo-
logical approaches, all moving the issue of context
forward. Each paper offers a unique perspective on
the issue of context which we discuss in the remain-
der of this Editorial in relation to key themes in the
extant literature on context. We also use the collec-
tive contributions of these papers to map out what we
believe to be a future research agenda towards contex-
tualisation research in entrepreneurship studies.
2 Theorising thedoing ofcontexts
Despite great progress in contextualisation research,
most of the literature in entrepreneurship research
still regards context as static and ‘outside there’
(Baker & Welter, 2020). These studies do not go
beyond sensitising theory to situational or temporal
enablers and constraints, that is attempts to contex-
tualise theory (Shirokova etal., 2022; Welter, 2011).

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This contrasts with approaches that aim to theo-
rise context by providing new context-specific con-
structs or creating new theories (Bamberger, 2008;
Shirokova et al., 2022). By failing to integrate con-
text into theory as a way of offering more explana-
tory power to the phenomenon under investigation,
entrepreneurship research has not ‘conceptualize [d]
adequately…[the] interactions between different ele-
ments or levels of context, or the role of the entrepre-
neurs in enacting contexts or defining the situations
they face in various ways’ (Baker & Welter, 2020, pp.
18–19). This observation of Baker and Welter (2020)
is reflected in recent research focusing on embedded-
ness (Korsgaard etal., 2022) or women entrepreneur-
ship (Henry & Lewis, 2023). These studies note how
scholars engage in their analysis with one dimension
of context, whereas entrepreneurship is embedded in,
and interacts with multiple contexts simultaneously.
In capturing the complex interaction of agents
(entrepreneurs) with their contexts, relational
(Fletcher & Selden, 2016; Tatli etal., 2014) and prac-
tice approaches (see, for example, Champenois etal.,
2020; Thompson et al., 2020; Wigren-Kristoferson
et al., 2022) have often been proposed. Korsgaard
etal. (2022), for example, suggest that this interaction
can be studied as a dynamic process of embedding
and disembedding as contexts change and access to
resources (including socio-cultural ones) varies. Red-
head and Bika (2022) depict this dynamism through
an empirical study of a UK locality by showing how
different groups of the population (migrant or local)
engage with the local context (place) in different ways
through processes of place adoption or place accept-
ance. Niemi et al. (2022) demonstrate the balance
between entrepreneurial agency and market context
by analysing how entrepreneurs use their immanent
sensemaking to understand their consumer context to
reduce uncertainty and make decisions.
Other studies look at how entrepreneurs ‘do con-
text’ by exposing how different markers of one’s iden-
tity afford them different types of action (Martinez Dy
et al., 2017). These intersectional studies, although
in minority, aim to expose how issues such as gen-
der, race, class — explain the differential entrepre-
neurial experiences in particular contexts. Together
with the concept of social positionality that consid-
ers the inequalities in access to resources — mate-
rial, economic, cultural (Martinez Dy & Jayawarna,
2020) they offer an opportunity to understand the
interactions of context and entrepreneurial agency. As
such, they support us in answering questions such as
how and why some agents are more (or less) success-
ful at creating and enacting contexts via entrepreneur-
ial action (McMullen etal., 2020) by highlighting the
structural conditions of advantage and disadvantage.
Not surprisingly, these different bodies of work we
have referenced in relation to entrepreneurs enacting
context are also representative of the shift away from
the ‘standard model’ of entrepreneurship — male,
white, high tech, high growth — to focus on greater
diversity in organisational forms, people, places, and
entrepreneurial development paths (Welter et al.,
2019).
The papers in this Special Issue engage in novel
theorisations of context. As shown in Table 1, the
papers provide both a stronger grounding for entre-
preneurship theories and concepts and suggest dif-
ferent approaches to doing contexts. Both Verver
and Koning (2023, this issue) and van Erkelens etal.
(2023, this issue) introduce a perspective of contexts
as endogenous rather than an external setting. Verver
and Koning (2023) provide a conceptual framework
of interconnectedness which takes the form of (1)
sociocultural ties between people; (2) interrelation-
ships between micro-, meso-, and macro-levels; and
(3) connections between the past and the present.
They illustrate their framework with ethnographic
data from cases of ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs in
South-East Asia demonstrating how sociocultural ties
can be leveraged in enacting context.
van Erkelens et al. (2023, this issue) employ a
practice-theory perspective to examine the dynamic
construction of an incubation context. They show
how entrepreneurs (incubatees) and stakeholders
(incubator management) collectively ‘do’ contexts.
They reveal four practices — onboarding, gather-
ing, lunching, and feedbacking — through which a
productive balance between agency-entrepreneurial
autonomy and structure-guided entrepreneurship pro-
grammes is maintained daily. The authors also show
how entrepreneurial agency is dependent on particu-
lar agent-structure relations that themselves are inher-
ent in social practices. Their layering and temporal
enactment then facilitates the collective creation of
this adaptive entrepreneurship context.
Whilst implicitly taking an endogenous perspec-
tive on doing contexts for granted, Muñoz et al.
(2023, this issue) and Ozasir Kacar (2023, this issue)

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Table 1 Articles composing the Special Issue
Author(s) Title Region/sample Stronger grounding for
entrepreneurship theo-
ries and concepts
Doing context
approaches
Shift from the ‘stand-
ard model’ of entrepre-
neurship
Methodological contri-
bution
van Erkelens, Thomp-
son, & Chalmers
The dynamic construc-
tion of an incubation
context: a practice
theory perspective
Entrepreneurial support
organization (ESO):
Dutch social entre-
preneurship incubator
Showing how entre-
preneurial agency is
dependent on particu-
lar agent-structure
relations that them-
selves are inherent in
social practices
Layering and temporal
enactment of social
practices facilitate
co-creation of an
adaptive context
Pro-social entrepre-
neurs working col-
lectively in order to
create positive social
and environmental
impact
Ethnographic approach:
action research
Muñoz, Kimmit &
Spigel
Trans-contextual work:
doing entrepreneurial
contexts in the
periphery
Peripheral areas in
Chile, entrepreneurs,
members of civil
society organisations,
and local government
representatives
Introducing trans-con-
textual work which
allows the doing of
multiple contexts
Trans-contextual
work occurs through
interaction rituals that
rely on and simulta-
neously create spaces
of change (interstitial
spaces)
Peripheral entrepre-
neurial contexts
shown as temporary
and simultaneously
resource-rich
Multi-stakeholder
approach: focus on
practices, roles, and
relationships
Ozasir Kacar Making, unmaking and
remaking of context
in entrepreneurial
identity construction
and experiences: a
comparative analysis
between Turkey and
the Netherlands
Women entrepreneurs
of Turkish origin
in Turkey and the
Netherlands
Showing the unique-
ness of entrepreneur-
ial engagement with
contexts and the role
of power for doing
contexts
Perceptions and inter-
pretations of oppor-
tunity structures as
key to developing
entrepreneurial
identity and enacting
context
Migration status as a
marker of identity
that explains how
women entrepreneurs
engage with their
context
Life course narratives
Verver & Koning An anthropologi-
cal perspective on
contextualizing
entrepreneurship
Southeast Asia, ethnic
Chinese entrepre-
neurs
Presenting three levels
of interconnectedness
as fundamental for
doing contexts
Socio-cultural ties that
exist on personal
level, together with
their interrelations
on micro-, meso-,
macro-levels as well
as their connections
between past and pre-
sent can be leveraged
for doing contexts
Developing country
contexts and how
kinship, spiritual,
and patronage ties
are best explained by
migration and busi-
ness experience of an
ethnic group
Ethnographic approach

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focus on the interactions between spatial contexts and
entrepreneurs as the doing of contexts. Muñoz etal.
(2023, this issue) explore how entrepreneurs do con-
texts in peripheral areas in Chile. They engage with
the concept of interstitial spaces (Furnari, 2014) to
bridge the micro-level practices of entrepreneurs with
broader macro-level influences. They identify trans-
contextual work as basis for doing multiple contexts
at the same time. Such trans-contextual work occurs
through three interwoven interaction rituals: support
seeking, neighbouring, and nesting. The concept of
trans-contextual work denotes a momentary changing
and/repurposing of roles in multiple contexts — pub-
lic, community, and social spheres that act as systems
of support and resources for entrepreneurs.
Ozasir Kacar (2023, this issue) uses a relational
approach in order to understand the interplay of
entrepreneurial experiences and opportunity struc-
tures. Opportunity structure is conceptualised in this
paper as the multifaceted contexts — social, politi-
cal, and institutional, and the situational opportunities
and constraints they provide. The concept has been
widely used in migrant entrepreneurship research and
is intended to capture variations due to both location
and migrant group characteristics (Lassalle & McEl-
wee, 2016). By looking at two groups of Turkish
women entrepreneurs in Turkey and Netherlands, the
study shows that entrepreneurs interpret and perceive
these opportunity structures differently based on
aspects of their identity such as gender, ethnicity, and
class. This study contributes further to discussions
in the literature about variations in the ways through
which entrepreneurs enact their contexts.
The final two articles draw our attention to the
heterogeneity of entrepreneurship in different con-
texts by focusing on the institutional and societal
level. Implicitly, these studies suggest that this vari-
ety of entrepreneurship across nations influences
these contexts by for example the choice of social
entrepreneurship (Pathak & Muralidharan, 2023, this
issue) or the lower rates of engagement in women
entrepreneurship (Angulo-Guerrero etal., 2023, this
issue). More specifically, Pathak and Muralidharan
(2023, this issue) shift our attention to what they
consider ‘a rather implicit and lesser recognized…
entrepreneurship context, culturally contextualized
emotional intelligence (CCEI)’ which they define as
a society’s stockpile of emotional competencies to
distinguish from the use of the concept of emotional
Table 1 (continued)
Author(s) Title Region/sample Stronger grounding for
entrepreneurship theo-
ries and concepts
Doing context
approaches
Shift from the ‘stand-
ard model’ of entrepre-
neurship
Methodological contri-
bution
Pathak & Muralidharan Contextualizing emo-
tional intelligence
for commercial and
social entrepreneur-
ship
24 countries Global
Entrepreneurship
Monitor, World Val-
ues Survey
Showing that and how
culturally contextual-
ised emotional intel-
ligence impacts on
commercial and social
entrepreneurship
Societal emotional
competence as
resources in the
environment used to
pursue different types
of entrepreneurship
Soft contexts of entre-
preneurship; social
entrepreneurship
Multi-level quantitative
approaches
Angulo-Guerrero,
Bárcena-Martín,
Medina-Claros, &
Pérez-Moreno
Labor market regula-
tion and gendered
entrepreneurship: a
cross-national per-
spective
42 high-income coun-
tries and 44 develop-
ing economies
Showing that the
assumption of a
relationship between
flexibility of market
regulation and
increase in the take
up of entrepreneur-
ship by women does
not hold in a develop-
ing country context
Acceptance/rejection
of the entrepreneur-
ship option as a result
of labour market
regulations
Women entrepreneur-
ship; heterogeneity of
contexts
Multi-level quantitative
approaches

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competencies at the micro-level of the individual.
They introduce societal psychological capital as
manifested by the four components of CCEI — well-
being, adaptability, self-control, and sociability —
to increase our understanding of the differences in
entrepreneurial behaviours across cultures includ-
ing through a choice between commercial and social
entrepreneurship.
Angulo-Guerrero etal. (2023, this issue) contrib-
ute to a long-standing discussion on the embedded-
ness of women’s entrepreneurship in labour markets
(see, for example, Hughes & Jennings, 2020). They
specifically focus on labour market regulation which
they define as ‘one of the key formal institutional ele-
ments when establishing a regulatory framework to
boost entrepreneurship’. In their article, they demon-
strate that, in developing countries, unlike the market-
oriented or liberal view on the positive association
between labour flexibility and entrepreneurial activ-
ity, more flexible labour regulation is related to less
female venturing. This paper might prompt the reader
to think about the relevance of Western assumptions
about the links between labour market regulations
and entrepreneurship in developing country contexts
characterised by different gender norms. How can we
research these contexts further and unpack the factors
that explain women entrepreneurship?
Together with their various perspectives on doing
contexts, the articles in this Special Issue also offer
a differentiated perspective on what constitutes entre-
preneurship, thus demonstrating how contextualising
entrepreneurship theory with a focus on entrepre-
neurial agency and its interplay with contexts sup-
ports the shift from the ‘standard model’ towards
acknowledging more diversity (Welter et al., 2019).
Verver and Koning (2023, this issue) and Angulo-
Guerrero et al. (2023, this issue) acknowledge the
diversity of entrepreneurship by focusing on develop-
ing country contexts. Verver and Koning (2023, this
issue) explore how migrants in a developing country
context use socio-cultural ties to enact their context.
They place sociocultural ties in the historical context
of this group’s migration, settlement, and business
development, providing the much-needed nuance
and contextual depth. Angulo-Guerrero etal. (2023,
this issue) focus on women entrepreneurs and the
differentiated effects of labour market regulations in
diverse contexts. Muñoz etal. (2023, this issue) show
how through trans-contextual work peripheral places
are reconstructed as — entrepreneurial and resource-
rich — spaces of change, even if temporarily. Ozasir
Kacar (2023, this issue) adds a differentiated picture
of migrant women entrepreneurs — individuals who
often are perceived as facing several structural disad-
vantages as being capable and resourceful in unmak-
ing, remaking, and changing their contexts, with
every single woman identifying her own means and
way of doing contexts.
Both van Erkelens et al. (2023, this issue) and
Pathak and Muralidharan (2023, this issue) have cho-
sen a focus on another, increasingly researched form
of entrepreneurship — social entrepreneurship that
marks a shift from the taken for granted for-profit
model of entrepreneurship. van Erkelens etal. (2023,
this issue) show that entrepreneurs work collectively
in order to create positive social and environmental
impact, whilst Pathak and Muralidharan (2023, this
issue) show that social entrepreneurs are supported
by different societal-level emotional competence.
Overall, the papers in this Special Issue help draw
attention to experiences and contexts that are often
marginal, or deemed uninteresting, to research by
mainstream entrepreneurship scholarship.
3 Methodological approaches attuned tostudying
the‘doing ofcontexts’
Contextualisation in entrepreneurship research has
also brought with it ramifications for research meth-
ods and approaches (Zahra etal., 2014). It has been
noted that contextualisation goes hand in hand with
the use of methods that are more attuned to captur-
ing the processual nature of entrepreneurship and the
temporal dimension of contexts as well as pay more
attention to the multiple dimensions of contexts, their
interactions with each other, and entrepreneurial
agency.
A wide body of literature has focused over the
years on language, narratives, and discourses both as
tools entrepreneurs use to construct their identity and
respond to their environment but also as a mean of
producing and reproducing inherent assumptions of
what entrepreneurship entails and how the people and
places where entrepreneurship is performed look like
(see Baker & Welter, 2020 for a thorough review).
The focus on language has been accompanied by the
use of storytelling techniques, metaphors, discourse

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analysis, etc. all providing interesting insights that
show what Garud et al. (2014) call the relational,
temporal, and performative aspects of narratives and
hence, that context is constitutive of entrepreneurial
behaviour. A focus on language and narratives, how-
ever, has also attracted some criticism especially as
it conceptualises all entrepreneurs as abled bodies
(Kašperová & Kitching, 2014). By focusing on the
case of the disabled entrepreneur — another form of
‘the other’ in entrepreneurship studies — Kašperová
and Kitching (2014) point to the need to also study
embodiment, material artefacts, and non-linguistic
practices in order to capture the diversity of entrepre-
neurial experiences.
Recognition that entrepreneurship unfolds in time
and in multifaceted contexts has also prompted atten-
tion to historical approaches and tools. A recent spe-
cial issue by Wadhwani etal. (2020) offered various
interesting insights on how historical approaches, for
example, can be utilised in entrepreneurship research
in order to capture context, time, and change. Of
most interest to understanding how entrepreneurs
‘do context’ (Baker & Welter, 2018) are historical
approaches that are premised on the ‘assumption that
interpretations of the past are highly malleable and
that contexts are actively constructed, for example,
through imagination and language’ (Wadhwani etal.,
2020, p. 13). Temporal context, thus, becomes part of
the story being told (Bamberger, 2008; Zahra etal.,
2014).
Welter and Baker (2021), on the other hand, incor-
porate history in a slightly different way by pointing
our attention to how the built environment (for exam-
ple incubators/accelerators) plays a role in entrepre-
neurs’ making of places. In addition to tools such
as language and metaphors, they point out a need
to engage with visual methods (i.e. photography) as
well as spatial planning and architecture as ways for
understanding entrepreneurship.
Others have also noted the benefits of engagement
with arts-based techniques in furthering a more estab-
lished way of researching entrepreneurship through
narratives. Henry and Lewis (2023), for example,
point out that the use of such techniques can help
researchers add depth to their analysis through link-
ing various aspects of the context or understanding
the emotional dynamics involved. They propose four
techniques from the art of dramatic construction in
the English Literature including defamiliarisation
(describing contexts in real terms and offering a fresh
view), exposition (providing the background infor-
mation first to set the scene; highlighting the cir-
cumstances of actions), highlighting sub-texts (the
human dimension of the context; thoughts, feelings,
emotions), and privileging the protagonist (focusing
on the main character, their needs). As they point out
these techniques complement well the use of other
methods including qualitative interviews and ethno-
graphic studies.
Brännback and Carsrud (2016, p. 21) argue that
our ‘research methods seem to have become a con-
text in itself, irrespective of whether those methods
are the best fit with our research questions’, and irre-
spective of whether they are context-sensitive. The
authors in this Special Issue use a variety of context-
sensitive methods that support a deeper understand-
ing of how contexts and entrepreneurial agency inter-
act (see Table1).
Four of the papers apply qualitative methods,
two of them ethnographic methodologies. Verver
and Koning (2023, this issue) demonstrate the
value of ethnography in deconstructing research
participants’ narratives and making the researcher
aware of the way they interpret the findings of
their research. Their objective is to show that eth-
nography broadens the methodological scope and
allows for an in-depth understanding of various
forms of ‘everyday entrepreneurship’. van Erkelens
et al. (2023, this issue) use ethnography in order
to understand how social practices within an incu-
bation context are enacted in its co-creation as an
adaptive context. They point out that social prac-
tices are a concrete unit of analysis for ‘unpack-
ing the dynamic and socially constructed nature
of entrepreneurship contexts’ (ibid.). Ozasir Kacar
(2023, this issue) uses life course narratives, long
established as a technique for understanding the
connections between individual agency and social
structure (Giele & Elder, 1998) in teasing out the
intersectional effects of migration when navigat-
ing the opportunity structure and constructing
entrepreneurial identity. Muñoz etal. (2023, this
issue), on the other hand, use multiples sources
of data including policy documents and reports,
population statistics, and interviews with multiple
stakeholders including entrepreneurs, local organ-
isations, and public officials in order to under-
stand the relationships between all these different

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spheres and capturing their unique perceptions and
interpretations.
Indeed, much research on doing contexts has relied
on qualitative research approaches (Baker & Welter,
2017, 2020), reasoning that the multiplicity of con-
texts and the interaction between agency and con-
texts is too difficult to capture otherwise. Two of the
articles in our Special Issue show the importance of
multi-level research approaches, in this regard.
Pathak and Muralidharan (2023, this issue) high-
light the value of multi-level quantitative approaches
to contextualise entrepreneurship. In their study on
24 different countries using Global Entrepreneur-
ship Monitor Data and the World Values Survey, they
bring together different levels of analysis — micro
and macro — to develop a differentiated understand-
ing of how the context of emotional intelligence
impacts different forms of commercial or social entre-
preneurship across nations.
Angulo-Guerrero etal. (2023, this issue) use panel
data to study 86 countries over the period 2004–2018
and understand whether labour market regulations
contribute to gender equality in terms of entrepre-
neurial activity. Although not the intention of the
authors, their findings indicate that assumptions we
hold in a Western (high income) context about the
benefits of flexible labour market regulations do not
fit the developing country context.
Whilst this diversity of approaches is to be cel-
ebrated, it also urges more reflection from us as
researchers. How we engage with context through
our own research designs (Chlosta, 2016; Henry &
Lewis, 2023) plays a major role in how knowledge
is accumulated and progress in the field is made. As
researchers, we need to recognise that the methods we
select influence how we understand and embrace con-
texts (Baker & Welter, 2020).
4 Moving forward towardstheorising thedoing
ofcontexts inentrepreneurship
This Special Issue aims to further the debate on
contextualising entrepreneurship research and ame-
liorating criticism of ‘hyper-contextualisation’ by
considering the interconnections of context and entre-
preneurship (Welter & Baker, 2021). Collectively, the
articles have contributed to the different identified
avenues for investigation set out in the original call,
thus pushing our understanding of how to theorise the
doing of contexts.
In line with the second wave of contextualisation
in entrepreneurship research identified by Welter
et al. (2019), the papers demonstrate the contribu-
tion and utility of ‘contextualisation’ by providing
a stronger grounding for entrepreneurship theories
and concepts as to how entrepreneurs do contexts
(Table 1). They engage with theoretical approaches
(relational and practice-based) that place an emphasis
on entrepreneurship as the enactment of practices that
means a relational, material, and processual phenom-
enon (Thompson et al., 2020). As noted elsewhere,
most research to date that takes a practice approach
is within the domain of the ‘critical perspectives in
entrepreneurship’ and has contributed to a better
understanding of ‘the other’ in entrepreneurship —
women, migrant, disadvantaged etc. through analys-
ing narratives, discourse, and gendered practices they
engage in (Champenois etal., 2020). A further focus
on practices will not only strengthen our understand-
ing of the situational context of entrepreneurship but
it can contribute towards what Champenois et al.
(2020) refer to as new thinking of traditional entre-
preneurship research concerns.
Given the approaches used, papers in this Special
Issue also show with interlinkages between different
levels of analysis privileging neither the individual
entrepreneur nor context echoing broader calls in the
entrepreneurship literature for multi-level research
approaches (Busenitz etal., 2003; Coviello & Jones,
2004; Davidsson & Wiklund, 2001; Hadjielias etal.,
2022; Lee et al., 2022; Saebi et al., 2019; Urbano
etal., 2022; Zaheer etal., 2019; Zahra et al., 2014).
Some papers in this Special Issue, for example, place
an emphasis on the meso-level — interstitial spaces
and incubators — suggesting that there is value in
looking at the meso-level to understand how entre-
preneurial agency, practices, and contexts are inter-
dependent. Similarly, literature has started to look at
a variety of such ‘in-between’ entrepreneurial spaces
— ‘anchor events’ (Garud et al., 2014), co-working
spaces (Howell, 2022), transnational spaces (Harima
etal., 2021) that provide a relational view of context
and expose power relations and privilege and disad-
vantage. The meso-context can also be particularly
useful in the growing body of research on entrepre-
neurial ecosystems (Stam & van de Ven, 2019; The-
odoraki & Catanzaro, 2021). Despite paying close

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attention to the features of particular locations includ-
ing their institutional, economical socio-cultural, and
political characteristics, the ecosystem literature still
needs to further understand how various actors in the
ecosystem, including those at the meso-level, shape
and develop the ecosystem (Stam & van de Ven,
2019). The ecosystem approach increasingly rec-
ognises the importance of microdynamics (Stam &
Welter, 2020) in the light of movements such as digi-
talisation (Sussan & Acs, 2017) and transnationalism
of entrepreneurship (Drori etal., 2009) which show
how entrepreneurs can (more and more) forge their
contexts.
Riding the third wave of contextualisation in entre-
preneurship research, the papers also provide strong
support for moving on from the standard model of
entrepreneurship (wave one) towards ‘deepen[ing]
our theorizing by broadening our understanding
of what is usefully to be included in the domain of
entrepreneurship research’ (Welter et al., 2019, p.
324). They show us how we can embrace the richness
and diversity of entrepreneurial experiences across
the globe by focusing on peripheral areas, women or
migrants and creative ways of doing context such as
trans-contextual or identity work. This brings to the
attention how limited our knowledge of local con-
texts and situated ways of doing context still is and
questions the theories and choices we make through
our research, thus forcing us to start moving towards
one of the fourth waves of contextualisation — new
theories for existing territories (Welter etal., 2019,
p. 326). In this case, our understanding of doing con-
text is enriched by a closer look at the local — be that
spatial, social, or cultural contexts — entrepreneurs
enact, do, and change, with particular emphasis put
onto the local. As Bruton etal. (2018, p. 6) suggest
entrepreneurship research ‘needs to have a richer the-
oretical appreciation of the local domain rather than
treating its dominant characteristics as mere mod-
erators to the dominant Western theory’. We see the
articles in this Special Issue, with their surprisingly
strong focus on the local from various perspectives,
as having identified one of the missing pieces that are
required to allow us a different theorising of doing
contexts.
We firmly believe that such inquiries into the
making, unmaking, and remaking of entrepreneur-
ial contexts (Baker & Welter, 2020) cannot come
about without methodological contributions and
cross-fertilisation from other disciplines. In this Spe-
cial Issue, authors have demonstrated the importance
of practice-based approaches, ethnography, and the
capture of ‘softer’ institutional contexts such as that
of societal psychological capital. They have also
highlighted the reflexivity of the researcher because
which research approaches, we engage with in which
research contexts, is of equal importance in devel-
oping further the theorising of doing contexts. For-
tunately, the journey does not end here. Whilst this
Special Issue presents novel contributions to con-
textualisation research within entrepreneurship, it
also paves the way for subsequent research endeav-
ours that look at theorisation as ‘knowledge in con-
text’ (Steyaert, 2016, p. 33). Taken together, all the
insights from this Special Issue echo calls made else-
where for the need to challenge the many taken for
granted assumptions about entrepreneurship and to
ask more daring and imaginative questions with our
research (Essers et al., 2017). Imas et al. (2012) in
their study of barefoot entrepreneurs — those who
live in the margins of the main economic neoliberal
system — drew our attention to different types of
values, meanings, and practices and overall, to a dif-
ferent entrepreneurial narrative that emerges through
‘encounters with difference’ (p. 579). The continual
engagement with ‘the other’ and the structural con-
ditions under which they conduct their entrepreneur-
ship will enhance further our understanding of the
interplay of context and entrepreneurship. We encour-
age further studies in this ever-increasing and excit-
ing line of research that will act as a corrective to the
dominant narrative(s) of entrepreneurship and will
embrace the calls for the decolonisation of entrepre-
neurship research.
5 Conclusion
This Special Issue was set for investigating the con-
struction and enactment of entrepreneurial contexts,
an approach that enables a better understanding of the
reasons and outcomes that arise when entrepreneur-
ship scholarship reaches beyond agent centric views
to theorise the interconnections between agency and
structure. As demonstrated, the articles in this Spe-
cial Issue unfold the rich diversity of entrepreneurial
experiences across the globe by focusing on periph-
eral areas, women or migrants and creative ways of

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doing context such as trans-contextual or identity
work. Moreover, the articles show the value of hav-
ing rich variety of methodological approaches in cap-
turing and analysing the surroundings of ‘doing con-
texts’ (Baker & Welter, 2020). Accordingly, we hope
that the articles in this Special Issue pave the way for
new ideas and research projects that move the contex-
tualisation research within entrepreneurship scholarly
field even further.
Acknowledgements David Urbano acknowledges the finan-
cial support from the projects ECO2017-87885-P (Spanish
Ministry of Economy & Competitiveness) and 2017-SGR-1056
(Economy & Knowledge Department, Catalan Government),
and ICREA under ICREA Academia programme.
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