Contextualizing Entrepreneurship—Conceptual Challenges and Ways Forward

By Friederike Welter. Entrepreneurship and Context, 2011

2,256 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper sets out to explore contexts for entrepreneurship, illustrating how a contextualized view of entrepreneurship contributes to our understanding of the phenomenon. There is growing recognition in entrepreneurship research that economic behavior can be better understood within its historical, temporal, institutional, spatial, and social contexts, as these contexts provide individuals with opportunities and set boundaries for their actions. Context can be an asset and a liability for the nature and extent of entrepreneurship, but entrepreneurship can also impact contexts. The paper argues that context is important for understanding when, how, and why entrepreneurship happens and who becomes involved. Exploring the multiplicity of contexts and their impact on entrepreneurship, it identifies challenges researchers face in contextualizing entrepreneurship theory and offers possible ways forward.

Subfields: Management of Technology and Innovation, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/59d7b0def3650b47136edf389d3861d15f972ed5

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Citations in the corpus

Women entrepreneurship in developing economies: A gender-based growth model (2021, neutral): “The need for gender sensitivity is notably higher in the developing countries, which are primarily patriarchal societies, where women entrepreneurs are primarily responsible for household chores that they frequently combine with their entrepreneurial activities (Lincoln, 2012; Ogundana et al., Forth”
Does entrepreneurial activity matter for economic growth in developing countries? The role of the institutional environment (2019, background): “Thus, institutional economics as a theoretical framework has gained interest and relevance among those scholars within the entrepreneurship research field (Aidis et al. 2008; Salimath and Cullen 2010; Thornton et al. 2011; Urbano et al. 2019b; Welter 2011; among others).”
High‐Growth Women’s Entrepreneurship: Fueling Social and Economic Development (2018, background): “Across all of these societies, women’s entrepreneurship can manifest in different ways, according to vastly different contexts and geographies, and women around the world have varied entrepreneurial experiences regarding their access to opportunities, markets, and resources (Welter 2011).”
The Scientometrics of Social Entrepreneurship and Its Establishment as an Academic Field1 (2018, background): “Context might play an important role, particularly in social entrepreneurship and the activities of social entrepreneurs, which often seem to be inspired by certain contexts (see Welter 2011 and Zahra and Wright 2011 on contextualization of entrepreneurship research in general).”
Entrepreneurial ecosystem elements (2019, background): “…and policy makers to become more sensitive to the macro context of entrepreneurship; too often context has been treated as ‘exogenous’ where it is not included in the conceptual framework, but ‘taken for granted, its influence underappreciated or … controlled away’ (Welter 2011, pp. 173–4).”
Stress Processes: An Essential Ingredient in the Entrepreneurial Process (2018, background): “The environmental context provides opportunities and sets boundaries for entrepreneurial activities (Welter, 2011).”
Myth-busting and entrepreneurship policy: the case of high growth firms (2017, background): “be better served by determining policy frameworks and programmes that best suit the needs of their own specific locations (Welter 2011).”
Rural entrepreneurship in place: an integrated framework (2019, background): “institutional (Welter 2011), we propose the notion that within a spatial context we can also see such layers that entrepreneurs engage with (Gaddefors and Anderson 2018).”
Entrepreneurs and innovation: The contingent role of institutional factors (2018, background): “Institutions are defined as the rules of the game that regulate political, social and economic relations in a society and provide a structure and an order to economic transactions, reducing risk and facilitating human interaction (Welter, 2011).”
Individual capital and social entrepreneurship: Role of formal institutions (2020, background): “, 2010; Davidsson & Honig, 2003) and regional- or national-level contextual factors (Bowen & De Clercq, 2008; Welter, 2011).”
The influence of human capital factors and context on women's entrepreneurship: Which matters more? (2017, background): “The importance of historical, temporal, institutional, spatial and social contexts, is more widely recognized because they set boundaries for individual opportunities and actions, posing liabilities or assets for the nature and extent of entrepreneurship (Welter, 2011).”
National Business Regulations and City Entrepreneurship in Europe: A Multilevel Nested Analysis (2018, neutral): “…calls for multilevel research (Ding et al., 2015; Westlund et al., 2014; Hundt and Sternberg, 2016), insight on crossnational institutional variation (Welter, 2011), dynamics of entrepreneurs in broader context (Autio et al., 2014), and drivers of urban entrepreneurship (Glaeser et al., 2010b).”
What Makes an Entrepreneurship Study Entrepreneurial? Toward A Unified Theory of Entrepreneurial Agency (2020, background): “We recognize that greater abstraction is a direct affront to the growing number of calls for further contextualization of entrepreneurship research (Welter, 2011; Wiklund et al., 2011, 2019).”
Women’s entrepreneurship policy research: a 30-year review of the evidence (2019, background): “As highlighted above, a review of the literature not only reveals several different applications of the concept (Isenberg, 2010; Moore, 1996; Van de Ven, 1993), but also demonstrates the many frustrations associated with its application (Welter, 2011; Zahra, 2007).”
A progress review of entrepreneurship and regional development: What are the remaining gaps? (2016, background): “Welter (2011) emphasizes the need to focus more strongly on the interaction between the entrepreneur, local resources and context, in other words contextualizing entrepreneurship.”