TC edO BN aT keE rX anT dU FA riL eI dZ e rI ikN eG W E elN t eT rR E P R E N E U R S Routledge Studies in Entrepreneurship H I P T H CONTEXTUALIZING E O R Y ENTREPRENEURSHIP THEORY Ted Baker and Friederike Welter A PDF version of this book is available for free in Open Access at www.taylorfrancis.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. www.routledge.com Routledge titles are available as eBook editions in a range of digital formats Contextualizing Entrepreneurship Theory As the breadth and empirical diversity of entrepreneurship research have increased rapidly during the past decade, the quest to fnd a “one-size- fts-all” general theory of entrepreneurship has given way to a growing appreciation for the importance of contexts. This promises to improve both the practical relevance and the theoretical rigor of research in this feld. Entrepreneurship means different things to different people at different times and in different places and both its causes and its consequences likewise vary. For example, for some people entrepreneurship can be a glorious path to emancipation, while for others it can represent the yoke tethering them to the burdens of overwork and drudgery. For some communities it can drive renaissance and vibrancy, while for others it allows only bare survival. In this book, we assess and attempt to push forward contemporary conceptualizations of contexts that matter for entrepreneurship, pointing in particular to opportunities for generating new insights by attending to contexts in novel or underexplored ways. This book shows that the ongoing contextualization of entrepreneurship research should not simply generate a proliferation of unique theories—one for every context—but can instead result in better theory construction, testing and understanding of boundary conditions, thereby leading us to richer and more profound understanding of entrepreneurship across its many forms. Contextualizing Entrepreneurship Theory will critically review the current debate and existing literature on contexts and entrepreneurship and use this to synthesize new theoretical and methodological frameworks that point to important directions for future research. Ted Baker is George F. Farris Chair and Professor of Entrepreneurship at Rutgers Business School, Newark and New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Honorary Professor at the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business, South Africa. Friederike Welter is President and Managing Director of the Institut für Mittelstandsforschung (IfM) Bonn, and holds a professorship at the University of Siegen, Germany. Routledge Studies in Entrepreneurship Edited by Susan Marlow and Janine Swail University of Nottingham, UK This series extends the meaning and scope of entrepreneurship by captur- ing new research and enquiry on economic, social, cultural and personal value creation. Entrepreneurship as value creation represents the endeav- ours of innovative people and organisations in creative environments that open up opportunities for developing new products, new services, new frms and new forms of policy making in different environments seeking sustainable economic growth and social development. In setting this objective the series includes books which cover a diverse range of conceptual, empirical and scholarly topics that both inform the feld and push the boundaries of entrepreneurship. Time, Space and Entrepreneurship James O. Fiet Entrepreneurship and Global Cities Diversity, Opportunity and Cosmopolitanism Edited by Nikolai Mouraviev and Nada K. Kakabadse A History of Enterprise Policy Government, Small Business and Entrepreneurship Oliver Mallett and Robert Wapshott New Frontiers in the Internationalization of Businesses Empirical Evidence from Indigenous Businesses in Canada Fernando Angulo-Ruiz Contextualizing Entrepreneurship Theory Ted Baker and Friederike Welter For more information about this series please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Studies-in-Entrepreneurship/book-series/RSE Contextualizing Entrepreneurship Theory Ted Baker and Friederike Welter First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Ted Baker and Friederike Welter to be identifed as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The Open Access version of this book, available at www. taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-8153-7156-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-11063-1 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC Contents Preface: Our Journey Towards Contextualizing Entrepreneurship Theory vii PART I Understanding Contexts and Entrepreneurship 1 1 Why Contexts Play an Ever-Increasing Role in Entrepreneurship Research 3 2 Synthesizing the Context Debate in Entrepreneurship Research 14 PART II Theorizing Contexts 39 3 Constructing Contexts: Enacting, Talking, Seeing 41 4 Problematizing, Making Choices and Asking Who Our Research Serves 71 PART III Studying Contexts 103 5 Some Heuristics for Researchers Embracing a Critical Process Approach 105 6 Narrating and Visualizing Contexts 129 vi Contents PART IV Going Forward 163 7 Why It’s Hard to Look Back Once You Have Embraced Contexts 165 Author Biographies 175 Index 176 Preface Our Journey Towards Contextualizing Entrepreneurship Theory Ted Baker and Friederike Welter This book took us on a journey to other disciplines—both far (photog- raphy) and near (anthropology)—where we discovered, and just barely began to explore, treasure troves left by earlier explorers. After years of talking loosely about working together, we have recently taken the opportunity to write about something that has long concerned both of us: the failure of much of contemporary entrepreneurship research to seriously embrace the wondrous empirical diversity of entrepreneurship. One way of talking about this is to focus on “contexts” of entrepre- neurship. A short monograph (Baker & Welter, 2018) became the start- ing point for this book. In this volume we develop systematically some of the nascent ideas presented in Baker and Welter (2018) and move on to entirely new territory. We hope that this book suggests our pro- found respect for the remarkable work recently done by entrepreneurship researchers as well as the fun we had discovering new treasures around each corner. We remain critical on both practical and theoretical levels about what we see as the slowness of the feld to expand its empirical and theoretical vision, and we develop at some length both our own cri- tique of the feld’s conservatism and some ideas for moving forward. We wondered whether writing this book would get such things “out of our system”. Instead, it has whetted our appetites. One sign of this is that much of the most interesting work we read these days seems to come from—at least to us, as social science researchers—fairly obscure corners. We invite other researchers to join us on a path that continues to embrace and to celebrate the disparaged, the invisible and the silenced among entrepreneurs. Reference Baker, T. & Welter, F. (2018). Contextual entrepreneurship: An interdisciplinary perspective, Foundations and Trends in Entrepreneurship, 14(4): 357–426. Part I Understanding Contexts and Entrepreneurship