New publication on entrepreneurship-as-practice and rural context published

Research on entrepreneurship, especially in rural areas, has long emphasized the importance of the contextual conditions that enable or restrict entrepreneurial activities. This is often described with the concept of ‘embeddedness’. However, the concept usually obscures the process that leads to embeddedness and also assumes causal relationships. Together with Neil Thompson from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, I develop a practice-theoretical framework that emphasizes the ontological sameness of context and entrepreneurial practices as overlapping bundles of practices and sociomateriality. This allows us to propose four relationships between entrepreneurial practices and contextual dimensions - causal, prefigurative, constitutive and intelligible - that can be used as heuristics to understand the processual and reciprocal relationships between entrepreneurial action and rural context. The article was published under the title “Rural entrepreneurship as-practice: a framework for research beyond stereotypical notions of entrepreneurial agency and contextual constraints" in Entrepreneurship  Regional Development, an international Journal on entrepreneurship and economic development.

Contact: Dr. Gesine Tuitjer