Www.jibs.se © Jönköping International Business School Reflections on entrepreneurship in...

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Reflections on entrepreneurship in different contexts

Friederike Welter

KeynoteVI INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP OF RESEARCH BASED ON GEM:

“INTERCULTURALITY, DIVERSITY AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP”28 March 2011


Key Issues

• Why consider entrepreneurship in different contexts?

• Exploring the multiplicity of contexts

• How to contextualise entrepreneurship (research)


Why consider entrepreneurship in different contexts?

• Observers “have a tendency to underestimate the influence of external factors and overestimate the influence of internal or personal factors when making judgements about the behaviour of other individuals.” (Gartner, 1995: 70)

• “(...) entrepreneurship takes place in multiple sites and spaces (many more than the ones currently considered).” (Steyaert & Katz, 2004: 180)

• “Contextualising our research means the effective linking of theory and research objectives and sites (…).” (Zahra, 2007: 445)


Key Issues





Which contexts?

• Physical• Economical• Social• Cultural• Historical • Time…

Context as a lens

Figure from Brush, de Bruin, Welter , Converting Conventional Wisdom: Insights from Entrepreneurship. Unpublished manuscript . Also cf. Hitt et al. (2007)

Context as variable


The social context: Towards household and family embeddedness

• ‘traditional’ context perspective: Networks and network ties as resource for overcoming liabilities of newness and smallness

• family embeddedness perspective (Aldrich & Cliff, 2003)

• household embeddedness– “multiple economy” phenomenon of transition period

(Pavlovskaya, 2004)

– portfolio entrepreneurship and pluriactivity of farm businesses (cf. Carter & Ram, 2004; Carter, 1998; Carter, Tagg & Dimitratos, 2004)

– household-enterprise systems (Hansch & Piorkowsky, 1997; Piorkowsky, 2002;

Tschajanow, 1923)


Enterprising families in a cross-border context

• 65 year old woman, living in Belarus

• travels to Lithuania to officially visit relatives, takes along medicines (semi-legal) and brings back second-hand shoes and clothes

• Social and family embeddedness of activities:

– Daughter: works in chemicals firm in Belarus and provides access to medicines

– Sister, married in Lithuania: sells medicine to pensioners

– Niece and her girlfriend in Lithuania: help respondent to buy second-hand clothes and shoes


The institutional context

• Well-researched area: regulatory impact of institutional context

• Fewer studies on ‘culture’ / informal institutions

• Some research has (tried to) studied informal institutions in connection to transformation from Soviet to market economy

• Recent emphasis on entrepreneurship as societal phenomenon and as ‘everyday activity’ (Rehn & Taalas, 2004)


How social and institutional contexts influence opportunity recognition and

exploitation

• Opportunities created and recognised in / through social contacts (de Koning, 2003; Jack & Anderson, 2002)

• Opportunities socially constructed and enacted (Fletcher, 2006; Gartner, Carter & Hill, 2003)

• Immigrant entrepreneurs: Opportunity recognition influenced by country of origin (van Gelderen, 2007)

• Emerging market economies: Institutional ‘holes’ temporarily create opportunities based on Soviet legacies (Smallbone et al., 2010)


Institutional holes as entrepreneurial opportunities

• In Ukraine, in 1990s, rapid and frequent changes in laws and overly excessive business regulations created demand for consultants

• innovative business service provider exploited institutional settings, offering “full service” packages which included the necessary connections to officials.

• History as context: legacy of Soviet economy of favours

• Time: transient opportunities which will vanish when the institutional context improves over time.


Linking social, institutional and spatial contexts

• Entrepreneurship as socio-economic and spatial phenomenon (Johannisson et al., 2002) and as collective event

• Entrepreneurship as leverage for social change through community and neighbourhood activities (e.g., Dupuis & de Bruin, 2003; Frederking, 2004)

• Contradictory effects of institutional and spatial contexts

– Spatial proximity fosters social networks and can lead to ‘over-embeddedness’

– Culture-based rules of a place can foster ‘breaking out of norms’


Contexts as liability and asset

• Young woman in rural Uzbekistan (Chartak): took up gold embroidery and sewing after father’s death to provide family income

• Institutional and socio-spatial contexts determine low-growth and low-income nature of her activities


Breaking out of norms – Coping with norms:

Female entrepreneurs in a post Soviet context

• Entrepreneurship as means to gain (economic) independence, with high impact on societal change

• behavioural patterns of defying post Soviet gender norms, but coping with the post Soviet entrepreneurship norm:

– becoming “more male”: “I sometimes forget that I am a woman.”

– acting as “outsider”: “If some people do not like female entrepreneurs, let them. We do not care. But female entrepreneurs do exist and you have to take account of the fact.”

– using “femininity”: “The tax inspector saw me as a weak woman and felt pity for me. He did not ask for bribes and sometimes even confined himself to minimal fines for my mistakes.”


Key Issues





Current shortcomings in contextualising entrepreneurship

• Dominance of business context or restricted understanding of social context

• Most studies assume a one-way relationship.

• Most research still is not sufficiently multi-level oriented.

• Few studies try to bridge between different levels, probably because of methodological and theoretical challenges.


Challenges for entrepreneurship theory: How to improve the theory ‘lens’?

Contextualising theory means acknowledging situational and temporal boundaries – Challenge: how to overcome barriers in the research field preventing

contextualisation? (for management field in general: Johns, 2006; Bamberger, 2008)

• Theorizing entrepreneurship contexts is about identifying ‘theories-in-context’ (Whetten, 2009). – Challenge: which theory / theories acknowledge bottom-up and top-

down effects?

• But: Do we aim for customized theory (theory by context), or more generalised theory which would be applicable across contexts (Rousseau & Fried, 2001)?


Challenges for empirical research

“The true measure of entrepreneurship in a society as a whole needs to sample across multiple sectors, domains and spaces.” (Steyaert & Katz 2004: 193)

• Queries unit of analysis

• Method mix to capture ‘richness and diversity’ of contexts

• Being sensitive to time – longitudinal research


Challenges in contextualising entrepreneurship research

• Entrepreneurship research takes place in specific contexts and communities.

• We bring our own (cultural) context to the research site.

• Contextualising entrepreneurship research is about listening to each other


Thank you for your attention – and I am looking forward to your questions and comments!

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