Foundations and Trends® in Entrepreneurship > Vol 14 > Issue 4

Contextual Entrepreneurship: An Interdisciplinary Perspective

By Ted Baker, Rutgers University, USA, tbaker@business.rutgers.edu | Friederike Welter , University of Siegen and IfM Bonn, Germany, welter@uni-siegen.de

 
Suggested Citation
Ted Baker and Friederike Welter (2018), "Contextual Entrepreneurship: An Interdisciplinary Perspective", Foundations and Trends® in Entrepreneurship: Vol. 14: No. 4, pp 357-426. http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/0300000078

Publication Date: 04 Jul 2018
© 2018 T. Baker and F. Welter
 
Subjects
Business formation,  Nascent and start-up entrepreneurs
 
Keywords
L26 Entrepreneurship
Contextualizing entrepreneurshipEntrepreneurship theoryResearch methodsCritical entrepreneurship studies
 

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In this article:
1. The Goldilocks Problem in Contextualizing Research: Too Much, Too Little, Just Right?
2. Challenges and Promise
3. Progress in Contextualizing Entrepreneurship Research
4. Progress in Empirically Studying Contextual Entrepreneurship
5. Outlook and Agenda for Future Research
References

Abstract

The need to contextualize research in entrepreneurship has become an important theme during the last decade. In this monograph we position the increasing prominence of “contextual entrepreneurship” research as part of a broader scholarly wave that has previously washed across other fields. The challenges and promises we face as this wave carries us forward are similar in many ways to the challenges faced by researchers in other fields. Based on a review of the current context debate among entrepreneurship scholars and a selective review of other disciplines, we outline and discuss issues in theorizing, operationalising and empirically studying contexts in entrepreneurship research. Researchers have made rapid and substantial – though uneven – progress in contextualizing their work. Unsurprisingly, there is healthy disagreement over what it means to contextualize research and how it should be done, which we see as expressions of competing implicit theories of context. We argue that no overarching theory of what context is or what it means is likely to be very successful. Instead, we suggest briefly that it may be useful to adopt and develop what we label a “critical process approach” to contextualizing entrepreneurship research.

DOI:10.1561/0300000078
ISBN: 978-1-68083-456-7
82 pp. $65.00
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ISBN: 978-1-68083-457-4
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Table of contents:
1. The Goldilocks Problem in Contextualizing Research: Too Much, Too Little, Just Right?
2. Challenges and Promise
3. Progress in Contextualizing Entrepreneurship Research
4. Progress in Empirically Studying Contextual Entrepreneurship
5. Outlook and Agenda for Future Research
References

Contextual Entrepreneurship: An Interdisciplinary Perspective

Contextual Entrepreneurship: An Interdisciplinary Perspective generates new insights about why and how we might go about contextualizing entrepreneurship research. The authors attempt to frame the issues, the progress that has been made, and the substantial challenges that remain with a view toward calling for future work that takes more of what we call a critical process approach to contextualizing entrepreneurship research.

 
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