Transcript Reflections on entrepreneurship in different contexts Friederike Welter Keynote VI INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP OF RESEARCH BASED ON GEM: “INTERCULTURALITY, DIVERSITY AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP” 28 March 2011 www.jibs.se © Jönköping International.

Reflections on entrepreneurship
in different contexts
Friederike Welter
Keynote
VI INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP OF RESEARCH BASED ON GEM:
“INTERCULTURALITY, DIVERSITY AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP”
28 March 2011
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Key Issues
• Why consider entrepreneurship in different
contexts?
• Exploring the multiplicity of contexts
• How to contextualise entrepreneurship (research)
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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)
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Key Issues
• Why consider entrepreneurship in different
contexts?
• Exploring the multiplicity of contexts
• How to contextualise entrepreneurship (research)
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© Jönköping International Business School
Which contexts?
• Physical
• Economical
• Social
• Cultural
• Historical
• Time
…
Context as a lens
Context as variable
Figure from Brush, de Bruin, Welter , Converting Conventional Wisdom: Insights from
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Entrepreneurship. Unpublished manuscript . Also cf. Hitt et al. (2007)
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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)
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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
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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)
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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)
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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.
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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 ‘overembeddedness’
– Culture-based rules of a place can foster ‘breaking out of norms’
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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
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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.”
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Key Issues
• Why consider entrepreneurship in different
contexts?
• Exploring the multiplicity of contexts
• How to contextualise entrepreneurship (research)
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© Jönköping International Business School
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.
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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)?
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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
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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
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Thank you for your attention – and I am
looking forward to your questions and
comments!
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