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S Routledge Studies in Entrepreneurship
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H CONTEXTUALIZING
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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
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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
