An anthropological perspective on contextualizing entrepreneurship

Autor: Michiel Verver, Juliette Koning
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2023
Předmět:
Economic History: Government
Economics and Econometrics
ETHNIC CHINESE
z13 - Economic Sociology
SOCIETY
Economic Sociology
o53 - Economywide Country Studies: Asia including Middle East
and Regulation: Asia including Middle East
Interconnectedness
International Migration
Economywide Country Studies: Asia including Middle East
SPACE
Spirituality
IDENTITY WORK
l14 - "Transactional Relationships
Contracts and Reputation
Networks"
International Relations
Ethnic Chinese entrepreneurship
Transactional Relationships
Networks
Entrepreneurship
General Business
Management and Accounting

Colonialism
Imperialism
Postcolonialism
l26 - Entrepreneurship
CONTEXT
BUSINESS
Anthropology
Kinship
f54 - "Colonialism
Postcolonialism"
n45 - Economic History: Government
War
Patronage
f22 - International Migration
Law
Zdroj: Small Business Economics.
ISSN: 1573-0913
0921-898X
DOI: 10.1007/s11187-023-00774-2
Popis: Plain English SummaryAnthropology can broaden current understandings of how context is perceived in entrepreneurship research. As the study of how people live and experience the world around them, anthropology explores social relationships and their cultural meanings - sociocultural ties - to provide insights into the everyday of the people and communities studied. Such sociocultural ties can also illuminate how entrepreneurs enact context, a missing link in entrepreneurship research. Based on research among ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs in Cambodia and Indonesia, three kinds of sociocultural ties are presented that play a key role in their entrepreneurship: kinship ties (shared family and ethnic background), patronage ties (interdependence of politicians and entrepreneurs), and spiritual ties (membership of religious communities). It is through these ties that context is enacted at the micro level and entwines with the entrepreneurial process. To debunk the idea that context equals external setting, we invite entrepreneurship researchers to include sociocultural ties to reveal how entrepreneurs enact context.This paper develops an anthropological perspective on contextualizing entrepreneurship. We argue that interconnectedness is the quintessence of such a perspective and takes the form of (1) sociocultural ties between people; (2) interrelationships between micro, meso, and macro levels; and (3) connections between the past and the present. We illustrate this perspective through our research among ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs in Southeast Asia, identifying three kinds of sociocultural ties among the ethnic Chinese (kinship, spiritual, and patron-client ties) and positioning these ties in the historical and contemporary experiences of Chinese migration, settlement, and business venturing. In doing so, we show that an anthropological perspective broadens the empirical scope (including developing countries, minority groups, and "everyday" entrepreneurship), the methodological scope (employing ethnographic methods), and the conceptual scope (considering sociocultural ties at the interpersonal level) of entrepreneurship research. The contribution lies in operationalizing and theorizing context: we operationalize context through interconnectedness - comprising our three forms as well as ethnographic methodology to examine these - and theorize interconnectedness by elaborating how entrepreneurs "do" context through enacting the sociocultural ties that "embody" this context, while considering the micro-meso-macro and past-present connections that have engendered these ties. Our anthropological perspective presents a fine-grained and holistic analytical framework for contextualizing entrepreneurship.
Databáze: OpenAIRE