Entrepreneurial activities are strongly influenced by the context in which they occur. It is therefore imperative to understand how different contexts enable entrepreneurs to create opportunities. In this paper we focus on the spatial context of rural entrepreneurs and explore how the rural context impacts on their opportunity creation. Based on a multiple case study we find that rural entrepreneurs mix what we refer to as placial embeddedness -an intimate knowledge of and concern for the place -with strategically built non-local networks, i.e. the best of two worlds. Notably, the entrepreneurs seek to exhaust the localised resource base before seeking out non-local resources. Our findings thus contribute to our understanding of entrepreneurship in context and challenge future research to explore how different forms of contexts are bridged in different settings to create varieties of entrepreneurial activities.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explain how context shapes what becomes entrepreneurial. Design/methodology/approach The paper is part of a longitudinal study over ten years, an ethnographic work including interviews, participating in meetings and shadowing. Texts and voices boiled down to transcripts and notes were sorted in NVivo. The empirical material was presented as a simple, short story, with the aim to question established assumptions and relations. The paper propose context as the unit for analysis, instead of entrepreneurs and outcomes. This opened up the scale from a narrow individualism to a much broader appreciation of the entrepreneurship as shaped by social factors. Findings The paper provides insights about how context determines entrepreneurship. It is not simply the context in itself, but the things that are going on in the context. What entrepreneurship does is to connect and thus create a raft of changes. The paper suggests that to depart from context as the unit of analysis will avoid the objectification of entrepreneurship and open up for discussing the becoming of entrepreneurship. The case illustrates how entrepreneurship is an event in a flow of changing circumstances. Entrepreneurship is formed from the context itself, rather than being individual or social; entrepreneurship appears simultaneously to be both. Entrepreneurship can and does exist in multiple states regardless of the observer and the observation. Originality/value This paper fulfils an identified need to learn more about how entrepreneurship and context interact. It illustrates how context is more engaged in the entrepreneurial process than entrepreneurship theory acknowledges.

This article considers how we conceive and research rural entrepreneurship. While we argue for the importance of context for understanding entrepreneuring, we also acknowledge that some perceptions of the rural context may be misleading. We critically review how the rural in rural entrepreneurship has been applied. We find how some romancing of the rural has had detrimental effects in theorizing about rural. However, we also find and discuss the interesting range of relationships between the rural and the entrepreneurship presented in the literature. We conclude that a conceptually robust approach can be achieved by examining the nature and extent of entrepreneurial engagement with the contexts that characterize the rural. Finally, we propose methods that will enable us to achieve better understanding of the processes of rural.

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