An anthropological perspective on contextualizing entrepreneurship

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.