This book identifies Friederike Welter’s key contribution to entrepreneurship research over recent decades, and shows how her work is contextualised in time and place. The book gives a differentiated understanding of entrepreneurship and contexts, celebrating diversity as well as complexity.

Much research in entrepreneurship presents results as if they are universally and timelessly valid. Entrepreneurship in Context takes the opposite tack – it studies entrepreneurship as a context bound phenomenon. For entrepreneurship, the importance of context goes beyond gaining understanding and avoiding mistakes. The reciprocal influence exercised by the entrepreneurial venture and its corresponding context is at the very heart of the entrepreneur as an agent of change. The book addresses context in a narrow sense, i.e. a person’s life situation and local, situational characteristics. It also deals with wider contexts such as social, industry, cultural, ethnic, sustainability-related, institutional, and historical contexts. The book studies the interconnectedness of all these various sub-contexts. It zooms in on the actions that entrepreneurs take to involve, engage, and influence their context and shows the changing and dynamic nature of context. It provides lessons for entrepreneurs about which contextual elements should be prioritized, engaged and sought out.

There is growing recognition that entrepreneurship can be better understood within its context(s). This carefully designed book invites readers to take a journey: from reflecting critically on where the discussion on context and entrepreneurship stands today towards identifying future research questions and themes that deserve the attention of entrepreneurship scholars. This collection draws attention to the research challenges the entrepreneurship field faces by reviewing the many facets of contexts and by reflecting on methods and theoretical approaches that are required in order to contextualize entrepreneurship research. Students and academics interested in context and entrepreneurship will benefit from this far-reaching and forward-thinking book.

Context plays an important role in entrepreneurship and this is increasingly being acknowledged both in research, practice, and policy considerations. Where, why, and how entrepreneurship occurs can be considered when studying the effects of context. This book focuses on the role of context in entrepreneurship by analyzing different factors, including locational, time-specific, and cultural variables and social conditions. Researchers of entrepreneurship will particularly benefit from the holistic, context-based perspective this book offers.

Navigating Entrepreneurial Contexts highlights the critical importance of understanding and adapting entrepreneurship to the diverse contexts in which businesses operate. The heterogeneity of the topics covered in this book reflects the richness of theories and methods employed in this interdisciplinary field of study.

This Research Handbook offers contextualized perspectives on entrepreneurship in emerging economies. Emphasizing how national context profoundly shapes incentives for entrepreneurial efforts, chapters dissect the opportunities emerging from various institutions and social practices from the Middle East, North and Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and Latin America. This Handbook is an ideal guide for researchers working on emerging economies, particularly those with an interest in global entrepreneurship.

Enterprise and entrepreneurship is of strong interest to policy-makers because new and small firms can be a key contributor to job and wealth creation. However this contribution varies spatially, with some areas in a country having new firm formation rates that are up to three or four times higher than others. The vast majority of these new firms begin in the geographical area in which the founder lives, works or was born emphasising that entrepreneurship is a local event. The book documents a diversity of research approaches to examining the regional determinants of entrepreneurship in countries as contrasting as India and Sweden. The Editors call is for scholars to better understand the long run factors that influence enterprise at the local and regional level. For policy makers the Editors challenge is for them to be much clearer about the targets for their policies. Is it new firms, new jobs, productivity and does it matter where these targets are delivered? This book was published as a special issue of Regional Studies.

Entrepreneurship in Policing and Criminal Contexts explores the contemporary and under researched themes of ‘entrepreneurial policing’ and ‘entrepreneurialism in criminal justice contexts’ which are emerging topics of both theoretical and practical interest in the current rapidly changing criminal justice environment.

Context is everything in entrepreneurship research. This book compellingly demonstrates the ways in which the distinctive European cultural, societal and geographic environments enable research into new entrepreneurial phenomena. It also gives guidance as to how future research should endeavour to understand the influences of context.

Contextualizing Entrepreneurship in Emerging Economies and Developing Countries