Rural entrepreneurship as-practice: a framework for research beyond stereotypical notions of entrepreneurial agency and contextual constraints

Gesine Tuitjer and Neil Aaron Thompson

Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, 2025, vol. 37, issue 9-10, 1102-1116

Abstract: Rural entrepreneurship scholarship has long underscored the importance of contextual conditions that enable or constrain entrepreneurial activities. However, contextual relations are, at times, characterized by a stereotypical or superficial understanding of what ‘rurality’ is and means for rural entrepreneurship, prompting calls for an exploration of new theoretical foundations. We develop a novel theoretical framework that underscores the ontological sameness of rural context and rural entrepreneurship as intersecting practice-material bundles. This enables us to propose four relations between rural entrepreneurship and rural contexts – causal, prefigurative, constitutive and intelligibility – that can be used as a heuristic to understand the processual and mutual relations between entrepreneurial agency and rural context. We map out three important contributions of this framework for future research, including integrating positivist-functionalist and social constructivist divisions, the necessity of an insider analytical approach, and foregrounding the dynamics and relations between practice-material bundles as the primary unit of analysis for future rural entrepreneurship research.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/08985626.2025.2475890

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