Abstract
This volume of selected works from 2001 to 2017 charts the development of Welter’s thinking on context, including some in published form at long last (i.e. conference papers and IfM Bonn working papers). Chapter 1, the introduction, reviews the other 17 chapters, leading her to observe that ‘all the articles have their own story . . . how and with (who) they came about’, are ‘contextualized in time and space’, and are categorised into empirical, conceptual, ‘when and where’ contexts, how researchers and entrepreneurs ‘do’ context, and gender and diversity. The quality of the journal and the impact (e.g. citations) speak for themselves. However, her initial insights into context were largely experiential (e.g. fieldwork in Central and Eastern Europe) but also empirically based and richly theorised from these studies which led to the later seminal articles on contextualising entrepreneurship.
Chapters 2, 6, 12, 14, 16 and 17 reveal many aspects of the distinctiveness of entrepreneurship in contexts in which the transition from communism to the market economy was occurring, that is, informal networks, scarce resources, the hostile external (including regulatory) environment, the social context, necessity and opportunity entrepreneurship, change agents, resourcefulness, informal enterprises and institutions. The ‘two-way’ relationship – or ‘recursive links’ (p. 114) – between institutional change and entrepreneurial behaviour is especially noteworthy here.
Next, Chapters 3, 4 and 5 focus on entrepreneurship in (Western) Europe with a particular focus on her home country of Germany. These chapters also help explain why context is so important to her and how her own context has shaped the development of her empirical research, collaborations and theoretical contributions, and specifically the multidisciplinarity of German entrepreneurship research with its emphasis on context.
Gender (Chapters 6, 7, 9, 15) is one of Welter’s key collaborative research themes. Several chapters from the US-Aotearoa-Europe collaboration of Brush, de Bruin and Welter offer new insights into context from a gendered perspective including the expansion of the Markets, Money and Management (3M) framework to include Motherhood and the Macro- and Meso-Environment as a 5M model which is then applied in another chapter. How women entrepreneurs are represented in newspapers in Germany is investigated in terms of ‘everydayness’, the ‘male norm’, role models, types and stereotypes (Chapter 9).
These chapters lead to some miscellaneous, but connected, chapters on the spatial context, institutions and trust (Chapters 10, 12, 13). Again, emphasising the ‘everydayness’ (a theme she returns to in Chapter 20), entrepreneurship is a ‘socio-spatial phenomenon’ which needs to include consideration of not just family and friends, kinship, institutions and networks and cultural embeddedness but also the important geographical concept or measure of ‘scale’, that is, global, regional, national and ‘the underlying socio-spatial processes that influence the type and the extent of entrepreneurial activities’ (Chapter 12). She then considers trust and again the contextualised two-way relationship between this concept and entrepreneurial behaviour in terms of ‘social norms’ and social capital (Chapter 13). In this chapter, she examines the nature of trust and its scales, that is, micro (personal trust – relationships), meso (collective trust – city, network etc.) and macro (institutional trust – culture, regions, Government etc.), various other aspects, and that it ‘is volatile and fragile – it is easily destroyed’.
Context – conceptually speaking – is the final research theme in Chapters 11, 18, 19 and 20. Her seminal article – or her ‘flagship’ (11) – is all about the dimensions of context: ‘when, how and why entrepreneurship happens’, and ‘who becomes involved’. A further chapter then shows how she has been ‘wandering between contexts’ and, in particular, how a ‘great variety of contexts in which I . . . work[ed] that greatly sensitized me to the role of context in creating the differences that make both the world and good theory interesting’. That is from her background of researching in Africa as a student, then becoming ‘a small business researcher’, institutions, the transition context, change agents (informality, ‘shuttle trading’, arbitrage etc.) and, finally, women’s entrepreneurship – all leading to contextualising entrepreneurship research. Indeed, in 2005, the late and great Professor Mike Wright invited her to a symposium on ‘Entrepreneurship in Transition and Emerging Economies’, leading to her 2011 ETP article (Chapter 11) where she ‘took stock’ and ‘condensed . . . into a few ideas how to further entrepreneurship research’. The final two chapters essentially call for subfields that have become silos, but very important theorising ones, to move into the mainstream (Chapter 19), and critiquing the ‘Silicon Valley model’ of entrepreneurship so that we instead focus on ‘everyday entrepreneurship’ (Chapter 20). Lessons are learned from research into inequality, the life course and identity, ‘heterogenous motivations and varieties of success’, victimhood and emancipation, agency and ‘doing context’, and what they describe as the ‘nexus’ (Chapter 19). The very final chapter – the cherry on a very satisfying cake – argues that ‘high-growth, technology-enabled, venture capital-backed businesses that do big initial public offerings, make billionaires of their founders, create thousands of jobs, and provide products and services that change the way we live’, such as gazelles and unicorns, has led to the ‘valorisation’, on the one hand, and ‘disparagement’ on the other of a variety of everyday (but not high-growth) types of entrepreneurship.
This current reviewer – as an economic geographer who conducted empirical fieldwork in Hungary for his PhD in 2000 and who now has research interests that are similar to Welter’s – is particularly appreciative of this volume. Boyer (1990) redefined scholarship as discovery, integration, application and teaching. Welter’s work here is largely integrative (especially Chapter 11), since she synthesises the empirical and theoretical insights from her previous research to explain how contextualising entrepreneurship can move this sometimes stuck-in-the-mud field forward significantly.