ABSTRACT
This chapter briefly presents some arguments for why we need to continue progress on building a contextualized perspective in entrepreneurship research. Anthropologists, as well as scholars from a variety of liberal arts disciplines such as philosophy and literary studies, have struggled over how to choose and delimit how they contextualize their work. Drawing from the movement towards taking “environments” into consideration that swept organization theory during the 1970s, early entrepreneurship research talked about environments for entrepreneurship, treating these largely as objective differences in the situations entrepreneurs faced. The urge to contextualize is a longstanding and recurring theme among some entrepreneurship researchers. Because contextualizing entrepreneurship is about acknowledging and accounting for variations and differences in the nature and patterns and meanings of entrepreneurship, it not only urges us to greater sensitivity of typically hidden variation but can also shed new light onto seemingly well-known entrepreneurship phenomena.
