ABSTRACT
Earlier, we introduced some common themes and patterns of contextualization and showed how entrepreneurship research has—or has not— dealt with contexts over time and what “doing context” implies. We then focused on how entrepreneurs themselves do context, discussing contextualization in terms of enactment, use of language and images. In this chapter we now will turn to theorizing contexts as a Critical Process Approach, attempting to go beyond what the sociologist Rachel Rosenfeld, reflecting on the state of much gender research in the 1980s and 1990s, criticized during a seminar attended by one of the authors as “add gender and stir”. Our focus here is on researchers doing context: on the choices researchers make, and to some extent on how these are embedded in the social structures in which we operate and the terms by which careers, resources, status and rewards are made available. But when we begin to interrogate these structures by asking “who does our research serve”? our basic argument is in favor of making choices that are more cognizant of and critical toward the varied structures of inequality and domination that are frequently in play and shaping how entrepreneurs— and researchers—do contexts.
