ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how, regional social legitimacy influences the relationships between individual entrepreneurial beliefs, intentions and start-up behaviour and how the interaction effects are conditioned by the socio-economic characteristics of the region. It presents significant new empirical knowledge to the limited understanding of how regional social norms affect the formation of entrepreneurial intentions and of how regional features influence the translation of intentions into start-up behaviour. The chapter describes entrepreneurship as a place-dependent process of emergence and responds to the call for longitudinal and multilevel research to establish causality and uncover the mechanisms through which regional social norms influence new firm formation. It introduces the concept of the regional social legitimacy of entrepreneurship, and develops and validates a corresponding measurement instrument. The chapter addresses the lack of congruent concepts and measurement tools for the investigation of the regional cultural embeddedness of entrepreneur- ship.
