In this article, we introduce the special issue on entrepreneurship and embeddedness. We do so by providing a brief overview of existing research on the topic focused on three important conversations related to process, context and theoretical foundations. The overview highlights essential contributions from extant research and suggests that expansion and advancement in the research...

This paper aims to extend the theoretical foundations of entrepreneurship education by integrating several of the most relevant lessons from Anderson’s contribution into current conceptualizations. We identify three main dimensions of Anderson’s work useful for our purpose: conceptualization of entrepreneurship; network and social capital as mechanisms to explain entrepreneurship as a socially embedded phenomenon; and...

Migrant entrepreneurship has been acknowledged in the literature to be a dynamic and diffused phenomenon that characterizes local systems within European countries in the form of ethnic economies. The aim of the paper is to investigate the phenomenon of ethnic quasi-enclave industrial sub-clusters within industrial districts and to analyse social capital within the economic and...

A generalized belief in entrepreneurship as a source of economic growth ensures sustained interest in the entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE) concept, capturing the attention of governments and regional authorities. This has generated a plethora of public policies aimed at creating and developing EEs, frequently without solid theoretical and empirical foundations for its design, with consequent policies...

Based on the works of Alistair Anderson, this article explores entrepreneuring in the context of entrepreneurial families prior to, and following, the death of a leading family member in business. Until now, literature has suggested that the loss of a leading family member may bring complexity and chaos to ongoing entrepreneurial efforts. Drawing on a...

In this research note, we further Alistair R. Anderson’s argument that an atomized view of entrepreneurship as an economic function provides limited understanding of what it is to actually do entrepreneurship. We take the stance that entrepreneurship, as a process, is born of social context. What it is to be and what it is to...

his paper employs a practice perspective to understand the hanging-together of networking and production practices in small craft-food businesses. Based on a case study from a rural region of Germany, we explore how practices are held together by teleoaffective structures and socio-material arrangements, pointing to the role of machines as nodes in networking and production...

The purpose of this paper is to add a contextual understanding of care ethics to the nascent literature on ethics in social entrepreneurship. To this end, an interpretive study of social bricoleur entrepreneurs in rural India is presented and the constitutive effects of the enactment of care ethics are articulated. First, this enactment is examined...

Forced displacement drastically changes the nature of refugees’ connection to their home countries and requires them to build new ties to their host countries. While refugees undergo the dynamic transformation of their embeddedness after arriving in host countries, previous studies on refugee entrepreneurship have not sufficiently examined the dynamic and procedural nature of refugees’ embeddedness...

This paper reviews the literature on community enterprises (CEs), i.e. organizations that engage in commercial activity and operate for the development of a local community by bringing economic, social, and environmental benefits. In the face of widespread recognition of the positive role they play in impoverished territories, there is no general agreement on their very...