Search Results

In this chapter, we discuss the dominant tendency in entrepreneurship research to objectify the notion of context and the limitations this engenders for understanding how context is related to the real-time emergence of entrepreneurial processes. We contribute to the increasing efforts to theorize context by presenting a relational conception of context which explains how the interrelationship of multiple contexts and agency is constitutive of action (interpretive and social) in real-time emergence. This conceptualization has important implications for identifying, selecting and integrating contexts in entrepreneurial explanations because it connects multiple contexts with the spatio-temporal specifics of actioned events.

In this chapter, we draw attention to the theme of embodied practice as it relates to the challenge of theorizing the interrelationship of agency-centred transformational events and distributed relational connections in entrepreneurship “process” research. The issue of how transient actioned events interrelate with a multiplicity of relational contexts remains problematic for process research. Process theorists have used concepts related to the embodiment of entrepreneurial activity, such as practice, design, performativity, affect, desire, passions, emotions, lived experience and materiality, to contribute to the explanation of how entrepreneurial processes transpire in multiple contexts. We argue that temporality, or the relativity of actioned events to a past, present and future, is a neglected aspect of embodiment, which can be used to further advance the theorization of process by developing an embodied explanation of relationality. In this chapter, we explain how an embodied conception of relationality contributes to theorizing entrepreneurial process as a continuous flow of transformational events and as an evolving relational web of sociomaterial connections.

In parallel with the growing interest in qualitative research methods in family business, many family business scholars advocate the greater use of ethnographic methods to advance the field further. This endorsement rests on at least two arguments. On the one hand, there is a need to widen, extend, or deepen our perspectives to better understand the ‘boundary-crossing’ nature of families in business; on the other hand, the majority of proposals to extend ethnographic research aim to tap into the important yet underexplored complex tacit processes of family firms. However, ethnographic research in family business settings remains rarely published. This chapter reviews a set of family business studies that have used ethnographic methods and have been published in business and management journals in order to examine their orientations, main findings, techniques adopted, and epistemological/ontological stances. Looking forward, the authors end this chapter with a brief discussion on how the practice of ethnography is changing with reference to the visual and virtual applications of ethnographic principles.