Rural entrepreneurship as-practice: a framework for research beyond stereotypical notions of entrepreneurial agency and contextual constraints

Rural entrepreneurship scholarship has long underscored the importance of contextual conditions that enable or constrain entrepreneurial activities. However, contextual relations are, at times, characterized by a stereotypical or superficial understanding of what ‘rurality’ is and means for rural entrepreneurship, prompting calls for an exploration of new theoretical foundations. We develop a novel theoretical framework that underscores the ontological sameness of rural context and rural entrepreneurship as intersecting practice-material bundles. This enables us to propose four relations between rural entrepreneurship and rural contexts–causal, prefigurative, constitutive and intelligibility–that can be used as a heuristic to understand the processual and mutual relations between entrepreneurial agency and rural context. We map out three important contributions of this framework for future research, including integrating positivist-functionalist and social constructivist divisions, the necessity of an insider analytical approach, and foregrounding the dynamics and relations between practice-material bundles as the primary unit of analysis for future rural entrepreneurship research.