Contextual confidence and theorising back: A logic for generating entrepreneurship theory from the margins

Entrepreneurship research has grown alert to the limits of theories forged in Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) settings, and recent calls to decolonise and pluralise the field are welcome. Yet naming whole entrepreneurial worlds by what they are not leaves the deeper architecture undisturbed, since widening the map does nothing to alter the rule that decides which settings generate theory and which must earn relevance through deficit or deviation. What these calls still require, this conceptual article argues, is an operating logic: a specification of how theorising might proceed once the presumption of a centre is withdrawn. Contextual confidence supplies the stance, theorising phenomena from within the histories, relations and institutions that render them intelligible rather than against dominant settings; and by securing the right to theorise without apology, it makes a second move possible. Theorising back turns concepts developed where they are analytically unavoidable on supposedly central contexts, asking what dominant theory has failed to see because of where it was built. Six generative lenses, derived from the dimensions any account of entrepreneurial action must specify, show that at each the field has mistaken a WEIRD default for a universal, taking the autonomous founder, the stable institution and the growth imperative for descriptions of entrepreneurship rather than the local settlements they are. Being variables rather than cultural attributes, the lenses can be turned on any setting, and a model, a protocol and an illustration from women's entrepreneurship in Côte d’Ivoire put the proposed logic to work. The aim of this article is not to rename the periphery but to provincialise the centre.