Microbusiness and place-based change: New insights into the aggregate nature of small-scale entrepreneurial action

Entrepreneurship research increasingly recognises that place is shaped by the everyday actions of economic actors. Yet, we still know relatively little about how the small-scale actions of individual microbusinesses reshape local places. Starting from a relational conception of place as process, this article examines how microbusinesses contribute intentionally and in harmony to the transformation of local places. We combine Emirbayer and Mische’s temporal-relational conception of agency, which recognises entrepreneurial action as a contextually embedded process, with constitutive approaches to performativity that highlight how microbusiness actions gradually remake place. The findings of our 18-month ethnographic study of a small town in the United Kingdom, which combines interviews, diaries and field observations, show how visible, materially grounded microbusiness practices operate performatively, signalling aspirational futures and reshaping expectations for local places. Underpinned by processual theories of temporal-relational agency and performativity, our analysis identifies an entrepreneurial process, through which mutually reinforcing effects of individual, projective entrepreneurial actions by microbusinesses accumulate over time and space to transform the town. Theorising this process as ‘aggregate agency’, we contribute to place-based entrepreneurship research by revealing how microbusinesses make incremental transformative contributions to local places through uncoordinated yet, converging individual actions, commanding a processual understanding of both entrepreneurship and place.