Entrepreneurs Contextualisation of Culture in a National Setting

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to capture the variation in entrepreneurs’ understandings and experiences through which they contextualise cultural factors within a national setting to articulate how they use their knowledge and social capabilities to advance their activity.
Design/Methodology/Approach: this study adopts an interpretivist approach through which culture is investigated at the individual level. Phenomenography is used as a methodology to capture the variation in entrepreneurs’ understanding and experiences of cultural factors.
Findings: The findings introduce four different understandings and eight experiences that enable us to explore how entrepreneurs contextualise culture in their environment. The findings present a change in the role of culture in influencing entrepreneurial social capabilities and confidence; and a change in the local culture from collectivism to individualism. Furthermore, the findings show how entrepreneurs use their knowledge, experience and understanding to achieve socially driven acts to pursue economic value, integration and acceptance.
Originality/value: In this study, phenomenography has enabled new insights into the multiplicity and idiosyncratic role of culture within a national setting and introduces a model of social capability and integration which capture the contextualisation of cultural factors. The study contributes to entrepreneurship literature as follows: first, the implicit assumption in this research is that culture is an active construct that entrepreneurs understand, experience and also influence; second, the variation in entrepreneurs’ outcomes is based on their subjective and personal understandings which form the ways of contextualisation. Third, the variation in understanding and experiences captures the different ways entrepreneurs use their social capabilities to achieve integration and economic value.