In this article, we seek to open a debate within entrepreneurship scholarship around a prevailing reductionist view when it comes to non-western or alternative contexts. We argue it is incapable of capturing behavioral differences across contexts without making ethnocentric, narrow and simplified theoretical assumptions about ‘the rest’. Drawing on the sociology of absences, we explain why the concept of entrepreneurship, as it relates to development, has remained captive and constrained by western economic and cultural assumptions, which has been boosted by a worrying absence of self-criticism. This is problematic but equally full of missing opportunities. Drawing from cultural relativism and the sociology of emergences, in this paper we propose a refreshed agenda for advancing research at the intersection of entrepreneurship and development, marked by the possibility of alternative futures and the potency of hidden causes.

Introduction

In this article, we argue that current entrepreneurship scholarship, beyond western borders, offers only a reductionist view of the phenomenon. It understands that entrepreneurial action is one we have synthesized in the west and whatever happens in the ‘rest’ is most of the time insufficient or inferior. This is typically viewed as requiring a replication of what has proven successful in industrialized countries needing a major institutional reengineering to function appropriately. We argue that this is the same technocratic illusion and theoretical blindness that has been observed in critical development studies (Easterly, 2014, 2007; Escobar, 2011). The conceptual debate between the transcendental institutionalism (Sen, 2009) – the focus on an ideal framework for entrepreneurial behavior – that still characterizes western entrepreneurship research and the legitimacy of the emerging behaviors we observe in the rest (which diverge from the assumed norm) is still missing. By western entrepreneurship research, we mean one that frames the phenomenon as a set of human activities involved in the pursuit of business opportunities and/or the emergence of a new firm within a neoliberal conception of markets and institutions, making causal attributions within the boundaries of liberal humanism. One that therefore focuses on studying the antecedents, influencers, processes, outcomes and consequences of such a limited set of activities in a rather narrow set of ideological and cultural contexts. Echoing recent debates in critical development studies (Easterly, 2006, 2014; Ziai, 2015), in this article we aim to open such a discussion. We argue that only a serious reconsideration of our ontological position will enable an adequate and place-sensitive development of the field that disrupts assumptions about other contexts, seen as less developed, impoverished and even desperate. This involves addressing the problematic lack of self-criticism within entrepreneurship research when it comes to the rest living in non-western contexts, the narrow appreciation of development theories and the complexity of development itself, as well as the neglected power relations between western and non-western knowledge creation that still prevail in our field (Peredo and McLean, 2013). Dealing with a widely ethnocentric, narrow and simplified view of the phenomenon, we argue that a position of cultural relativism would be beneficial for advancing research at the intersection of development and entrepreneurship. Outside of the entrepreneurship domain, this has emerged by embracing of postcolonial theories in management (Nkomo, 2011; Özkazanç-Pan, 2008) and discussion of epistemological origins (Jaya, 2001). However, such a critique has only been partially articulated within entrepreneurship research (e.g. Peredo and McLean, 2013). We build on this prior research by drawing from de Sousa (2012) sociology of emergences.