Entrepreneurship & Regional Development

Entrepreneurship meets Anthropology: investigating the intersections

Introduction

This special issue aims to investigate the meeting points between entrepreneurship studies and anthropology to advance our understanding of entrepreneurship as a field of practice. Various domains in entrepreneurship scholarship show close affinity with anthropology, including sub-fields that focus on specific categories of entrepreneurs—e.g. social, religious, family, or migrant entrepreneurs—and topical areas ranging from the commons and community enterprise (Meyer, 2020; Peredo & Chrisman, 2006) to the social and economic ramifications of generative artificial intelligence (Artz & Ren, 2025). In addition, approaches that avoid positivist, individualist, and scientistic frameworks and instead examine entrepreneurship in terms of socially constructed opportunities (Fletcher, 2006), an everyday endeavour (Welter et al., 2017), an embedded process (Jack & Anderson, 2002), or a set of interconnected practices (Gartner et al., 2016) resonate with anthropology’s view that seeking “the essence of entrepreneurship” is futile, and instead frame it as “part of the ongoing process of human life” (Greenfield & Strickon, 1986, p. 15).

A further investigation of these meeting points will foster novel, thought-provoking, and innovative interpretations of entrepreneurship, both through the advancement of already existing meeting points and by engaging with more recent conceptual developments in anthropology. For example, prominent notions in entrepreneurship studies like embeddedness and context not only originate from anthropology, but conceptual development around these notions benefits from engaging with anthropological insights (e.g., Roy & Grant, 2020; Verver & Koning, 2024). Contributions to the special issue may also engage with recent conceptual developments around the state (Peternel & Doolan, 2023) or reappraisals of human relations with nature within the Anthropocene (Bell, 2025), which are only beginning to be explored in entrepreneurship journals (e.g. Thomsen et al., 2024).

Background

More than three decades ago, Alex Stewart called entrepreneurship studies’ avoidance of engagement with anthropology a “regrettable neglect” (1991, p. 143). Such claims of disciplinary neglect hold no longer true—the two disciplines have moved closer together with respect to theoretical angles and empirical interests. Entrepreneurship scholars have, for example, used the anthropological notion of kinship to explore the “moral order” underlying familial involvements in entrepreneurship (Stewart, 2003), and challenged the ethnocentric notion that so-called necessity entrepreneurship contributes little to developing economies (Kodithuwakku & Rosa, 2002). These and other anthropological contributions to entrepreneurship journals include a variety of contexts, ranging from community-based entrepreneurship among indigenous peoples in the Andean highlands (Peredo & McLean, 2010) to entrepreneurial sons rebelling against patriarchal authority in Greek village communities (Bika, 2012), and from processes of in- and exclusion among Syrian refugees in the North of England (Refai et al., 2024) to informal taxi services reshaping the semi-colonial context of Shanghai (Frost & Frost, 2021).

Vice versa, entrepreneurship is re-emerging as a subject of study in anthropology, as demonstrated by the recent publication of two monographs and two special issues on the topic (Beuving, 2023; Briody & Stewart, 2019; Liebow & Sunderland, 2023; Pfeilstetter, 2022). Building on the work of Fredrik Barth (1963), Clifford Geertz (1963), and Mary Douglas (1992), anthropologists have studied how entrepreneurial experimentation challenges established community norms, values, and statuses as well as scrutinized the entrepreneur as a cultural phenomenon of late modernity (Pfeilstetter, 2022). Recent ethnographies explore entrepreneurial spaces as shaped by both hegemonic neoliberal tropes and cultural specificities such as middle-class aspirations, kinship, solidarity, and gender (e.g., Beltrán, 2020; Zhang, 2023). This emergent body of anthropological work approaches the entrepreneur “from the South”, for instance tracing the rise of entrepreneurs in Cuba resisting state restrictions on private sector growth (Vertovec, 2021) or investigating the value that investors in India place in the personhood of the start-up entrepreneurs (Ghosh, 2020).

Scope

This special issue aims to create an intellectual space for interdisciplinary conversation, which is where exciting new opportunities arise for conceptual development, contextual enrichment, and methodological advancement. We invite contributions that are at the interface of the two disciplines: we encourage entrepreneurship scholars who are inspired by anthropology to further develop their insights, and we encourage anthropologists who may typically publish in anthropology outlets to engage with the entrepreneurship field. We especially welcome engagements with socio-cultural anthropology—which can be defined as “the comparative study of culture and society, with local life as the starting point” (Eriksen, 2004, p. 9)—as its interests align closely with the now-established body of entrepreneurship research that has moved beyond the traditional divide between explaining entrepreneurship in terms of psychological characteristic versus economic opportunities (Swedberg, 2000). We are also open to engagements with adjacent fields such as economic, political, or linguistic anthropology. With respect to entrepreneurship studies, we are broadly interested in the creation of new enterprising activity, both within and beyond formal businesses, and including but not limited to comparative work, narrative and discourse-analytical approaches, and process ontologies that are, for example, captured in Steyaert’s notion of “entrepreneuring” (2007). We welcome theoretical as well as empirical contributions that explicitly build on anthropology and explicitly contribute to entrepreneurship debates, thus engaging both fields. In line with the aims and scope of Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, contributions need to go beyond pure empirical and contextual description to advance our conceptual understanding of the entrepreneurship phenomenon.

Meeting points

Contributions may explore how entrepreneurship and anthropology meet along the following dimensions:

• Thinkers. Contributions may revisit anthropologists whose work has been employed in entrepreneurship studies, such as Claude Levi-Strauss’ bricolage or Jeanette Carsten’s kinship relatedness, or flesh out the intellectual contributions of early or recent thinkers, such as Marilyn Strathern, Marshall Sahlins, Tim Ingold, David Graeber, or Anna Tsing, whose conceptual focus on, for example, reciprocity, context, value, materiality, and assemblage mirrors the interests of many social sciences-oriented entrepreneurship scholars. Revisiting early “intellectual colossuses” may bring back some of their original nuances, while engaging with more recent thinkers may open up novel interpretations of familiar issues.
• Conceptualization. This may include established anthropological concepts (e.g., rituals, conviviality, magic) or more recent conceptual notions (e.g., spectrality, embodiment, the pluriverse, spirituality). Contributions may also join debates—such as around cosmopolitanism and more-than-human sociality—that inspire much contemporary anthropological thinking and are finding their way into entrepreneurship studies (e.g., Bell, 2025). We are also interested in shifting conceptualizations of the economic sphere—as, for example, manifested in the sharing economy, circular economy, and gig economy—and paralleling interest in regenerative, post-growth, and platform-based venturing. Considerations of the thorny concept of culture—a concept that was once core to anthropology and has been used and abused within the organization and business literatures—are also welcome.
• Methodology. Ethnography—anthropology’s hallmark methodology—is increasingly common in entrepreneurship research. It hinges on knowledge generation through participant observation, informal interviewing, and prolonged immersion in the research setting, and facilitates uncovering unexpected and unconventional manifestations of entrepreneurship in lived experiences. Alongside traditional ethnography, we also welcome more recent branches such as multispecies and autoethnography, and alongside classic long-term participant observation, we invite multimodal ethnography that braids together in-person, digital‑trace, visual‑sensory, co-creative, and arts-based data. Methodology is also about writing—we welcome contributions that build on the anthropological literary approach captured in the notion of thick description (Geertz, 1973).
• Criticality. Contributions may engage with the anthropological tendency to mistrust powerful actors like states and corporations, while foregrounding the perspective of the shopfloor, disadvantaged groups, and the Goffmanian backstages. Contributions may include investigations of entrepreneurship’s perverse and destructive aspects by, for example, focusing on locations where politics, violence, and industry converge, or on the ambiguities between formal/informal and legitimate/criminal entrepreneurial activity (e.g., Galemba, 2008; Sanchez, 2010). We also invite contributions that investigate micro-level manipulations—such as studies that critically debunk the heroism and enchantment that accompany much popular and academic discourse on social entrepreneurship (e.g., Barton & Muñoz, 2023; Mauksch, 2016)—or show the local consequences of macro-processes of neoliberalization and commodification that are fostered through entrepreneurship within global capitalism (e.g., Huang, 2020).
• Holism. A holistic approach enables an examination of the lived experiences of entrepreneurship in context, and manifests in an interest in the interplay between entrepreneurship and other life spheres, such as religion, magic, and spirituality, or migration and ethnicity (e.g., Barton & Muñoz, 2023; Pécoud, 2010). It also manifests in the realization that modes of entrepreneurial “value creation” often extend beyond profit-making and material gain, and into the realm of prestige, power, gift-giving, solidarity, or emancipation (e.g., Pfeilstetter, 2022; Werbner, 1999). We encourage such non-reductionist examinations of phenomena that are central to entrepreneurship research, including value, necessity, and informality.
• Contextualization. We invite contributions that provide context-sensitive accounts of entrepreneurial practice, diverting from normative accounts of profit-motivated, Silicon Valley-based, venture capital-backed “gazelles” and “unicorns” run by White men (Aldrich & Ruef, 2018). Contextualization implies alternative research contexts, nuancing social categories, and historicization (e.g., Frost et al., 2023; Refai et al., 2024). We consider contextual heterogeneity an end in and of itself but also—recognising that theoretical claims are contingent upon and can only be understood within the context of people’s everyday lives—a means to foster theoretical advancement. We both welcome accounts that engage with and are far removed from hegemonic entrepreneurial productions, both in developed and developing countries, and both among marginalised and elite groups.
• Decolonization. Contextualization goes hand in hand with decolonization, which is central to contemporary anthropology and increasingly prioritized in entrepreneurship studies. Decolonization implies revealing how forms of colonial power persist in contemporary entrepreneurial phenomena as well as accounting for understudied economic niches or subcultures (e.g., Marshall, 2018; Mbaye, 2015). Beyond contextual heterogeneity as such, it means “theorizing from the South” (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2012), which may emerge from the inclusion of indigenous, spiritual, and non-Western voices, and may challenge familiar conceptual understandings that were developed in the Global North. This is warranted considering the persistent reductionism and ethnocentrism that is for example implied in understandings of empowerment, poverty, and informality (Muñoz & Kimmitt, 2018), and in distinctions between “mainstream” and “minority” entrepreneurs that reify social categories (Fonrouge, 2022). We invite work—especially emerging from scholars and communities from the Global South—that takes reflexive positionality to heart and recentres underrepresented epistemologies.

We look forward to your contributions advancing scholarship at the interface of anthropology and entrepreneurship studies!

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