An anthropological perspective on contextualizing entrepreneurship
提出人类学视角来情境化创业，强调社会文化纽带、微观-中观-宏观联系及过去-现在连接，并以东南亚华裔创业为例展示该视角如何拓宽创业研究的经验、方法和概念范围。
Abstract This paper develops an anthropological perspective on contextualizing entrepreneurship. We argue that interconnectedness is the quintessence of such a perspective and takes the form of (1) sociocultural ties between people; (2) interrelationships between micro, meso, and macro levels; and (3) connections between the past and the present. We illustrate this perspective through our research among ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs in Southeast Asia, identifying three kinds of sociocultural ties among the ethnic Chinese (kinship, spiritual, and patron-client ties) and positioning these ties in the historical and contemporary experiences of Chinese migration, settlement, and business venturing. In doing so, we show that an anthropological perspective broadens the empirical scope (including developing countries, minority groups, and “everyday” entrepreneurship), the methodological scope (employing ethnographic methods), and the conceptual scope (considering sociocultural ties at the interpersonal level) of entrepreneurship research. The contribution lies in operationalizing and theorizing context: we operationalize context through interconnectedness – comprising our three forms as well as ethnographic methodology to examine these – and theorize interconnectedness by elaborating how entrepreneurs “do” context through enacting the sociocultural ties that “embody” this context, while considering the micro-meso-macro and past-present connections that have engendered these ties. Our anthropological perspective presents a fine-grained and holistic analytical framework for contextualizing entrepreneurship.