Rural entrepreneurship as-practice: a framework for research beyond stereotypical notions of entrepreneurial agency and contextual constraints

Gesine Tuitjer, Neil Thompson · 2025 · Entrepreneurship and Regional Development

Summary. Rural entrepreneurship research often relies on stereotypical views of rurality and how context shapes business activity. This paper proposes a new theoretical framework treating rural context and entrepreneurship as interconnected practice-material bundles. The authors identify four types of relations between entrepreneurial agency and rural context—causal, prefigurative, constitutive, and intelligibility—to better understand how they mutually shape each other. The framework bridges positivist and constructivist approaches and emphasizes analyzing practice-material dynamics as the core unit for studying rural entrepreneurship.

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@article{tuitjer-2025-rural-entrepreneurship-practice-framework-research,
  title   = {Rural entrepreneurship as-practice: a framework for research beyond stereotypical notions of entrepreneurial agency and contextual constraints},
  author  = {Gesine Tuitjer and Neil Thompson},
  journal = {Entrepreneurship and Regional Development},
  year    = {2025},
  doi     = {10.1080/08985626.2025.2475890},
  url     = {https://doi.org/10.1080/08985626.2025.2475890}
}

TY  - JOUR
TI  - Rural entrepreneurship as-practice: a framework for research beyond stereotypical notions of entrepreneurial agency and contextual constraints
AU  - Gesine Tuitjer
AU  - Neil Thompson
JO  - Entrepreneurship and Regional Development
PY  - 2025
DO  - 10.1080/08985626.2025.2475890
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1080/08985626.2025.2475890
ER  - 

Details

DOI

10.1080/08985626.2025.2475890

Countries

Netherlands

Regions

Europe

Categories

entrepreneurship, innovation-theory, regional-innovation-systems

Added

2026-04-28