Entrepreneurial Failure Contextualized : Sociocultural Approaches

This chapter reviews how sociocultural approaches can advance the study of failure by highlighting the role of context in shaping failure. The chapter discusses the use of three lenses – embeddedness, social construction, and materiality – in exploring how collective organizing, ideas, and artifacts shape organizational failure. Drawing on vignettes from three separate studies on entrepreneurial failure, the chapter demonstrates the use of these lenses in highlighting, for example, the role of organizations’ assimilation in a community rule system, contextual variations in the understanding of what constitutes failure, and artifact-created boundaries in organizational failure. The chapter shows the contextual study of failure as complementary to actor-centric perspectives and offers possible research questions to encourage closer collaboration between actor-centric and contextual scholarship.