The situated meaning of entrepreneurial engagement

This dissertation seeks to develop a contextualised understanding of entrepreneurship by exploring the situated meaning of entrepreneurial engagement. Defined as the subjective meaning attached to entrepreneurial engagement that is actively constructed based on on-going lived experiences of, and within, contexts, examining the situated meaning of entrepreneurial engagement leaves aside 'universal' theories when exploring a novel or poorly understood phenomenon and instead develops understanding from the bottom-up. I put forward three theoretical approaches that support the goal of situating meanings of entrepreneurial engagement in different contexts: entrepreneurial imagination, identity, and emotion. In addition, creative approaches designed to uncover situated meaning and its construction in context are also presented. Paper 1 explores how individuals in a centrally planned economy respond to strict government regulations on private entrepreneurial activities through imagining. The study examines the prospective entrepreneurial engagement of university students in North Korea and generates a novel framework that identifies and elaborates various types of narratives for envisioning entrepreneurial engagement. In this way we demonstrate how entrepreneurial engagement can still be considered possible and desirable despite the constraints that presumably pertain within a centrally planned economy. Paper 2 examines how impoverished women entrepreneurs negotiate, reproduce, and/or challenge local sociocultural norms surrounding gender and entrepreneurship through identity construction. The study examines the self-narratives and identity construction of self-employed women in poor patriarchal communities in Indonesia, showing how gendered expectations can be both enabling and constraining in local contexts. We thereby challenge the assumption that entrepreneurship presents impoverished women with the most promising employment opportunity. Paper 3 introduces a novel research method for uncovering the emotional experiences of entrepreneurs through visualising. The paper introduces colour and the colour timeline approach as tools with which to reveal the hidden or silenced voices of entrepreneurs. This paper advances the literature's methodological toolbox by creatively advancing contextualised entrepreneurship research. Altogether, by examining the situated meaning of entrepreneurial engagement through entrepreneurial imagination, identity, and emotion, this dissertation offers theoretical and methodological pathways for developing context-sensitive understandings of entrepreneurship. In doing so, this dissertation contributes to the development of entrepreneurship as a rich, diverse, and inclusive field of study.