Making the Hostile Hospitable: Constructing Entrepreneurial Contexts in an Urban Slum

Abstract

Entrepreneurship researchers have become increasingly concerned with the holistic quality of context, yet despite several theoretical contributions this important stream of work has lacked empirical application. This paper draws on Zahra and Wright’s (2011) four- dimension framework of context to explore how context can serve as both a trigger for, and a product of, entrepreneurial organising. Data is drawn from an impoverished and marginalized slum community in Nairobi, Kenya, where two ‘entrepreneurial collectives’ were studied ethnographically over a period of three months. Studying subjective interpretations of context within these collectives enabled us to show how hostile entrepreneurial contexts can be negotiated through collaborative processes of framing and creative construction. The contextual lens used here supplements the growing literature on entrepreneurship in areas of deep poverty by retracting its focus from the micro-strategies of individual entrepreneurs, and instead gives a fuller account of how entrepreneurship can be provoked by the broad array of challenges embedded in such settings.