Understanding the Entrepreneurs Context: A Phenomenographic Approach

This study investigates the variation in entrepreneurs’ own understanding and experience of their context. Previous research has focused either on the entrepreneur in terms of behaviour and characteristics towards opportunities or on the context and the factors that influence the entrepreneurial activity nationally, regionally or within a specific industry. These studies had a limited focus on the entrepreneur own understanding and how they reason their contextual factors based on their experience. This limitation is mainly due to the methodological approaches used in these studies. To address this limitation, I will be using phenomenography to explore the variation in entrepreneurs’ own understanding and experience of context in Jordan. Jordan is a developing country situated in midst of political instability. To capture the variation in the lived experience from the entrepreneurs’ perspective, I will be asking “how do entrepreneurs understand their local context; How they experience the context of regional instability? and how context is presented in training?”. Underpinning the individual decision is a personal experience that needs to be captured and to understand the reasoning with which it is applied (Jones and Casulli 2014). Previous discussions of context have tended to be limited to the description of its spatial, temporal, geographic and cultural elements, and this has affected the development of theory about context and limited our understanding of context (Sarasvathay and Venkataraman, 2011; Welter, 2011; Zahra and Wright, 2011; Zahra 2007). Therefore, this research will focus on the individual level understandings and experience of context during time of regional instability; and the role of training in shaping these experiences using phenomenography as a methodology. The result of this research will introduce “framework of entrepreneurs’ context”. The framework will present the entrepreneurs’ understanding and experiences in contextualising their activity and the role of entrepreneurial training in shaping their understanding. As a result, context carries different meanings within entrepreneurial activity, and thus the variability in, and idiosyncratic nature of, the entrepreneurs’ context is captured.