Entrepreneurial opportunities and the role of contextual embeddedness

This chapter focuses on how external contextual factors shape entrepreneurial actions and also how entrepreneurial actions shape these contextual factors in return. Our study uses two in-depth cases studies to gain in-depth understanding of their contextual embeddedness. We also explore how industry knowledge is transferred to the locals as a result of political, market, and economic pressures and how institutional context made local managers break the norms, and with the help of social networks built over time, to set up their own ventures. This chapter makes contributions to the extant literature on context and entrepreneurship by using contextual embeddedness, in our study of entrepreneurs in a specific industry, in a specific landscape, we determine how temporal, industry and market, and social constructs can shape the development of an industry. This study found entrepreneurs to be change agents and shows how they can flourish under resource constraints and under conditions of adversity.