A place for habitual communal entrepreneurship: Toward a theory of how community-based enterprises can encourage and sustain habitual communal entrepreneurship

Abstract

In this research I employ ethnographic procedures and a grounded theory analytic approach to address questions regarding how established community-based enterprises (CBEs) encourage and sustain repeated acts of entrepreneurship. Through my attention to the key characteristics of place, I develop a model that improves our understanding of community-based enterprising and habitual entrepreneurship. My findings highlight the important role of place by showing how within an isolated, communal, small, and secure place eight community practices become socially embedded everyday actions that promote and sustain habitual communal entrepreneurship. I identify and describe four of these everyday social practices—tinkering, considering the needs of others, provoking, and normalizing failure—as critical to sustaining habitual communal entrepreneurship. I also identify and describe four of these everyday social practices—maintaining boundaries, encouraging social collisions, providing familial well-being, fulfilling a higher purpose—as place-sustaining practices that, while designed to support and maintain the community, also acted to reinforce the entrepreneurship-sustaining practices that encouraged and sustained habitual communal enterprising. In doing this, my findings challenge the view that places are largely irrelevant in today’s globalized connected world, instead empirically supporting the contention that place and its multidimensional components have an important influence on behaviour.