The crafting of an (un)enterprising community: context and the social practice of talk

Abstract

This article examines a ‘deprived’ UK community to identify how (dis)connections between context and enterprise are produced within accounts of a particular locality. We used a discursive psychological approach to examine how the community depicted itself as a context for enterprise. Our analysis identified three discursive repertoires mobilised by a range of voices in the community which combined to portray an unenterprising community and create a conceptual deadlock for enterprise. We suggest it is too deterministic to assume context is fixed and controls the potential for entrepreneurial development. Instead, we should consider social practices, including talk, that help construct the contexts in which entrepreneurship is expected to occur.