Rural entrepreneurship scholarship has long underscored the importance of contextual conditions that enable or constrain entrepreneurial activities. However, contextual relations are, at times, characterized by a stereotypical or superficial understanding of what ‘rurality’ is and means for rural entrepreneurship, prompting calls for an exploration of new theoretical foundations. We develop a novel theoretical framework that underscores the ontological sameness of rural context and rural entrepreneurship as intersecting practice-material bundles. This enables us to propose four relations between rural entrepreneurship and rural contexts – causal, prefigurative, constitutive and intelligibility – that can be used as a heuristic to understand the processual and mutual relations between entrepreneurial agency and rural context. We map out three important contributions of this framework for future research, including integrating positivist-functionalist and social constructivist divisions, the necessity of an insider analytical approach, and foregrounding the dynamics and relations between practice-material bundles as the primary unit of analysis for future rural entrepreneurship research.

Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2025.2475890