How does context become context: relating multiple contexts in entrepreneurial explanation

The issue of how to ‘theorise context’ remains largely implicit in entrepreneurship research.  This means that although there is an increasing receptiveness to the meaning, role and function of context, the search for different ways to make context a theoretical (rather than factual or referential) concept is still underdeveloped. In this article, we identify three dominant conceptions of context in entrepreneurship research and discuss the limitations they engender for theorizing context. These limitations relate to the spatial and/or temporal separation of context and action, and the spatio-temporal conflation of action and context. Next, we offer a first step in theorizing context from the perspective of relational thinking.  From this perspective, we explain how entrepreneurial processes emerge through the circular causality of action-context relationships. This relational conceptualization also enables an evaluation of how multiple contexts are related to the spatio-temporal specificities of actioned events