What If We Are the WEIRD Ones? A Call (and Roadmap) for More Non-WEIRD Entrepreneurship Research

Non-Western vis-à-vis Western Contexts

The term Western usually refers to “countries in Western Europe and the countries they settled in, such as the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand” (Clancy & Davis, 2019, p. 173). The West represents a cultural zone—the “geographic area defined by an eco-cultural complex based on a view that the self is independent, emerging over the last 1,000 years” (p. 498). An Annual Review of Psychology article (Kitayama & Salvador, 2024) suggests that non-Western countries are in one of five cultural zones: (1) East Asia, (2) South Asia, (3) Arabia, (4) Latin America, and (5) Sub-Saharan Africa. These non-Western cultural zones differ from each other (and the Western cultural zone), and these differences could be important for entrepreneurship research.

However, we note that there are other ways to categorize countries as Western versus non-Western. For example, Karan (2004) proposes that the non-Western world includes countries that developed apart from the Greco-Judaic-Christian tradition, including East Asia, Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Still, he excludes Latin America, Russian Asia, and Oceania countries. Moreover, Connell (2020) and others (Dados & Connell, 2012; Gray & Gills, 2016) emphasize non-Western contexts by highlighting the importance of research in the global south—“epistemic places where global futures are being forged by delinking from the colonial matrix of power” (Mignolo, 2011, p. 184; see also Özkazanç-Pan [2008] for the advantages of a postcolonial framework in international management). Therefore, cultural differences are only one way to approach non-Western entrepreneurship research. Indeed, we note criticisms of Hofstede’s assumptions that culture is “implicit; core; systematically causal, territorially unique; and shared” (McSweeney, 2002, p. 91), a debate that does not need to be resolved here. Further, while we focus on the attributes of non-Western geographical areas to develop theories and findings relevant to these relatively neglected contexts, we are mindful that these new theories may feed back to and advance entrepreneurship theories in Western contexts (Yeung, 2007).

In the sections below, we offer examples of possible entrepreneurship research in non-Western contexts that will hopefully stimulate others’ ideas, including different categorizations of non-Western, different conceptualizations of culture, and dynamic changes across and within regions that inform our understanding of entrepreneurship in these areas, with the possibility (but not the necessity) of providing feedback to how we think about entrepreneurship research in WEIRD contexts.

Problems With Insufficient Entrepreneurship Research in Western Contexts

With an emphasis on Western contexts, past entrepreneurship research has explored the role of culture in entrepreneurship. Culture impacts people’s values, attitudes, preferences, behaviors, and interactions as well as society’s norms, practices, and routines. All of these elements may shape entrepreneurship within a non-Western context differently than in a Western context. Therefore, entrepreneurship models that explain phenomena in Western contexts, such as key entrepreneurial attitudes, personal goals, proactive behaviors, new venture strategies, types of social networks, and so on, may (and will likely) be less explanatory in non-Western contexts, leading to problems. These problems include leading audiences (scholars and entrepreneurs) in non-Western contexts to erroneous conclusions about entrepreneurial phenomena. These problems of a Western-context bias and/or assuming generalization to non-Western contexts represent an opportunity for future research, to which we now turn.

Future Entrepreneurship Research in Non-Western Contexts

We recommend more entrepreneurship research in non-Western contexts. In the following subsections, we offer broad questions that we believe could make important contributions to the mainstream entrepreneurship literature. To address these questions, research can begin by building on and extending current mainstream entrepreneurship research, non-mainstream entrepreneurship research, and/or the literatures from other disciplines.

Specifically, new entrepreneurship research in non-Western contexts can build on and extend mainstream research on non-Western entrepreneurs, such as entrepreneurship research in Brazil (Lenz et al., 2021), Chile (Harima et al., 2024), China (Berrone et al., 2023; Jiang et al., 2018; Liu et al., 2024; Zhang & Yu, 2017), Ecuador (Shymko & Khoury, 2023), India (Chatterjee et al., 2022; Shepherd, Parida, & Wincent, 2021, 2024), Lebanon (Shepherd, Saade, & Wincent, 2020), Palestine (Omran & Yousafzai, 2024), Singapore (Bi et al., 2021), Sri Lanka (Shantz et al., 2024), and Turkey (Erdogan et al., 2020). Furthermore, new entrepreneurship research in non-Western contexts can build on non-mainstream entrepreneurship studies (e.g., Abd Hamid, 2020; Gamage & Wickramasinghe, 2012; Mousa, 2024) and literatures from various disciplines (e.g., Fahlberg, 2023; Kitayama & Salvador, 2024; Moosavi, 2023). We also recommend consulting other research-agenda papers for guidance (e.g., Muñoz & Kimmitt, 2018; Simba, 2024; Wickert et al., 2024). We now offer our broad set of research questions.

Building primarily on the cultural zones proposed by Kitayama and Salvador (2024), we explore opportunities for future research embedded in these contexts. First, non-WEIRD entrepreneurship research can focus on the East Asian cultural zone, including countries like China, Japan, North Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan. Kitayama and Salvador (2024, p. 512) suggest that the cultural zone of East Asia highlights “social harmony and self-defacement.” Social harmony refers to “friendly or cooperative relations among people, such that social interactions are congruous and conflict free” (APA Dictionary of Psychology). How do entrepreneurs use social harmony to co-construct and explore potential opportunities or solutions to (economic or social) problems, enroll and engage stakeholders (including family) to acquire resources, and create new ventures? Further, researchers can explore the entrepreneurial behaviors or venture moves that threaten or fracture social harmony (i.e., social disharmony), the implications of such threats or fractures (to entrepreneurs and/or ventures), and entrepreneurs’ responses to maintain or regain social harmony. Furthermore, in East Asian culture, self-effacement refers to “acting in such a way as to avoid drawing attention to oneself or making oneself noticeable” (APA Dictionary of Psychology). How do entrepreneurs promote themselves and their ventures to acquire critical resources from (potential) stakeholders and families while engaging in self-effacement? It would be interesting to investigate self-effacement strategies for interpersonal interactions to determine which are effective and which are not, what the penalties are for entrepreneurs drawing attention to themselves and/or their ventures (breaking the social norm), and how entrepreneurs effectively respond to and recover from (or get away with) cultural breaches of self-effacement?

Second, non-WEIRD entrepreneurship research can focus on the South Asian cultural zone. South Asian countries include Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Pakistan, Nepal, and Sri Lanka (and some lists include Afghanistan and the Maldives). Kitayama and Salvador (2024, p. 512) suggest that the cultural zone of South Asia highlights “debate and argumentation as a means of maintaining commerce-based social relations.” How do entrepreneurs debate with (potential) stakeholders (including family members), what arguments do they use, and how do these debates and arguments facilitate their entrepreneurial endeavors? From such a view, it would be useful to determine if debates generate task conflict to reveal critical information for innovation, form and strengthen social relationships, and/or help different parties “sound each other out.” With all parties valuing debate and argumentation, studies may seek to understand how entrepreneurs and stakeholders eventually agree, how long it takes (are there costs for debates that are too short and/or too long), and how they avoid arguments becoming personal (presumably adversely impacting these relationships and thus the entrepreneurs and their ventures).

Third, non-WEIRD entrepreneurship research can also focus on entrepreneurs in the Arabian cultural zone, including countries like Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Kitayama and Salvador (2024, p. 514) suggest that the Arabian cultural zone highlights “self-assertiveness.” Assertiveness is “an adaptive communication style in which individuals express their feelings and needs directly while maintaining respect for others” (APA Dictionary of Psychology). Research can investigate the personal strategies entrepreneurs use to promote (or reflect) their assertiveness, which assertiveness practices are most effective (and why), and how these strategies lead to cooperative outcomes when stakeholders are also assertive. Do stakeholders eventually succumb to entrepreneurs’ assertiveness, or is there some optimal level of assertiveness achieved for both sides—some sort of assertiveness balance or equilibrium? How does such assertiveness manifest in a family-funded venture?

Fourth, non-WEIRD entrepreneurship research can focus on the Latin American cultural zone, including Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Columbia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Kitayama and Salvador (2024, p. 515) suggest that the Latin American cultural zone highlights “emotional expression as a means for social interdependence.” Interdependence is “a state in which two or more people, situations, variables or other entities rely on or react with one another such that one cannot change without affecting the other” (APA Dictionary of Psychology). Future research can explore (nascent) entrepreneurs’ networks and social capital endowments and how they influence the various stages of the entrepreneurial process. Indeed, it would be interesting to explore (nascent) entrepreneurs’ strategies for building, maintaining, and refining their social interdependence, on whom these entrepreneurs depend, and what happens when interdependence breaks down. For example, can damaged relationships be repaired (and if yes, how), and what impact does a damaged relationship have on an entrepreneur’s other existing relationships and their ability to create new relationships? With strong interdependence in relationships, are entrepreneurs careful with whom they form relationships, conscious of the substantial time commitments expected of such relationships?

Finally, non-WEIRD entrepreneurship research can focus on the Sub-Saharan African cultural zone, including Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Ghana, Ethiopia, Senegal, Uganda, Tanzania, and Rwanda. Kitayama and Salvador (2024, p. 501) suggest that countries in the cultural zone of Sub-Saharan Africa “tend to score low on individualism (or high on collectivism).” Collectivism is “a social orientation that prioritizes group cohesion over individual goals, emphasizing interdependence, shared responsibility, and mutual support within a community” (APA Dictionary of Psychology). Future research can explore how these collectivist values shape entrepreneurial decision-making, particularly resource-sharing, business partnerships, and community-based venture formation. Additionally, how do entrepreneurs in collectivist societies balance personal ambition with social obligations and expectations from extended family and local networks? It would be interesting to explore the role of trust and reciprocity in these informal business arrangements and how collectivist norms influence the scalability and long-term sustainability of entrepreneurial ventures in countries across Africa.

Future Entrepreneurship Research in Non-Western Subcontexts Within Western Contexts

Non-WEIRD entrepreneurship research can explore non-Western groups within Western countries. For example, there may be ethnic neighborhoods (e.g., Hispanic immigrant neighborhoods in Chicago [Tienda & Raijaman, 2004]), enclaves (Polish immigrant entrepreneurs in Great Britain [Marinoni, 2023]; self-employed Cubans in Miami, Koreans in New York, and Salvadorans in Los Angeles [Logan et al., 2003]; and Asian venture capitalists in Silicon Valley [Zhang, Wong, & Ho, 2016]), or Indigenous communities (Peredo et al., 2004; e.g., in Australia [Foley, 2003], Canada [Anderson, 2002], New Zealand [Tapsell & Woods, 2008], and the United States [Garsombke & Garsombke, 2000]) comprising non-Western people with non-Western cultures, norms, and attitudes that shape their entrepreneurial endeavors. Future research can explore these groups to expand our knowledge of entrepreneurship. Indeed, consistent with the research opportunities focused on a specific country, future research can explore non-Western aspects of entrepreneurship among groups within a Western country (building on and extending current work on the topic).

Non-Educated vis-à-vis Educated Contexts

Education is often used as a proxy for general human capital (for a meta-analysis, see Martin et al., 2013). General human capital refers to knowledge, skills, and experience that can be employed across various occupations and industries (e.g., Estrin et al., 2016) and is thus distinct from specific human capital. In countries with less educated populations and high variability in school quality, years of schooling is a poor proxy for general human capital; instead, researchers must capture the skills students obtain from education (Angrist et al., 2021). Such skills include literacy and numeracy. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization describes literacy as an instrument to “empower individuals, communities, and societies.” Still, more than 260 million young people lack access to school-based education, with females lagging behind males in countries with the lowest literacy rates (Fish, 2021). Appendix Table A1 details the literacy rates and global rankings for countries below the median. For example, the literacy rate is 74.4% in India, 59.1% in Pakistan, 43% in Afghanistan, and 19.1% in Nigeria.

Problems With Insufficient Entrepreneurship Research in Non-Educated Contexts

With an emphasis on educated contexts, WEIRD research has underexplored or ignored semiliterate and illiterate people engaged in entrepreneurship. Indeed, entrepreneurship research in educated contexts may capture and explore variation in education, but that variation is truncated. For example, scholars often assume a minimal level of education in the scales they use (with the lowest level of education typically being some high school) and in their research methods (i.e., they frequently assume study participants can read instructions, fill out surveys, or understand numbers for experiments). While such research generates useful knowledge in educated contexts, it can lead to limited, useless, or misleading information in non-educated contexts. By ignoring illiteracy or a lack of numeracy, scholars likely lack a sufficient understanding of the types of businesses low-educated individuals create, the heuristics they use to overcome their lack of education-based knowledge, their creation of new ventures, and so on. Thus, we need more entrepreneurship research in non-educated contexts to advance the entrepreneurship field.

Future Entrepreneurship Research in Non-Educated Contexts

In the following subsections, we offer broad questions that we believe could make important contributions to the mainstream entrepreneurship literature. To address these questions, research can begin by building on and extending current mainstream entrepreneurship research, non-mainstream entrepreneurship research, and/or the literatures from other disciplines.

Specifically, new entrepreneurship research in non-educated contexts can build on and extend mainstream research on non-educated entrepreneurs, such as studies of entrepreneurs with low education in Bangladesh (Shahriar, 2018; Shahriar & Shepherd, 2019) and India (Chatterjee et al., 2022), entrepreneurs with a mean of 8.81 years of education in Uganda (Rooks et al., 2016), entrepreneurs in Ghana who gain most of their information from their families rather than from formal education (Shantz et al., 2018), and entrepreneurs who desire to give their children a greater education than they received themselves in Ghana (Newman & Alvarez, 2022) and India (Shepherd, Parida, & Wincent, 2021). Furthermore, new entrepreneurship research in non-educated contexts can build on non-mainstream entrepreneurship studies (e.g., Burchi et al., 2021; Fauzi et al., 2021; Munyuki & Jonah, 2022) and literatures from various disciplines (e.g., Cueto et al., 2021; Weixiang et al., 2022; Zhang, 2021). We also recommend consulting other research-agenda papers for guidance (e.g., Anshika & Singla, 2022; Arenius & Lenz, 2024; Graña-Alvarez et al., 2024; Molina-García et al., 2023). We now offer our broad set of research questions.

For the first set of research questions, we suggest that non-WEIRD entrepreneurship research focus less on general human capital, especially years of schooling as a proxy for general human capital, to explore entrepreneurial phenomena. Indeed, research may reveal the need to focus on education that builds specific human capital skills and/or non-educated sources of general human capital. There has already been important work on entrepreneurial training in Sub-Saharan Africa (Campos et al., 2017), highlighting the importance of teaching entrepreneurial skills for entrepreneurial outcomes among traditionally low-educated populations. Indeed, non-WEIRD entrepreneurship research needs to adjust existing scales and surveys to capture lower levels of education and the quality of that education. For example, scholars need to think more carefully about conducting studies with surveys and experiments when their samples comprise people who cannot read. We suspect that illiterate (nascent) entrepreneurs are often excluded from samples, which is problematic in countries where these individuals are prevalent. How do low-educated individuals think, feel, enact, and experience the entrepreneurial process? How do they compensate for their low literacy, such as through the industries they enter, their personal goals for their ventures, the entrepreneurial team members, family members, and/or employees they recruit, their construction and reliance on (potential) stakeholders, and so on? Further, a lack of numeracy often goes hand in hand with a lack of literacy (Purpura & Napoli, 2015). How do (nascent) entrepreneurs overcome their lack of numeracy to organize their operations, enroll and engage investors, and compete? We suspect research on non-educated entrepreneurs will reveal some ingenious “workarounds” and, in doing so, make important contributions to the entrepreneurship literature.

Furthermore, non-WEIRD entrepreneurship research can study the least literate people in countries with low literacy rates. In Table A2 of the appendix, we detail the 38 countries where the literacy gap between men and women is greater than 10%. Those countries with the greatest gender gap in literacy are Yemen (38.2%), Guinea (29.9%), Afghanistan (29.5%), Liberia (28.6%), and Guinea-Bissau (26.6%). How does the gender gap in literacy (which is absent in countries with high education) impact the entrepreneurial action of women? How does their low education (absolute and relative to men) impact the types of businesses these women create, the industries they enter, and the capital they raise? Indeed, we wonder how the gender literacy gap relates to other gender biases that influence women’s entrepreneurship. We hope future non-WEIRD entrepreneurship research explores how women’s entrepreneurship changes as the literacy gap in their local region closes (or opens). Furthermore, we wonder whether women’s entrepreneurship influences gendered social norms in business, family, and local communities, helping to close the gender literacy gap. If yes, what mechanisms underpin the reciprocal relationship between women’s entrepreneurship and the gender literacy gap?

Future Entrepreneurship Research in Non-Educated Subcontexts Within Educated Contexts

Non-WEIRD entrepreneurship research can also research people with low education within countries that have high education, on average, across all citizens. For example, the National Literacy Institute reports that in the United States, 21% of the adult population is illiterate, 54% of adults have literacy below the sixth-grade level, and 75% of people on welfare cannot read. The National Literacy Institute also reports the lowest literacy rates in Louisiana, Mississippi, and New Mexico. Furthermore, specific groups within wealthy countries that have low education include people living in prisons, poverty, and areas where property values are low as well as immigrants, non-native English speakers, and people with learning disabilities (for a review, see Haderlie & Clark, 2017). Future research can explore these groups of low-educated people to expand our knowledge of entrepreneurship.

Non-Industrialized vis-à-vis Industrialized Contexts

Scholars have characterized industrialization as modernization whereby businesses have made productivity gains through technology (Rasiah et al., 2015; Walton, 1987). Industrialized nations are “countries where there is sufficient infrastructure for businesses or goods to be produced locally” (Clancy & Davis, 2019, p. 174), which involves a shift from low-value-added businesses to high-value-added businesses (Piore & Sabel, 1984; Pyke & Sengenberger, 1992). Inkeles (1993, p. 1) distinguishes an industrialized region from a non-industrialized region in two ways: “First, the share of all products resulting from manufacture rather than agriculture increases markedly, and second, there is a major shift in the share of all fabrication undertaken not by craft hand labor but machine processes, especially driven by inanimate sources of energy.”Table A3 of the appendix lists countries below the median in industrialization. Countries low on the industrialization index include Iraq (.06), Albania (.12), Tanzania (.14), Cambodia (.19), Iceland (.20), Haiti (.24), New Zealand (.26), and Greece (.29).

Problems With Insufficient Entrepreneurship Research in Non-Industrialized Contexts

Entrepreneurship researchers emphasize industrialized contexts and focus on high-tech, venture-capital-funded, and highly scalable ventures. With such an emphasis on industrialized contexts, scholars have not fully explored entrepreneurship in pursuit of low-tech, family-funded opportunities, and low-growth (i.e., growth-constrained) ventures. The knowledge gained from research in industrial contexts is unlikely to apply to non-industrial contexts. It could lead audiences (entrepreneurs and scholars) to erroneous conclusions about entrepreneurship in these contexts. For example, the motivation and knowledge for entrepreneurial action on a high-tech potential opportunity is likely very different from the motivation and knowledge for entrepreneurial action in starting a craft business. Similarly, understanding how venture capitalists assess entrepreneurs and their ventures when deciding whether or not to invest their money likely offers little insight for an entrepreneur trying to raise money to buy a small subsistence farm. Furthermore, research on the effectiveness of new venture strategies (based on the assumption of entrepreneurs’ motivation to grow their businesses rapidly) is likely to provide misleading advice to entrepreneurs who have low-tech businesses that are family-funded and who are motivated to constrain the size of their businesses so they can manage them personally. Therefore, we need more entrepreneurship research in non-industrialized contexts.

Future Entrepreneurship Research in Non-Industrialized Contexts

In the following subsections, we offer broad questions that we believe could make important contributions to the mainstream entrepreneurship literature. To address these questions, research can begin by building on and extending current mainstream entrepreneurship research, non-mainstream entrepreneurship research, and/or the literatures from other disciplines.

Specifically, new entrepreneurship research in non-industrialized contexts can build on and extend mainstream research on rural entrepreneurship and craft work in non-industrialized countries. For example, a solid foundation for future research includes rural entrepreneurs in Uganda (Rooks et al., 2016), fish farmers and coffee growers in Colombia (Theodorakopoulos et al., 2012), community-based rural tourism businesses in Uganda (Victurine, 2000), and artisans in Cambodia and Rwanda (Clammer, 2014). Furthermore, new entrepreneurship research in non-industrialized contexts can build on non-mainstream entrepreneurship studies (e.g., Gyimah & Lussier, 2021; Kania et al., 2021; Komba et al., 2024; Yadav et al., 2023) and literatures from various disciplines (e.g., Qu & Zollet, 2023; Tabares et al., 2022; Thurnell-Read, 2021). We also recommend consulting other research-agenda papers for guidance (e.g., Aggarwal & Johal, 2021; Bouichou et al., 2021; McElwee & Atherton, 2021; Raza et al., 2024; Welter et al., 2017). We now offer our broad set of research questions.

First, non-WEIRD entrepreneurship research can focus on the non-industrialized entrepreneurial activity of agriculture (especially agriculture without heavy reliance on machinery). What is entrepreneurial about farming or agricultural businesses in non-industrialized regions? Perhaps farmers in such regions are particularly effective at applying bricolage (Baker & Nelson, 2005) to generate innovations, improve efficiency in non-mechanistic ways, and develop human systems rather than technological ones. Such research may start with a more fundamental question: what does entrepreneurship mean in non-industrialized regions? In asking this question, we do not advocate for endless definitional debates but suggest an open mind to understand who believes these farmers (e.g., owner-managers of a farm, albeit a small farm) are entrepreneurs and why. Should we expand our conceptualization of entrepreneurship to represent its meaning in agricultural (and other non-WEIRD) contexts? For example, if some farmers are considered entrepreneurs by themselves, their families, their communities, and their local societies, then perhaps that should be sufficient for us, as entrepreneurship scholars, to be interested in understanding more about them, their businesses, and the processes they drive.

Second, non-WEIRD entrepreneurship research can explore various activities centered on natural-resource exploitation. Mining, for instance, has emerged as a prominent sector, encompassing artisanal and small-scale operations that serve as critical income sources in resource-rich but economically marginalized areas (Paschal et al., 2024). How do individuals engage in small-scale mining—namely, what are their operations for extraction, transportation, and negotiation with buyers? It is interesting to consider how entrepreneurs’ reliance on manual labor in exploiting a natural resource may shape their decisions and actions toward health-related issues for themselves (and their workers), considerations of issues related to protecting the environment, and the impact of their entrepreneurial endeavors on their local communities (positive and negative).

Third, non-WEIRD entrepreneurship research can focus on entrepreneurs whose energy for production comes from human and other animal labor (Inkeles, 1993). On the one hand, the physicality of non-industrialized entrepreneurship may facilitate physical fitness and thus benefit psychological and subjective well-being. On the other hand, when physical well-being is paramount, a physical injury may impact the viability of an entrepreneur’s business. How does an entrepreneur’s physical well-being impact the entrepreneurial process in a non-industrialized context, and how does an entrepreneur’s engagement in the entrepreneurial process impact their physical well-being? Learning about entrepreneurs’ different strategies for using their labor, maintaining physical well-being, and supplementing their personal energy by finding or constructing (perhaps through bricolage) other energy sources is meaningful. For example, what happens to a venture as the focal entrepreneur ages: does the business deteriorate with the entrepreneur’s dwindled physical state, and/or does the entrepreneur’s physical condition trigger the implementation of a succession plan?

Finally, non-WEIRD entrepreneurship research can also investigate the types of craft businesses entrepreneurs create, the acquisition and deployment of skills necessary to perform different crafts and run these businesses, and whether and how entrepreneurs form teams of craftspeople or other workers. Do these craft entrepreneurs desire to grow their businesses? What are their primary obstacles to growth, and why can some overcome those obstacles and others cannot? We suspect entrepreneurs face interesting trade-offs between managing their crafts and their businesses.

Future Entrepreneurship Research in Non-Industrialized Subcontexts Within Industrialized Contexts

Non-WEIRD entrepreneurship research can research people in low-industrialized areas within high-industrialized countries. For example, the United Kingdom’s most rural locations are the Highlands of Scotland, Wales, and southwest England, which focus on agriculture and natural-resource extraction (House of Lords Library, 2024). In the United States, most farms or ranches are located in Texas (231,000), Missouri (87,600), Iowa (86,800), and Ohio (75,800; Statista, 2023). Over and above farmers, other groups emphasize a non-industrialized life, such as people living in Amish communities, Indigenous communities, and kibbutzim and those otherwise choosing to live “off the grid.” Future research can explore these groups to expand our knowledge of entrepreneurship. Indeed, consistent with the research opportunities focused on a specific country, future research can explore non-industrialized aspects of entrepreneurship among groups within an industrialized country (building on and extending current work on the topic).

Non-Rich vis-à-vis Rich Contexts

Non-rich refers to having a low income and a low resource endowment. At the national level, the United Nations categorizes countries based on an index of income, human resource endowments, and economic vulnerability. The bottom of this index includes the least developed countries (LDCs). LDCs have low incomes, suffer from weaknesses in their human resources, and have high economic vulnerability (Cuervo-Cazurra & Genc, 2008). There are 45 LCD countries (UNCTAD, 2023), which represent approximately 14% of the global population (1.15 billion people) yet only 1.3% of the global gross domestic product (United Nations, 2024). Table A4 in the appendix lists these non-rich countries.

Problems With Insufficient Entrepreneurship Research in Non-Rich Contexts

With an emphasis on rich contexts, entrepreneurship research has underexplored or ignored entrepreneurship in resource-constrained environments. However, even entrepreneurship research on “resource constraints” can mean different things across rich and non-rich contexts. In resource-rich contexts, an entrepreneur’s resource constraints may indicate a current lack of external funding (from business angels or venture capitalists), a lack of time to experiment with new ideas, and the need for the entrepreneur to reconsider the (substantial) resources they have at hand. Therefore, the lessons we have learned from research on entrepreneurs in resource-rich, munificent environments and research on resource-constrained environments in rich contexts are likely to provide an incomplete picture of entrepreneurship in resource-constrained environments in non-rich contexts. For example, we underestimate the entrepreneurial challenges of individuals facing abject poverty (as generations before them), identifying as members of a stigmatized caste, living in stigmatized slums, and having no career opportunities other than self-employment in a dirty (stigmatized) business to provide for their families’ survival. Therefore, we need more entrepreneurship research in non-rich contexts.

Future Entrepreneurship Research in Non-Rich Contexts

In the following subsections, we offer broad questions that we believe could make important contributions to the mainstream entrepreneurship literature. To address these questions, research can begin by building on and extending current mainstream entrepreneurship research, non-mainstream entrepreneurship research, and/or the literatures from other disciplines.

Specifically, new entrepreneurship research in non-rich contexts can build on and extend mainstream research in developing countries, such as Guatemala (Kistruck et al., 2015), India (Chatterjee et al., 2022; Shepherd, Parida, & Wincent, 2021), Indonesia (Neubert et al., 2017), Kenya (Kimmitt et al., 2020), Niger (Shepherd, Osofero, & Wincent, 2022), and South Africa (Nason et al., 2024). Furthermore, new entrepreneurship research in non-rich contexts can build on non-mainstream entrepreneurship studies (e.g., Dzingirai, 2021; Morris & Tucker, 2023; Okolie et al., 2022) and literatures from various disciplines (e.g., Bossuroy et al., 2022; De Bruijn & Antonides, 2022; Sabol et al., 2021; Wang et al., 2022). We also recommend consulting other research-agenda papers for guidance (e.g., Amorós et al., 2021; Bruton, Ketchen, & Ireland, 2013; Bruton, Sutter, & Lenz, 2021; Santos & Neumeyer, 2021; Sutter, Bruton, & Chen, 2019).

First, non-WEIRD entrepreneurship research can focus on the entrepreneurial challenges presented in non-rich regions. For example, infrastructure is often underdeveloped in impoverished regions (Calderón & Servén, 2010). How do the contextual features of a non-rich region shape the businesses entrepreneurs create? How do entrepreneurs overcome regional constraints, and can some of these constraints turn into an advantage? Indeed, can entrepreneurship create wealth to overcome an entrepreneur’s current impoverished situation, or are the structural foundations of poverty too difficult to change quickly? Perhaps it takes generations of entrepreneurs chipping away at these structural foundations of poverty to make progress or an event that triggers collective action. Indeed, as we consider this stream of research, it is appropriate to consider the Matthew effect (Merton, 1968): “The rich get richer, and the poor get the picture” (attributed initially to Percy Bysshe Shelley). Non-WEIRD entrepreneurship research can explore how some impoverished entrepreneurs can disrupt the Matthew effect through the businesses they create, the opportunities they pursue, the strategies they execute, the stakeholders they enroll, and the value they generate.

Second, non-WEIRD entrepreneurship research can investigate the role of a scarcity mindset in how entrepreneurs make decisions and the impact of those decisions on their businesses, families, and themselves (see Morris et al., 2020). Indeed, small income shifts can dramatically impact people living in poverty (Bourguignon et al., 1991) and how they think about risks and the value of future benefits (Mullainathan & Shafir, 2013). How does a scarcity mindset impact entrepreneurs’ decisions about the businesses they create, their aspirations for venture growth, their strategies, and their definitions of success?

Finally, poverty can manifest as food deprivation (or food insecurity), which can impact the entrepreneurial process. Food deprivation refers to “inadequate individual consumption of food or specific nutrients, also known as undernutrition” (Uvin, 1994, p. 1) and can negatively impact psychological, emotional, and physical well-being (Gundersen & Ziliak, 2015). How does food deprivation (and its impact on well-being) affect entrepreneurs and their entrepreneurial endeavors? One of the ways to deal with food deprivation is by borrowing from microfinance institutions. However, the evidence of microfinance institutions’ success in stimulating entrepreneurship among impoverished individuals is mixed (Banerjee et al., 2015; Karlan & Zinman, 2011). We hope research continues to explore ways impoverished people can access capital to create and run their businesses. Indeed, how can individuals build financial knowledge and skills to help them access credit and debt at a reasonable cost, gain insurance against common risks, and build a buffer against small income shocks?

Future Entrepreneurship Research in Non-Rich Subcontexts Within Rich Contexts

Non-WEIRD entrepreneurship research can focus on entrepreneurs who are impoverished and/or living and working in impoverished locations within rich countries. Wealthy countries still have non-rich regions where people live and work in impoverished conditions. However, of the studies investigating necessity entrepreneurship in Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice and the Journal of Business Venturing over the last decade, only one paper focused on a non-WEIRD sample.

In the United States, the regions with the highest percentage of residents living below the poverty line are Puerto Rico (39.6%), Louisiana (18.9%), Mississippi (18%), New Mexico (17.8%), West Virginia (16.7%), and Kentucky (14%; (U.S. Census Bureau, 2023). Indeed, there are impoverished regions in other wealthy countries, such as Ireland’s Midlands and the Border Region (Central Statistics Office, 2017), Switzerland’s Ticino canton (Swiss Info, 2023), and Australia’s Northern Territory (Phillips & Prosser, 2020). How do entrepreneurs create and manage their businesses without possessing or being able to access necessary resources? We suspect there is a lot to learn about the inventiveness and innovativeness in these entrepreneurs’ resourcefulness. How do these entrepreneurs (and their innovative resourcefulness) impact the impoverished communities in which they are embedded: namely, to what extent are these entrepreneurs prosocially motivated to help others in their communities, how does this motivation manifest in prosocial behaviors, and how do these prosocial behaviors help members of impoverished communities?

Non-Demographic vis-à-vis Demographic Contexts

Democracy refers to the broader system of governance and societal framework by which power and decision-making are distributed to the people such that citizens actively participate in shaping their communities and futures instead of power and decision-making being concentrated among a few. This means that participation, equality, and safeguarding fundamental rights and freedoms are at the forefront of democracy. Table A5 of the appendix details countries below the median for democracy quality measures. Authoritarian governments are low on democracy quality measures. In politics and government, authoritarianism is defined as

the blind submission to authority and the repression of individual freedom of thought and action. Authoritarian regimes are systems of government that have no established mechanism for the transfer of executive power and do not afford their citizens civil liberties or political rights. Power is concentrated in the hands of a single leader or a small elite, whose decisions are taken without regard for the will of the people. The term authoritarianism is often used to denote any form of government that is not democratic, but studies have demonstrated that there is a great deal of variation in authoritarian rule. (Britannica.com)

Therefore, the rule of law—“a norm of equality before the law and the separation of the judiciary from other branches of government” (Sallai & Schnyder, 2021, p. 1317)—is critical to differences across governments. The rule of law establishes the principle of self-limitations (i.e., the government acknowledges “limits to its knowledge, capabilities, and powers” [Chen & Deakin, 2015, p. 4]) and state autonomy (i.e., “the separation of the state apparatus and particularistic interests of the governing elite” [Sallai & Schnyder, 2021, p. 1317]). The different types of non-democratic governments include approaches that are totalitarian-authoritarian; military rule; one-party rule; personal rule; and variations referred to as “semis,” hybrids, and other forms of “less-than-democratic” rule (Brooker, 2013). These different political systems impact economies in ways that likely shape the entrepreneurship embedded in them.

Problems With Insufficient Entrepreneurship Research in Non-Democratic Contexts

With an emphasis on democratic contexts, entrepreneurship research has underexplored the entrepreneurial process under conditions where entrepreneurs cannot rely on the rule of law, political connections are essential, and/or state-owned businesses are competitors. For example, research in democratic contexts has highlighted the importance of intellectual property protection as a strategy for minimizing competition for an innovative product. This strategy can be rewarded by venture-capitalist funding. However, knowledge of this intellectual property protection strategy and funding is likely uninformative (and unnecessarily costly in money and lead time) in non-democratic contexts where the government avoids or is lax in enforcing property rights. Similarly, research on entrepreneurs’ social networks has emphasized weak ties for generating creative ideas, finance, and venture growth. However, this knowledge about entrepreneurs’ networks understates the importance of political connections in non-democratic contexts for obtaining approvals to register a business, receiving big government contracts, and avoiding or minimizing harmful government interventions. Moreover, the lessons learned about competitive dynamics from democratic contexts are likely less applicable or misleading for entrepreneurs in non-democratic contexts where other organizations in their respective industry and adjacent industries are state-owned businesses. In such non-democratic contexts, the competitive dynamics are likely very different. Therefore, we need more entrepreneurship research in non-democratic contexts.

Future Entrepreneurship Research in Non-Democratic Contexts

In the following subsections, we offer broad questions that we believe could make important contributions to the mainstream entrepreneurship literature. To address these questions, research can begin by building on and extending current mainstream entrepreneurship research, non-mainstream entrepreneurship research, and/or the literatures from other disciplines.

Specifically, new entrepreneurship research in non-democratic contexts can build on and extend mainstream research on entrepreneurship in China (Baron et al., 2018; Burt & Opper, 2020; Du & Mickiewicz, 2016; Ge et al., 2019; Luo et al., 2020; Tang et al., 2017; Zhao & Lu, 2016), Nicaragua (Sutter, Webb, Kistruck, et al., 2017), and Vietnam (Dinh et al., 2022; Kasabov, 2015). Furthermore, new entrepreneurship research in non-democratic contexts can build on non-mainstream entrepreneurship studies (e.g., Farny & Calderon, 2015; Goel & Nelson, 2023; Serhan, 2021) and literatures from various disciplines (e.g., Márquez, 2016; Osa & Corduneanu-Huci, 2008; Wegner, 2019). We also recommend consulting other research-agenda papers for guidance (e.g., Ahlstrom & Ding, 2014; Balderacchi, 2022; He et al., 2019; Muhammad et al., 2024). We now offer our broad set of research questions.

First, non-WEIRD entrepreneurship research can explore the entrepreneurial process in countries with predatory governments and poor democracy standards. In a predatory government context, elites can execute entrepreneurship through opaque decision-making, institutional weaknesses, and monopolistic practices. Here, entrepreneurial opportunities may be limited and driven by corruption, lack of access to resources, and an uneven playing field or unequal market access, discouraging innovation and entrepreneurial entry. An example of a non-democratic context is China’s authoritarian government. Given the Chinese government’s powerful role in the Chinese economy, it is not surprising that researchers have revealed the importance of entrepreneurs’ strong political connections with government agencies and officials in China (Li et al., 2011). Future research can investigate how entrepreneurs form and maintain these political relationships, what benefits they provide entrepreneurs and the entrepreneurial system in the respective country (i.e., greasing the wheels of the economy), and what costs are borne by entrepreneurs and the entrepreneurial system in the country (i.e., sand in the wheels of the economy)? To what extent are entrepreneurs’ political connections maintained through corruption? If they are maintained in this way, how do entrepreneurs manage corrupt relationships with government officials, and why are some more successful at managing these relationships (gain more and/or pay less) than others? Furthermore, how do entrepreneurs compete with government-owned businesses without triggering the ire of powerful government officials?

Second, non-WEIRD entrepreneurship research can also explore entrepreneurship’s different forms, processes, and outcomes in non-democratic political systems other than China’s. For example, we highlighted above that governments differ in their adherence to the principle of the rule of law. Indeed, governments set different laws representing a country’s “rules of the game” for entrepreneurship. Specifically, Baumol (1996) proposes that such national factors set the rules of the game that determine the allocation of entrepreneurial effort into productive, unproductive, and destructive entrepreneurship. Therefore, non-WEIRD entrepreneurship research can explore entrepreneurs operating under different rules of the game in non-democratic environments and explore the ratios of productive to unproductive to destructive entrepreneurship and how these forms of entrepreneurship differ across countries with different forms of non-democratic governments. For instance, although we understand what productive entrepreneurship means in WEIRD contexts, what about in non-WEIRD contexts?

Finally, not only are the rules of the game different across countries with different forms of government but the game may also be different—that is, the nature of business might be substantially different. Therefore, what constitutes productive entrepreneurship may be very different when the game is non-democratic vis-à-vis democratic. The same goes for unproductive and destructive entrepreneurship. For example, destructive entrepreneurship in a democratic system refers to activities that harm society, such as environmental degradation, human exploitation, and the creation of harmful products (e.g., addictive substances). These activities are often criminalized or heavily regulated. In a non-democratic system, especially if the focal country is resource poor, destructive entrepreneurship may be pervasive and normalized due to the lack of institutional safeguards and enforcement. Activities that would be criminalized in democracies, such as black-market operations and resource plundering, may be tolerated or even incentivized by such regimes. These activities may be considered necessary in the short term and could allow for exploiting what would be considered destructive entrepreneurial opportunities in other societies. Therefore, if the rules of the game and the game itself differ across different types of governments (or political systems), then what is considered productive entrepreneurship in one system may be considered unproductive or destructive in another. Moreover, the dynamics of entrepreneurship are likely to change significantly when the game is changing, with new opportunities and challenges emerging based on the nature of the new system.

Future Entrepreneurship Research in Non-Democratic Subcontexts Within Democratic Contexts

Non-WEIRD entrepreneurship research can focus on entrepreneurs who live and work in regions that are less democratic, despite living in a democratic country. Indeed, while the quality of democracy can vary within a democratic country (e.g., Grumbach [2023] reports that the quality of democracy is lowest in the United States for Tennessee, North Carolina, and Wisconsin), it is an overreach to categorize these regions as non-democratic. However, what can we learn about entrepreneurial phenomena by situating research in less democratic contexts? Do entrepreneurs in these contexts focus on forming and maintaining political connections, employ strategies for dealing with corrupt government officials, help build the foundations for a more solid democracy, and/or rely more heavily on informal institutions to run their businesses?

Furthermore, even in democratic countries, residents may be precluded from participating in elections—that is, they are not allowed to vote. For example, in the United States, residents of Puerto Rico and Washington DC cannot vote in federal elections. Furthermore, certain groups cannot vote, including people convicted of a felony, illegal immigrants, legal and non-citizen residents, and people under the age of 18 (USA.gov, 2024). Does individuals’ inability to participate in the democratic system (based on one’s region or group) impact entrepreneurial inputs, processes, and outcomes? There is much to learn about entrepreneurship in low-quality democratic regions of a democratic country and for those who cannot participate in democracy.