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This paper intends to explore the role that spatial context plays in women's engagement in rural entrepreneurship. Positioned in a social constructivist perspective, spatial context is taken not as a background, but rather as an entrepreneurial milieu with its elements constructed and experienced. This paper argues that in order to understand how spatial context influences and is being influenced by women's engagement in entrepreneurial activities, scholars need to move away from considering spatial context as merely geographical locations, which allow for free flowing social relations and exchanges, and look at it as an active ingredient that may influence the entrepreneurial process. The paper theorises entrepreneurship as not merely an economic process but also a social-spatial process which draws from spatial structures as entrepreneurs embed within their context. The qualitative examination of women's engagement in rural entrepreneurship finds that spatial context plays a key role in shaping the process of engaging through thinning and/or thickening women's entrepreneurial agency. However, recognition, realisation and utilisation of spatial resources depend on the entrepreneurs' understanding of the spatial structures. This paper's contribution lies in its illustration of the role of spatial context in entrepreneurial processes, in particular for marginalised rural women. The paper furthers the understanding of spatial context as an entrepreneurial milieu for enhancing literature about women and entrepreneurship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses entrepreneurship in a depleted community in transition. The purpose is to develop knowledge about how discourses are used in the positioning of identity in regional development. The concept positioning illustrates how identities are provoked, challenged, negotiated and moved into identity positions that break away from the idea of imitating successful and wealthy regions; instead, locality, place and history emerge as important resources from where local actors obtain agency and recognize new opportunities. Ethnographic data of a single case were collected over a six-year period between 2005 and 2010. The longitudinal nature of the study made it possible to incorporate how local stakeholders took on new identity positions, while handling their inspiration as well as their frustration. Results show how rural change was conditioned by discourses and how entrepreneurship challenged and reframed dominating structures through interaction between entrepreneurship and community. Four discourses, expressed as dichotomies available to people in this depleted community, illustrate the interactive process of positioning: change vs. traditions, rational vs. irrational, spectacular vs. mundane and individual vs. collective. The results support research emphasizing perspectives that acknowledge interaction between entrepreneurship and context as well as discursive aspects of regional development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]