Sustaining platform-enabled entrepreneurship: unpacking dynamic embeddedness through entrepreneurial agency in Taobao villages

Abstract

Existing literature recognizes that entrepreneurial activity is embedded in evolving rural contexts, yet provides limited explanation of how entrepreneurial agency enables rural communities to respond to successive developmental challenges as these contexts change. Based on a multiple-case study of three Taobao villages in China, we develop a process model explaining how entrepreneurial agency evolves in response to changing contextual constraints and enables rural communities to sustain entrepreneurial development over time. Our findings reveal a four-phase process in which entrepreneurial agency evolves from cognitive reframing and collective resource integration to external coordination and governance design, enabling rural communities to iteratively reconfigure the socio-economic conditions supporting subsequent entrepreneurial activity. By conceptualizing embeddedness as a dynamic process continually reconstructed through evolving entrepreneurial agency in response to changing contextual conditions, our study advances a dynamic understanding of embeddedness and contributes to theorizing on rural entrepreneurship under transformation, while offering implications for platform-based entrepreneurship research.