Ted Baker

Former Metropolitan police chief Odbald has returned to his home county of Dorset after being sacked by the Home Secretary. With his legendary sleuthing skills and uncompromising style, his assistance is regularly called upon. These eight crime stories depict the doyen of detection at his brilliant best.

As the breadth and empirical diversity of entrepreneurship research have increased rapidly during the last decade, the quest to find a "one-size-fits-all" general theory of entrepreneurship has given way to a growing appreciation for the importance of contexts. This promises to improve both the practical relevance and the theoretical rigor of research in this field. Entrepreneurship means different things to different people at different times and in different places and both its causes and its consequences likewise vary. For example, for some people entrepreneurship can be a glorious path to emancipation, while for others it can represent the yoke tethering them to the burdens of overwork and drudgery. For some communities it can drive renaissance and vibrancy while for others it allows only bare survival. In this book, we assess and attempt to push forward contemporary conceptualizations of contexts that matter for entrepreneurship, pointing in particular to opportunities generating new insights by attending to contexts in novel or underexplored ways. This book shows that the ongoing contextualization of entrepreneurship research should not simply generate a proliferation of unique theories – one for every context – but can instead result in better theory construction, testing and understanding of boundary conditions, thereby leading us to richer and more profound understanding of entrepreneurship across its many forms. Contextualizing Entrepreneurship Theory will critically review the current debate and existing literature on contexts and entrepreneurship and use this to synthesize new theoretical and methodological frameworks that point to important directions for future research.

As the breadth and empirical diversity of entrepreneurship research have increased rapidly during the last decade, the quest to find a "one-size-fits-all" general theory of entrepreneurship has given way to a growing appreciation for the importance of contexts. This promises to improve both the practical relevance and the theoretical rigor of research in this field. Entrepreneurship means different things to different people at different times and in different places and both its causes and its consequences likewise vary. For example, for some people entrepreneurship can be a glorious path to emancipation, while for others it can represent the yoke tethering them to the burdens of overwork and drudgery. For some communities it can drive renaissance and vibrancy while for others it allows only bare survival. In this book, we assess and attempt to push forward contemporary conceptualizations of contexts that matter for entrepreneurship, pointing in particular to opportunities generating new insights by attending to contexts in novel or underexplored ways. This book shows that the ongoing contextualization of entrepreneurship research should not simply generate a proliferation of unique theories – one for every context – but can instead result in better theory construction, testing and understanding of boundary conditions, thereby leading us to richer and more profound understanding of entrepreneurship across its many forms. Contextualizing Entrepreneurship Theory will critically review the current debate and existing literature on contexts and entrepreneurship and use this to synthesize new theoretical and methodological frameworks that point to important directions for future research.

Contextual Entrepreneurship generates new insights about why and how we might go about contextualizing entrepreneurship research. The authors attempt to frame the issues, the progress that has been made, and the substantial challenges that remain with a view toward calling for future work that takes more of what they call a critical process approach to contextualizing entrepreneurship research.

Odbald, former head of Britain's biggest police force, has been sacked by the Home Secretary. Having returned to his home county of Dorset he is unable to resist becoming involved in the investigation into a brutal double murder in the Purbeck hills. Soon, however, he is at odds with the police's official lines of enquiry. Having rekindled a friendship with an eccentric, disfigured but brilliant friend, Sandra, he follows his own instincts. It brings him face-to-face with an appalling serial killer he had locked up decades before and the conclusion of that ghastly case, and causes him to unravel the mystery of a dreadful shipwreck in 1830.