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Why does South Africa underperform on benchmarks for nascent entrepreneurship? We use a contextualization framework to evaluate articles on entrepreneurship in South Africa, which appear in seven leading global entrepreneurship journals for the period 1986–2017. The literature is then discussed using a six-dimension contextualization framework. The historical and institutional dimensions of the contextualization framework unveil the path-dependent nature of entrepreneurial choice for Black South Africans. Understanding entrepreneurship in South Africa requires research designs that focus on where and when entrepreneurship developed in the country to render meaningful the why of entrepreneurial choices made by Black South Africans. This study illustrates the idiosyncratic nature of South Africa and its social, political and economic transitions, and how these have affected entrepreneurship development, particularly among previously disadvantaged Black South Africans. The nature of the South African case has broader impact and importance for developing and transitional economies.

Antiguans and Barbudans have both raised concerns over the disaster recovery solutions put in place to mitigate damages sustained during Hurricane Irma in September 2017. In Barbuda, the potential loss of commonhold land ownership and the possibility of a land grab by foreign investors has tended to portray the island as a victim of disaster capitalism rather than as a resilient community. At the same time, neither island has addressed its vulnerabilities to future extreme events through any substantive legislative response, or immediate policy shifts. While it is vital that we attend to the exploitation of vulnerable populations and the efforts of economic restructuring that follow a disaster to better understand the impact of major weather events, we propose that the threat to commonhold land tenure in Barbuda and the legislative overreach of Antigua’s government on the matter following Hurricane Irma can be understood in terms of various landscape legacies and continuities rooted in ongoing struggles over land in Antigua and Barbuda spanning the periods of slavery, emancipation, and post-colonial independence. This paper situates the past with distinction in order to understand the resilience of land tenure regimes, and the ways in which this resilience affects the quality of post-disaster response in the post-Irma era. Using path dependency theory, we examine the tensions over land tenure in response to Hurricane Irma within the framework of colonial legacies of land rights. More specifically, this paper attempts to examine how these land tenure regimes took shape, and in what ways it has been contested and resisted over time. Our findings demonstrate how the imposition of modern land-use solutions atop a landscape shaped by 18th- and 19th-century practices complicates the mandate to plan for and mitigate the impacts of future disasters. The impact of Hurricane Irma on Barbuda further shows how resistance to legislative change might result in a form of ecological restraint rooted in social-cohesion and commonhold land tenure that is now coming under threat.

The dynamic capabilities framework analyzes the sources and methods of wealth creation and capture by private enterprise firms operating in environments of rapid technological change. The competitive advantage of firms is seen as resting on distinctive processes (ways of coordinating and combining), shaped by the firm's (specific) asset positions (such as the firm's portfolio of difficult-to-trade knowledge assets and complementary assets), and the evolution path(s) it has adopted or inherited. The importance of path dependencies is amplified where conditions of increasing returns exist. Whether and how a firm's competitive advantage is eroded depends on the stability of market demand, and the ease of replicability (expanding internally) and imitatability (replication by competitors). If correct, the framework suggests that private wealth creation in regimes of rapid technological change depends in large measure on honing internal technological, organizational, and managerial processes inside the firm. In short, identifying new opportunities and organizing effectively and efficiently to embrace them are generally more fundamental to private wealth creation than is strategizing, if by strategizing one means engaging in business conduct that keeps competitors off balance, raises rival's costs, and excludes new entrants.