Running the business—running the place: How placepreneurs are embedding in the periphery

Abstract

Entrepreneurship in peripheral regions is often portrayed as making do against the odds, with research focused on small-scale, social, or community-oriented actors in depleted settings. Drawing on a case study of salmon farming firms in prosperous Norwegian peripheries, we tell a different story about commercially oriented firms that actively embed in and develop the places they depend on, extending their engagement well beyond their core business. We advance research on entrepreneurship and embeddedness in peripheral areas in three main ways. First, we explain why such firms take on responsibility beyond the firm boundary, locating its source in the firm's structural position and an internalised sense of responsibility—being the actor on which a thin place depends, and which depends on that place in return—a configuration we term moralised mutual dependence. Second, we show how this responsibility is enacted across three mutually reinforcing dimensions—social development, local economic structuring, and physical and institutional structuring—revealing the practice-based processes through which embedding unfolds. Across these dimensions, the firms' moralised embedding lends their engagement with place direction and legitimacy. Third, combining these insights, we conceptualise this distinct mode of entrepreneurial embedding and engagement with place as placepreneurship, and the firms that enact it as place entrepreneurs, or placepreneurs. We show how these firms do not merely adapt to or draw on place but take on a leading responsibility for developing it while also strengthening their own long-term viability.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Journal of Rural Studies, 2026 · DOI ↗