Neruda through copper-coloured glasses: the role of place attachment in the embeddedness of Chilean entrepreneurship

Abstract

Despite scholarly interest in how emotional and instrumental place attachments motivate entrepreneurship, the influences on embeddedness remain underexplored. Building on the notion that entrepreneurship becomes embedded in a locality, we argue that this process is packed with place-based interpretations of the material and imagined reality. Engaging with the empirical setting of Chile, the world’s largest copper producer, we embark on a study examining the interactions between the place attachment, embeddedness and natural resource-based entrepreneurship. We uncover these interactions through analysing several works of poetry by Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda, which focus on the diverging place attachment styles between local and multinational agents. Through reflecting on the poems, we show how historical changes within the Chilean mining industry and broader societal changes are visible in Neruda’s imagery of place attachments, emotions and concerns for local conditions. We problematize embeddedness and entrepreneurship through illuminating the place attachments shaping local actors’ entrepreneurial imagination, thus contributing to knowledge about being embedded in natural resource-based entrepreneurship contexts. We provide new insights into how place attachment can evolve alongside different forms of embedded entrepreneurship.