Nothing we do is unplaced. (Casey, 1996, p. 9)

Introduction

We began the journey of this special issue (SI) with the provocative aim ‘to put partnerships in their place’. Our intention was to create a forum where scholars from the domains of cross-sector partnerships (CSPs), place, and business ethics could combine their interests, advance novel theoretical and empirical insights, and reimagine a research agenda that explores CSPs from a place-based perspective. The aim of the SI is to bring to the fore the places in which CSPs are formed; how place shapes the dynamics of CSPs, and how CSPs shape the specific settings in which they develop. The papers of this issue collectively succeed in putting partnerships in their place by revealing the work involved in achieving this emplacement, each presenting a vivid illustration of how CSPs engage morally and materially with place, ranging from land to water, organized to wild spaces, and villages to transnational communities. The special issue offers new contributions to explaining how place enables and constrains organizing (Cartel et al., 2022; Lawrence, 2017), and it demonstrates that engaging with grand challenges such as climate change (Bowen et al., 2018) can enrich CSP theory in settings with entrenched inequality (Powell et al., 2018) and fragility (Welter et al., 2018). At a societal level, our SI connects critical sustainable development goals (SDGs), especially SDGs 3 (Good Health and Well-being), 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities), 14 (Life below Water), 15 (Life on Land), and 17 (Partnerships). It also provides actionable insights into how firms address grand challenges in different contexts and at different scales (Chatterjee et al., 2022).

The SI expressly moves away from a reductionist view that considers place as a geographical context, container, or mere backdrop, and instead recognizes place as an active ingredient (Finnegan, 2008), an actor (Gieryn, 2000), in the making and shaping of CSPs. The socio-materiality of place affords action, frames identity work and shapes CSPs as communities come together to care for places. Whereas prior research has investigated CSPs and their systemic impact on grand challenges, the papers in this SI focus on the local dynamics that shape CSPs within a community, between communities, in a region, and between countries. In all these settings, our attention is drawn to the situational rather than the universal, and to the actors and issues that convene in places and in which CSPs are established, emerge (or fail to emerge), develop, sustain, and, in some cases, conclude.

CSPs can rekindle the meaning of place (Howard-Grenville et al., 2013; Peredo et al., 2018). Natural and social ecosystems co-evolve with the place in which they are situated (Autio et al., 2018), and place is a critical resource that influences how ecosystems evolve (Slawinski et al., 2021; Thompson et al., 2018). The papers in the SI also demonstrate that partnerships and place are intrinsically reciprocal: the morality and materiality inherent in places repeatedly reset the reference points for partners (André et al., 2018), trigger epiphanies (Dentoni et al., 2018), shift identities (Anderson et al., 2019; Hardy et al., 2005), and redistribute capacities to act (Finch et al., 2017). Place thus becomes generative of partnerships in the most profound sense: by developing an awareness of their emplacement, CSPs commit to place, and through their place-based commitments they reflect three intertwined modalities of place-specific ethics that bind CSPs and place: an ethics of recognition, an ethics of care, and an ethics of resilience (see Fig. 1). As the papers in this SI illustrate, these ethical modalities are in equal measure “hopeful, disruptive and demanding” (Herman, 2015, p. 102), meaning that these are not easy ethics to live with. Our authors have found vivid examples of how emplaced CSPs embody these ethics, signaling hope for the sustainability of our (always hyper-local) life-worlds.

Fig. 1
figure 1

The Ethics of Emplaced Partnerships

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By speaking to the three place-specific ethics we discuss below—ethics of recognition, ethics of care and ethics of resilience—the papers included in this special issue reveal core tensions particular to each and render visible the acts by which partners interact with places. We define the ethics of recognition as being concerned with how actors in and of places make efforts to be recognized as equal partners; they do so using place-based resources and in turn using this recognition to draw attention to place-based concerns. The ethics of care is concerned with the mundane acts of reciprocity that bind partners and places. It allows an opening into the many different practices through which partnerships care for and about places, maintaining and repairing them. Finally, an ethics of resilience explores how places absorb shocks or disturbances and ‘bounce back’, but it may also invite us to witness collective efforts undertaken in partnerships to transform places; to ‘build them back better’, to use a highly charged political phrase, but in a very concrete materially and culturally situated sense. In the section below, we begin by discussing these three ethics separately, but of course they often intertwine, which we highlight in our framework in Fig. 1.

As the papers in this SI will demonstrate, partners in fact experience multiple tensions and combine different kinds of ethics in their acts in different ways, and we will preview the focus and contribution of each paper in the light of these ethics and the interrelationships and tensions they create. Finally, through four thought pieces from eminent scholars focused on place and partnerships, we invite critical reflections on the boundary conditions of these ethical perspectives, cautioning that places may also hinder partnerships. Overall, we hope that this introduction lays the foundation of a future research agenda on the multiple ethics at the intersection of place and partnerships.

A Place-Based Ethics of Recognition: Acts of Representation

The SI papers present multiple accounts of how actors in and of places make efforts to be recognized as equal partners, how they use place-based resources to gain recognition, and how they, in turn, use their own recognition to draw attention to place-based concerns. We were thus drawn to consider the ethics of recognition, which a place-based perspective on partnerships brings to the fore. The recognition of certain actors in CSPs and their concerns for the place is thus intrinsically interrelated. Indeed, as our papers demonstrate, when we direct our focus on the hyper-local and sometimes indiscernible interactions that coalesce in places and from which CSPs emerge, we begin to see the multitude of actors, some fully formed, others still emerging, who seek to shape CSP formation and development. While recognition may often be implicit in the struggles that our empirical accounts describe, these observations can fruitfully be informed by the politics of recognition (Fraser & Honneth, 2003) and a sensitivity to social justice and its governance (Cornelius & Wallace, 2010). On such views, any form of collective action is dependent on the recognition actors give to each other (Powell et al., 2018) and on the recognition they collectively receive from (potential) partners and external actors (Bojovic & Geiger, 2022; Lawrence & Phillips, 2019). Until there is mutual awareness and acknowledgement, collective action is not possible. A place-based ethics of recognition points to how social and material CSP infrastructures allow some actors to come to the fore, be formed, and be ‘seen’, while others may remain hidden from view (van Hille et al., 2021). Recognition extends beyond awareness to the acceptance of actors, their issues, and their ways of knowing and being, which may include being recognized as ‘spokespersons’ for the place in question (Callon, 1999). Accordingly, an ethics of recognition is strongly associated with concerns for social justice (Fraser & Honneth, 2003), sensitive to actor marginalization (Cornelius & Wallace, 2010), and alert to who gets to participate in CSPs and who does and does not get to ‘speak for’ a place (Gray & Purdy, 2018). Thus, an ethics of recognition needs to be attuned to the resources that place affords for actors to gain recognition.

Beyond the capacity to act and to speak for, an ethics of recognition also ties into issues of identity. As Grey and O’Toole (2020) remind us, questions of ‘who we are’ are often intimately related to questions of ‘where we are’. Prior research has laid the ground by demonstrating how places are sites of agency and constraint (Lawrence & Dover, 2015) that, on the one hand, script (Gieryn, 2000) and preconfigure ‘docile subjects’, and on the other hand are the raw material in the production of identity (Cresswell, 2004). Thus, place enables and requires partners to engage in identity work. Partners’ identity work is dynamic: the interplay between the constraint of affordances offered by place opens and closes possibilities for who one is and may be recognized as. The papers in this SI consider the mutual effects of recognizing actors and stabilizing a collective identity in place as actors come together to address a common issue. The ethics of recognition draws attention to the ‘acts of representation’ by which actors iteratively tether or release their identities as they recognize place-based (in)justices.

A Place-Based Ethics of Care: Acts of Reciprocity

An ethics of care draws attention to the mundane acts of reciprocity that bind partners and places, including those that are vital to maintain and repair places. We base our reflections here on the classic definition of care as “everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair ‘our world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible” (Fisher & Tronto, 1990, p. 40). Tronto and her colleagues offer a highly relational conceptualization of care, where care is interwoven “in a complex life-sustaining web” (ibid.) that includes social, material, and affective worlds. A place-based ethic of care highlights how actors care for and are cared for by place through acts of reciprocity, fuelled by the ‘enchantment’ that emanates from place to those who care for it (Herman, 2015). Places and the partnerships that they nurture are made and remade through the (a)symmetries of actors’ custodianship (Montgomery & Dacin, 2020), and closely related processes of guardianship, stewardship, even policing (Crawford & Dacin, 2021). Extreme forms of a place-specific ethics of care in fact deliberately intertwine practices of custodianship and enchantment (Crawford et al., 2022): partnerships are forged with the explicit intention to convert the memory of places that no longer exist into a key resource that incites activism to preserve those that still are.

The ethics of partners caring for place, and being taken care of in turn, is not conflict-free either. As care becomes coupled with ‘commitment’ or ‘responsibility’ (Chatzidakis et al., 2020), attention shifts from a focus on ‘who cares’ toward ‘how to care’—invoking a right or wrong way to care, and how care might do justice to the place in which it is entangled. Effectively, many of the conflicts that we see arising between partners and place in the empirical cases our papers describe are not caused by actors who fail to care, but rather by actors fighting over the question of ‘how to’ care for place. As care ethicists have noted, care is always both proximate and political (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017; Tronto, 1993). The tension between the proximate and the political renders visible both the mundane and the extraordinary acts of reciprocity through which partners respect and reclaim places (Fotaki & Daskalaki, 2021).

Place-based partnerships are, by definition, hyper-local and created to care; established to work in a specific geographic area or community (Moore et al., 2007), mandated to work for place (George & Reed, 2017), and embedded in the locale to identify, anticipate, and respond to local issues and opportunities (Muir, 2021). An ethics of care approach emphasizes this co-dependence more strongly than extant notions of custodianship: place-based partnerships are not only of a place but are for that place—thus, caring and place are mutually constituting (Till, 2012).

A Place-Based Ethics of Resilience: Acts of Plasticity

An ethics of resilience points to the capacity of a system to “absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same relationships between populations and state variables” (Holling, 1973, p. 14). As a consequence of the multiple crises that we have collectively experienced in recent decades, resilience has become a term du jour in policy domains. By contrast, for us, a place-based ethics of resilience rejects the view that responsibility for development lies with dominant institutions. Instead, an ethics of resilience prioritizes “shared ethical responsibility for actions and environment” (Käyhkö, 2021, p. 1). It embraces anything that increases the capacity of “communities [to be] less vulnerable to hazards and disasters than less resilient places” (Cutter et al., 2008, p. 601) by anticipating and preparing for crises (Muñoz et al., 2019), or recovering from shocks (Branzei & Fathallah, 2021). Beyond the original definition of “positive adaptation” to unexpected or surprising events, which implies mastery over adversity (Hermann et al., 2011 p. 259), an ethics of resilience relies on acts of plasticity by which partners remain sensitive to place. For example, partners identify place-based assets and convene in dedicated spaces (Muñoz & Kimmitt, 2019; Tobias et al., 2013).

Plasticity also points to a place-based ethics of resilience may move beyond a systems perspective, which defines resilience as the amount of “disturbance” that can be withstood by a system “before it loses capacity to bounce back” (Manyena, 2006, p. 435; see also Folke, 2016). Places may indeed “respond and recover from an internally or externally set of extraordinary demands” (Aguirre, 2006, p. 1), but they often emerge different or transformed from such processes of recovery. The ecological underpinning of resilience underscores the importance of the “persistence, adaptability and transformability” of places (Folke, 2016 p. 44; see also Folke et al., 2010), and it is particularly the latter—transformability—that we wish to highlight in our ethics of resilience. Ecosystems are shaped by, and shape partnerships, and partners co-construct sustainability (Onyas et al., 2018)—place improvements and transformations thus increase levels of living and well-being (van Hille et al., 2021).

An ethics of resilience thus explores how places emerge from shocks or disturbances and ‘bounce back’ transformed, by attuning to the ongoing collective efforts undertaken in partnerships to repair and mend them (André et al., 2018). The capacity of the CSPs to support institutional and community adaptation and transformation unfolds in local action to increase community sustainability (Powell et al., 2018), but does so dynamically, in constant dialogue with, and sensitivity to, an ever-changing place. While history and prior experience impact partner commitment, engagement, and responsibilities, an ethic of resilience highlights the local and deeply relational aspects of the socio-material relations as place holds together (Chandler, 2013). Resilience is demonstrated by acts of plasticity: actors ‘stay true’ as place transforms (Slawinski et al., 2021), and place evolves as partners remake and rescale CSPs (André et al., 2018; Chatterjee et al., 2022; van Hille et al., 2021). Thus, a central question for inquiries following an ethics of resilience perspective is to study those material, social, and cultural elements that stay the same and those that transform when partnerships engage in processes of recovery and repair..

In our model of the ethics of emplaced partnership ethics we see acts of representation, acts of reciprocity and acts of plasticity not only as an expression of the ethics of recognition, care and resilience, respectively, but as connectors between modalities. Representational practices open up who and what is cared for, reciprocity becomes a resource in resilience, and plasticity creates space for recognition.

Papers in the Special Issue

The articles in the SI collectively demonstrate the deep relationality between place and partnerships, illustrate the often complicated ethics of recognition, care, and resilience specific to different places, and advocate for a more prominent role for partnerships embracing ethical perspectives on place.

Stadtler and van Hassanhove’s examination of UN disaster response CSPs introduces the construct of ‘place work’ to describe the cognitive and emotional work involved when different partners cope with the intensity and diversity of the setting. They underscore the fragility of emplaced partnerships and render visible the ongoing efforts required to make, and remake CSPs in an ‘intense’ place when disaster relief professionals parachute in to provide rapid interventions. Their study shows the deep intertwining of the ethics of care and resilience, of ‘how to’ care and ‘how to build back’ resulting in very different practices depending on partners’ respective knowledge and relationships to a place.

Dahik-Loor, Moss and Han explain how CSPs with a corporation enable rural cooperatives and urban social enterprises in Mexico to respond to place-based economic, social, and cultural constraints. The cooperatives and social enterprises employ local knowledge about crops, products, and processes to develop and supply products that embody their heritage and skills, which the CSP acquires and distributes. The study shows how people from marginalized communities awaken and strengthen community bonds to preserve, develop, and revive place. Theirs is, thus, a highly illustrative case where place-based recognition facilitates a community to take care of a place, demonstrating the tight intermeshing between these two ethical modalities.

Brenton and Slawinski direct our attention to the often invisible assets of place including its traditions and physical setting, and their power to galvanize hyper-local action in depleted settings. The authors explicate how CSPs can redress the ‘lack of institutional organizing’ (Manyena, 2006, p. 436) as an island-based community organization and a corporation convert their direct experience of place (staged and naturally occurring) to alter place power dynamics. The place-based partnership reconfigures identities to gain global recognition. An ethics of care shines through as Brenton and Slawinski become ‘enchanted’ with the place through their own immersive engagement, making their experience contagious to the reader who starts to care too.

Palo problematizes the ethicality of marketizing Lapland. She elaborates community resilience by examining the capacity of commercial and ecological subsystems to adapt to increased tourism in a fragile environment. Her historical account brings to the fore the recognition and identity work in and around place, as engagement between partners and the Lappish politicians sought to preserve local attachments and curb the ‘Disney-ization’ of Santa Claus. Palo sensitizes us towards the plasticity of framing and reframing identities and place narratives as actors’ concerns become recognized, and thereby reverses our customary gaze by explaining how places come to be custodians of partnerships.

Baudoin, Zakriya, Arenas and Walsh explore how stewards’ efforts to recognize and represent place co-evolves based on key biophysical markers by which they experience place. The authors model place-based governance of Social-Ecological Systems (SES) when stewards are distributed rather than co-located. They quantitatively show how simple acts of representation, such as stewards’ driving for several hours to attend meetings, adapt to reflect the state of their commons and ultimately affect how this commons is being cared for (or not). They also draw our attention to the small but vital acts of care that give places identity and resilience.

Baker, Cutcher and Ormiston invite us to travel the Bundian Way (Australia) and reset our appreciation of intergenerational trauma, cycles of place dispossession, and collective reclaiming and re-storying of indigenous ways of living on the land. Recognition of community and recognition of place, in the deepest sense possible, are inseparable in their account. Their study enrolls indigenous practices of listening to stories while walking ‘on Country’ to enable non-Indigenous partners to recognize the complexities and layered meanings of place. The process of holding fast to a place-based ethic of care is embodied by partners sharing the historical trails, where caring for place and caring about their ways of living become folded into the same gesture.

Ungureanu’s research sheds light on the dynamic socio-materiality of place over time. The paper theorizes place as a punctuated accomplishment of the CSP from ideal-typing, to prototyping, to virtual, to lived. Each punctuation is accomplished as an emplaced spatial configuration that can be observed and revealed only multimodally; discourses reveal only the respective functions, energizing for emplacement, warning for spatial configurations. The process model traces the dual function of the respective combinations (for each four punctuations) over time.

Drawing on Jacobs (1961), Brandtner, Douglas and Kornberger go beyond abstract categorizations of place and put forward the concept of social infrastructure that enables collective action and the (re) production of the commons, which acts as a catalyst for partnerships. The paper advances three practices of partnerships in maintaining and repairing—and thus, in our definition, caring for—the commons: democratizing access, enabling mixed uses, and maintaining and repairing the material conditions for commoning. The paper also points to the importance of investment in the social infrastructures that enable partnering in place, thus hinting at an ethics of recognition.

Awad’s paper on Occupy Medical in Eugene, Oregon, frames CSPs as a form of latent organizing at the local level that enables communities to respond effectively to crisis situations and that resolves place-based tensions through manipulating structural elements, specifically partners’ roles, scope of activities, shared resources, and control. Drawing our attention to those who are marginalized by spatiality—the homeless—the paper highlights how the ethics of recognition and of care are differentially enabled through spatial contexts: As the partnership moves to different locales, different stakeholders come to the fore raising different concerns and suggesting different approaches on how to care.

Critical Perspectives on Embedded Partnerships

In this final section, we present four critical reflections from eminent scholars at the forefront of place-based research to open up further scope for scholarship and theorizing. Each alerts us to one notable concern around partnerships and place by problematizing the potentially hindering role of painful memories, unruly embodiment, local containment, and moral obligations for the scaling and success of embedded partnerships. Together, these four critical reflections broaden the future research agenda on ethical considerations specific to the growing intersection of place and partnerships.

Barbara Gray cautions that competing conceptions of place impede CSPs, because the divergent identities of partners that care deeply but differently about the same place repeatedly defeat their efforts to protect it. In two contexts, namely the establishment of Voyageurs National Park in the U.S. and a Peruvian gold mine, Gray reminds us that contrasting ethics of care can pit partners’ views on land use, power differences, and identity against one another. Tom Lawrence invites us to reflect on how partners from different sectors distinctly embody place. Lawrence comments on the intimate interconnectedness of place and bodies in the context of homelessness in Vancouver. He warns that transgressive embodiment of an ethic of care for the same place by the homeless gets stigmatized as dirty by collocated partners. Tim Cresswell’s critical reflection on a place-based ethic of care reviews different philosophical perspectives on traditional conceptualisations of place. Cresswell challenges the significance of localism, noting tensions in recognition, care and resilience between proximal and distal places. In the fourth and final critical reflection, Alistair Anderson, Sarah Jack and Ed McKeever grapple with the moral obligations associated with place and explore how social, sustainable and community entrepreneurs orchestrate their obligations to partners across different domains, offering insights into the challenges of regenerating depleted ecosystems.

Dark Sides of Embedded Partnerships: Painful Memories

Barbara Gray

When partnerships bring competing groups together to manage the care and use of a place (Gray & Purdy, 2018), partners are fuelled by their attachment to place and/or fears of its destruction (Bryan, 2004). Convergent attachments to places may advance (Fan & Zietsma, 2017), yet divergent ones can derail even well-intended partnerships (Sadeh & Zilber, 2019). Despite these often-romanticized images, place can also signify confusion, aversion, disappointment, fear and or violence for its current or past occupants. Houses can be haunted or succumb to storms or wildfires; fields turn into battlegrounds or burial grounds, buildings can become museums or extermination centers.

Places are symbolic in that they represent our heritage, our lineage, our birthplace, our family, our roots, our identity. We leave an indelible mark on a place through our investment in it while it inscribes memories in return. Places can even be revered as sacred (Burton, 2002) and exude healing powers (Sternburg, 2009). Places are the material form in which meanings, values and locations intersect (Gieryn, 2000). By observing the institutions that emerge in a place, one can learn about the meaning and values that a place infuses in its occupants and, reciprocally, how these meanings and values constitute or prevent the formation of new institutional forms in that place.

From an institution theory perspective, place plays constitutive roles in organizing (Crilly, 2017). Whether fuelled by positive or negative memories, occupants of places construct group identity and belonging around them (Barash, 2016; Brummans et al., 2008; Fiol et al., 2009). Institutions hold the values inscribed in the traditions and rituals a place inspires (Dacin et al., 2010). Place can also anchor ethical obligations that motivate occupants to preserve and protect it (Jack & Anderson, 2002). Finally, institutions inscribe the power relationships that hold sway in a place, conveying the rules of the game (Fairclough, 1998), who controls these rules and how they are enforced. Consequently, the power distribution within a place is likely to influence partnership efforts arising therein, with the potential to foster or impede its care and use over time.

To understand how the institutional embeddedness of place can affect partnerships, I consider how two attempts to partner were shaped by the identities, traditions and power inscribed in those places. The first case captures a 40-year conflict over the fate of Voyageurs National Park in northern Minnesota (USA); the second examines stakeholders’ attempts to jointly regulate discharge from a Peruvian gold mine that was contaminating the regional water supply. In each case, contrasting conceptions of place suffused the identities and values of key stakeholders and impeded sustained efforts to forge a collaborative solution.

Voyageurs National Park

In the first case, local residents fought the Voyageurs National Park’s formation since it was first proposed in 1891, arguing that stewardship of the land and water resources comprising it should be managed locally rather than nationally, whereas the federal government believed that federal control would best preserve these resources. Unlike other national parks where fishing, motorized boats and snowmobiles are not permitted, the area, largely lakes, had long-supported logging operations, hunting and fishing and recreational homes. After the Park’s enabling legislation passed in 1971, a local representative criticized the decision, asserting that federal control would take away the right and freedom of individuals to truly make decisions regarding their lives and livelihoods in their own backyards (Duluth News Tribune, 1964), strong place-based views that many local residents and officials shared.

Federal acquisition of land through imminent domain in 1975 further increased resistance because of alleged under-pricing, foreclosing of inheritance rights and loss of the right to log. In contrast, local, state and federal environmental groups lobbied for wilderness protection to protect the park and entice new wilderness-oriented visitors.

The conflict between local objectors and environmentalists continued for twenty years culminating in an unsuccessful effort in 1995 to decommission the Park. Two attempts to bridge these differences occurred in 1996–7 and 1999. An 18-month mediation, in which a panel of citizens, park and government officials, and wilderness and motorized-use advocates sought consensus and came close to a deal about permissible recreational activities, ultimately was scuttled by a local politician who viewed the deal as compromising too much (Lewicki et al., 2003). Subsequent efforts toward a partnership between the park and local residents to agree on a recreational use plan also failed because park opponents feared it would lead to wilderness designation.

Mesá di Diálogo y Consenso

In the second case an indigenous people’s organization, FEROCAFENOP, accused the Yanococha gold mine in Peru of unsafe practices, lack of transparency in acquiring land, and mercury contamination of the area’s water supply. An independent investigation, commissioned by International Finance Corporation (IFC) (which owned 5% of the mine), criticized the mine and Peru’s government for neglecting international standards for handling hazardous materials and recommended more stringent procedures. Further complaints by indigenous groups prompted the IFC’s Compliance Advisor/Ombudsman (CAO) to recommend a roundtable dialogue (the Mesá de Diálogo y Consenso) with representatives from business associations, local governments, universities, the Peruvian Ministry of Energy and Mines, the Catholic Church, local indigenous groups and NGOs to address the dispute. The mine exhibited a lukewarm response to the dialogue, leading some NGOs to boycott proceedings alleging the table was tipped in Yanococha’s favor because the courts, and not the Mesá, would decide accountability for the mercury contamination. Other stakeholders believed the dialogue would give local citizens a voice and empower the local community.

Although the Mesá’s first order of business was to study water runoff from the mine, place-based issues about ownership and legitimacy dominated the discussion. Yanococha refused to release water samples from its property, and the Mesá could not compel it to do so. Although the Mesá did gain community trust for the study (by taking steps to ensure its independence) and the study validated some water quality concerns, neither Yanococha nor the Peruvian government undertook remediation, and the Mesá had no authority to force such actions. The partnership collapsed in 2005 when the IFC pulled out.

In both partnerships, place and its effects on partners’ identities and power precluded the partners from building a collective identity that bridged their differences (Hardy et al., 2005). In Voyageurs, the self-images of local residents as caretakers of the land were inextricably bound to the local resource-extraction economy (trapping, logging and iron mining). Despite their professed stewardship, “having to grapple with the change of identity that is inherent to a park-supporting community” was “difficult and painful” for the locals (Parkinson, 2000) who resisted this change at every turn.

Environmentalists and Park officials also cared deeply for the Park’s resources and sought national park designation as a means to protect them from what they perceived as destructive uses such as hunting or trapping. Many had strongly lobbied to establish the Park and identified their current role as holding the National Park Service accountable for its mission, which includes serving a broader group of US citizens than just the locals. Consequently, while they welcomed the locals’ input, they didn’t “cede their authority over to the locals” (Lewicki et al., 2003, p. 114). The Park’s decisions to close bays to protect bald eagles’ nests and intercept harassment of grey wolves were met with strong resistance from the locals—battles that were ultimately settled through litigation.

The Voyageurs case clearly reveals how the meaning of places emerges through social relations within a specific context, and how the stamp of history imprinted a subjective territorial identity (Agnew, 1987) on the Northern Minnesotans through the natural resources that afforded them a livelihood. The idea of a ‘national’ park was antithetical to their place-based conception of the land that hinged on their ability to control and use it as they chose—in exchange for their stewardship. Places carry the memory of one’s history through centuries, fuelling continued efforts to grieve or reclaim what was lost (Barash, 2016; Lear, 2006). Emotion-laden memories can either block change, as the two cases above illustrate, or rekindle it via recursive processes that tightly tether identity to place (Crawford et al., 2022) and place to identity (Howard-Grenville et al., 2013).

In the Mesá case, the mining company was an outsider, only arriving in 1993 to a town 8900 feet up in the Andes. Before the Spanish arrived in 1532, the area had a long indigenous history dating back to between 2000 and 3500 years. The arrival of the mine, coupled with anomalies about how it had acquired the land, was like a two-edged sword for this farming area—providing employment for some and hazards for many.

Constructing a partnership across this divide between a US mining company with a history of shady dealings and a largely peaceful agricultural community was a bridge too far. This conclusion is derived from arguments that collaboration is not possible between partners in volatile institutional fields in which partners have neither countervailing power nor shared interests (Gray et al., 2022). Despite the Mesá facilitators’ efforts to increase local voice through the dialogue, the mine’s failure to partner in good faith and its coincident efforts to establish another mine on a nearby mountain that furnishes drinking water for the area further tilted an already lopsided negotiating table, jeopardized the Mesá and preventing transparency about the mine’s activities. The partnership’s lack of authority to enforce stringent water standards and to demand accountability from Yanococha left it helpless to assuage the locals’ concerns or enhance their bargaining power vis a vis’ the mine although subsequent local protests of the new mine eventually forced its closure.

Hindsight on both these cases warns that place can hinder partnerships when partners’ deep-seated associations with place fuelled different institutional visions of how the place in question should be used: specifically, whether it should be preserved or exploited; and who should have the power to control and benefit from those respective efforts. When residents or users of a place have competing visions about its use and care, and distribution of its benefits, partnering may be supplanted by heated and protracted conflicts. At extremes, the uniqueness of a place may even become memorialized in memory of such conflicts (Jess & Massey, 1995; Pile & Keith, 1997) although painful memories have also become resources for place-protection in other cases (Crawford et al., 2022).

Dark Sides of Embedded Partnerships: Unruly Bodies

Tom Lawrence

Both bodies and places are social-symbolic objects (Lawrence & Phillips, 2019) that are ‘doubly constructed’ in the sense that they are established physically (bodies are born and grown, places designed and built) and constructed in the sense of “interpreted, narrated, perceived, felt, understood, and imagined” (Gieryn, 2000, p. 465). Connecting bodies and places in the context of MSPs involves negotiating the discursive, relational, and material interfaces between them, and doing so in the context of the complex politics that are inherent to interorganizational relationships that span sectors.

The relationship between bodies and places is both intimate and inextricable. Bodies are born into and then grow, thrive, flourish, suffer, and decay in places that provide (or restrict) shelter and resources, shape (and deform) social relationships, and inspire (and constrict) meaning making. At the same time, spaces only become places to the extent that people recognize, maintain, value, and use them. This recursive dynamic is at the center of social problems and the responses of MSPs to those problems. Healthcare problems often revolve around the connection between ailing or healthy bodies and the places in which care might be provided (Lawrence, 2017). Social justice depends significantly on the relationships between vulnerable bodies and places of attention and protection (Zilber, 2002).

The social problems that multi-sector partnerships (MSPs) target are matters of negotiation, often involving the partners and sometimes involving external parties as well (Lawrence et al., 2013). A key element in this negotiation involves connecting the ‘who’ and ‘where’ of the problem—the bodies and places around which the problem revolves. A valuable approach to connecting bodies and places involves emphasizing the specificity of both—their specific locations and mobilities, idiosyncratic materiality, and local meanings. Moving in this direction leads us to consider who and where in concrete terms—as human bodies and social places that are specified in explicit, tangible referents that allow us to ‘see’ the problem more clearly and share that understanding more easily.

The relationship between bodies and places is especially important in the domain of homelessness, where the materiality, meaning, and location of bodies and places is definitive of the problem (Lawrence, 2018; Rosenberger, 2014). Although the relationship between bodies and place in relation to homelessness may seem obvious—that homelessness represents bodies without places, or at least places to call their own—the relationship is a complex and contested one. At its most restrictive, the concept of homelessness describes only those people not “buying or paying mortgage or rent on a primary residence and living in it regularly” (Bogard, 2001, p. 107). In contrast, the advocacy NGO, Shelter (2018), argues that:

You count as homeless if you are: staying with friends or family; staying in a hostel, night shelter or B&B; squatting (because you have no legal right to stay); at risk of violence or abuse in your home; living in poor conditions that affect your health; living apart from your family because you don't have a place to live together.

Thus, defining homelessness demands that we make certain assumptions about the relationships between bodies and places, including whether a place is truly a ‘home’ when it contains the risk of violence or instability.

The Mat Program

To explore how MSPs work to manage the relationship between bodies and places in the context of homelessness, I will revisit a partnership I examined previously (Lawrence & Dover, 2015). The Mat Program was established by a MSP in the Tri-Cities area of Metro Vancouver. The project provided individuals with overnight accommodation in a church hall, including an evening meal, a mat to sleep on, breakfast, and a bagged lunch. It grew out of a recognition by the community of increasing numbers of individuals living in their city who were homeless and dealing with alcohol and drug addiction. The question in the context of this discussion is how the developers of the Mat Program worked to connect churches as places to the bodies of the homeless people, and the challenges associated with making those connections. To answer this question, we need to enumerate the qualities of the churches as places and the bodies of the homeless people.

The Mat Program was rolled out in five churches, all located in residential neighborhoods across the Tri-Cities, each of which provided space for the Mat Program on a rotating monthly basis. An important characteristic of the churches and the neighborhoods was their lack of any prior experience of the problem of homelessness. The churches themselves were not unusual for their locations: as buildings, they were typical modern neighborhood churches, not only with dedicated spaces for church services but also with multipurpose spaces; their missions included social outreach, but as a routine practice this involved relatively limited engagement, and never in such a direct manner as was the case with the Mat Program.

The homeless people who were targeted by the Mat Program represented something of a surprise to most residents of the Tri-Cities, including the congregations of the churches involved. The surprise came from the dramatic increase in ‘counted’ homeless people in the region over the five years leading up to the Program, with the counts increasing from 13 people in 2002 to 177 in 2006—an increase likely reflective of both changes in counting methods and an actual increase in the number of homeless people. An important characteristic of the homeless population was its geographical distribution: the homeless people lived primarily outside of the suburban neighborhoods, with many of them ‘camped’ near the Coquitlam River. This had implications for connecting them to the churches involved in the Mat Program. The homeless people also had profiles not atypical of people living under such circumstances, with many suffering from mental health and addiction issues.

Connecting the homeless people to the Mat Program was a non-trivial component of developing the Program. Unlike urban mat programs and shelters, users of the Tri-Cities Mat Program could not simply walk up to the churches each evening, and indeed the possibility of this happening (even if unlikely) was a point of resistance in the neighborhoods where the churches were located. At public meetings in anticipation of the Mat Program, organizers had to reassure residents that no homeless people would be walking through their neighborhoods: to ensure this, the Program would provide buses to bring the homeless people in at night and take them away each morning. How space was made for the homeless people to eat and sleep in the churches also reflects specificities of materiality and meaning. Like most mat programs, the intention was to provide overnight shelter rather than an ongoing residence, and so the mats and meal services needed to be designed in ways that they could be laid out each night and then stored away during the day. More generally, the intersection of place and bodies was at the heart of both the challenges faced by and the successes achieved by the Mat Program developers. They were able to construct both the problem of homelessness and the Mat Program as a response, as one ‘of’ place (the Tri-Cities).

Bodies and places are intimately connected in the context of MSPs in ways that shape the work of such partnerships, but perhaps an even stronger claim can be made: that places and bodies are mutually constitutive, that the social construction of places involves and entails the social construction of bodies as objects, and vice versa. Places are only places to the extent that they are embroiled in the goings on of people, and bodies can only be realized in the way we understand them—as vessels of humanity—when they are located and connected to specific places, whether those places are stable, comfortable housing or ‘the street’. This mutually constitutive relationship may affect the willingness of partners to become involved, how partnerships are negotiated, and the long-term effects of partnerships on the fields in which they operate.

The willingness of organizations to become involved in MSPs may depend on whether bodies and places are co-constituted in ways that might be conceived of as approachable or manageable. The possibility of bodies and places being constructed as unruly or transgressive characterizes many of the bodies and places associated with dirty work and other stigmatized activities, which are often the focus of MSPs. As we saw in the Mat Program, the bodies of homeless people were foreign to the neighborhoods and their churches, and thus represented not only impurity but danger (Douglas & Wildavsky, 1983).

The co-constitution of bodies and places also shapes how MSPs unfold, particularly in relation to the kinds of social-symbolic work they enable and the social change they engender (Plowman et al., 2007). Addressing social problems necessarily involves social-symbolic work, including the social construction of problems and the construction of responses to those problems (Lawrence & Phillips, 2019; Lawrence et al., 2013). As MSPs engage with social problems, the bodies and places that infiltrate these processes may demand various forms of body work (Gimlin, 2002), relational work (Bandelj, 2012) and place work (Lawrence & Dover, 2015). More significantly, these forms of work are likely to spill over into each other, as bodies and places are co-constructed intentionally and otherwise (Nast & Pile, 2005).

Finally, the co-constitution of bodies and places is likely to shape the impacts of MSPs. A significant question for MSPs is the durability and robustness of the solutions they enact in response to social problems. Focusing on the interplay of bodies and places in relation to this question highlights the degree to which newly arranged bodies and places can become institutionalized as productive constellations that not only overcome immediate problems but are generative in longer-lasting ways. To achieve this kind of long-lasting generative organization of bodies and places may depend on embedding agency into such constellations (Plowman et al., 2007). Despite the potential unruliness of the bodies and places involved, empowering them with resources and autonomy may be the most powerful legacy of a successful MSP.

Dark Sides of Embedded Partnership: Local Confinement

Tim Cresswell

Recent re-conceptualizations of place have tended to move away from thinking of place as spatially bounded and temporally rooted but, rather, to see it as connected and produced through its connections to points far away (Cresswell, 2019; Massey, 1997). Ethically, this has meant considering how a confined and spatially bounded scale limits ethical commitment in ways that foreclose the possibility of care at a distance (Smith, 1998). This has been particularly true in work on ethical consumption where local does not always mean ethical—simply because something is produced close-by (Barnett, 2011). An ethic of care rooted in feminist theory has also questioned the masculinity of ethical theories based on knowing individual actors rather than caring forms of relationality between people. One way of looking at an ethic of care is to see it as valuing the local. An ethic of care has little time for the kinds of universal rationality (rationality that is not tied to place) that undergird mainstream definitions of morality and ethics (Held, 2006). Care, however, can happen between people who are not spatially contiguous (McEwan & Goodman, 2010). Work on care at a distance reminds us of the dark sides to place-based ethical thinking.

The moral currency of ‘the local’ is so appealing that it even transcends political affiliation. Donald Trump told the crowd at one of his large rallies in Hershey, Pennsylvania, that “People talk about how we’re living in a globalized world, but the relationships people value most are local—family, city, state, and country. Local, folks, local,” (Gapper, 2016). The late Roger Scruton, philosopher and advisor to Conservative UK governments, noted, for example, that places touch on the three foundational ideas of the conservative movement: trans-generational loyalty, the priority of the local and the search for home (Scruton, 2013). Broadly left of center and liberal cultural lifestyle choices have, for a long time, bought into the idea of the local as an unquestioned good. In Vancouver, the co-founder of the 100-mile-diet—a diet where consumers only eat things grown and produced from within 100 miles—MacKinnon declared that “distance is the enemy of awareness” (Smith & MacKinnon, 2007, p. 69). Recent responses to the COVID pandemic have drawn on the anarchist tradition of mutual aid instigated by Peter Kropotkin who posited the value of local cooperation over the large-scale workings of the state (Kropotkin, 1987). In each case, and from radically opposed political starting points, the scale of the local has been valorized and opposed to the implicitly or explicitly unethical machinations of processes working at bigger scales.

Despite the mass appeal of the local, and its deliberate valorization across the spectrum of political discourse, it is certainly worth pausing to think about some of its negative consequences. There is something that connects the seemingly positive desire to eat local food, or frequent a local business, or even to help each other out in COVID inspired efforts at mutual aid, with the clearly negative labelling of outsiders as deviant—to parochialism and xenophobia. Alongside the positive moral valence of the local is a long history of derogatory terms associated with the local. The word ‘parochial’ originated in the term for a parish and has come to mean limited or narrow—a lack of ability to deal with wider contexts.

References to an ethic of place normally refer to rural or small-scale places in relation to environmental thought and action (Bergmann & Sager, 2008; Berthold-Bond, 2000; Smith, 2001). Advocates of bioregionalism, a set of beliefs based on the belief that human society should be rooted in and based on clearly defined natural regions, particularly watersheds, are particularly focused on the ethics of place (Aberley, 1999; Sale, 1985). Central to this is the recognition that place is an assemblage that includes the non-human world as well as the human world. Thus any ethic of place stretches obligations beyond those we have for other humans to contemplate responsibilities towards non-humans. An origin point for this way of thinking is Aldo Leopold’s land-ethic where he argues that:

All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land (Leopold, 1949, pp. 203-204).

The non-human world clearly includes other living things or even the ‘land’ as conventionally thought of, but also the very stuff that place is made of—the material fabric of the local landscape. While it may be relatively easy to talk of an ethic of place in relation to care for the land in a rural context, most of these discussions tend to assume what ethics is. We all know that ethics is something to do with generally and vaguely being ‘good’. But what might ethics mean in relation to both the local and to place? What I focus on here is how place and localness feed in different ways into ways of thinking about ethics—consequentialist, deontological, and virtue approaches as well as an ethic of care.

A consequentialist approach to ethics insists that the ethical content of an act is given by its consequences (Rawls, 1999). If we can agree on what constitutes a good or bad outcome of an act, then we can decide if the act is ethical. A key part of this logic is the ability to know the consequences of an act, even in retrospect. Most obviously, an act and its consequences are separated by time, and it is often not possible to know in advance what the consequences will be. But place can also separate an act from its consequences. It could be argued that, broadly speaking, the closer the consequence is to the act, the more likely we are to (eventually) know it. If we buy a pair of trainers in Edinburgh that are made in Indonesia it is hard for us to know the consequences of our actions, even with sophisticated forms of global ethical accounting in place. Distance hides the consequences of our actions. If we buy a hand-made piece of furniture from a local cabinet maker, we may well meet on the street outside the coffee shop. Awkward conversations might ensue if there was something wrong with the table. The era of mass, affordable, communications has complicated this—we may think we know more about a coffee farmer in Kenya than a farmer in East Lothian simply by reading the back of the coffee packet. But it is at least possible to visit the local farm.

The second major mode of ethical reasoning is deontological. Deontological reasoning has no concern for consequences. Instead, deontologists look to moral norms that should guide action regardless of their outcome. Some things are just right. How do we know a moral norm? One way we can know that something is right is through a shared and particular set of codes that we learn through familiarity. Such a set of codes is classically easily shared in a small rural community. It is the definition of gemeinschaft—or community shared values in a local context (Tönnies, 1963). This is a particular version of what are known as agent-centered deontological theories (Kamm, 2007). At an individual level this means that there are certain relationships (such as between parent and child) that follow a specific set of rules that differ from other relationships. We have specific obligations to our family that exist regardless of whether or not they contribute to a greater good. The same could be said of obligations formed in a local context. Such a code would instruct us to treat our community differently because it is ours. What exists beyond the local simply does not matter in the same way. Such an ethical standpoint might, for example, inform versions of NIMBYism (Not In My Back Yard). We may know that wind power is more ethical in a consequentialist sense, but we do not want the windmills just outside our homes.

Virtue ethics puts the emphasis on the idea of character rather than consequences or moral norms. Good character is seen as habitual, repeated good conduct where a person’s deeply learned dispositions tend towards some sense of moral excellence. Virtue ethics, based on the work of Aristotle, insists that virtue makes us a good person, and by becoming a good person, we lead a good life. Collectively the pursuit of virtue leads to human flourishing and happiness. What counts as virtue, in Aristotle, is a calculation of moderation—virtue lies between excess and deficiency. For example, being rash is a vice of excess, being cowardly a vice of deficiency. Having courage is a virtue and may be gained from habit and training. We are, Aristotle argues, what we repeatedly do. In modern terms Aristotle appears to be referring to what we might call ‘practice’ (Bourdieu, 1990; de Certeau, 1984). In theories of practice the social is performed and produced through iterative acts and habits. One way we know a place is through embedded practices, through being part of it in an embodied and habitual way, and we know that we are out of place when we do not know the ways to do. Alongside that recognition is an uneasy feeling that we are doing the ‘wrong’ thing—which is why being out of place can be uncomfortable. A virtue ethics of place and the local, then, would draw out attention to what is repeatedly done in a place collectively and whether that is in some way ‘excellent’ and productive of the good life (Tuan, 1986). Arguably, it is easiest to assess virtue in repeated doings at a local level where practice is known and visible to those who share the place. Close entanglements of people and things are as likely to lead to corruption as they are to virtue.

As we continue to explore embedded partnerships, the value of the local bears re-thinking: why should our ethical commitments to those that are close to us (human and non-human) exceed those that are far away?

Dark Sides of Embedded Partnership: Moral Obligation

Alistair Anderson, Sarah Jack and Ed McKeever

Partnerships are formed to bring about change (Seelos & Mair, 2017), and entrepreneuring is an engine of change. Entrepreneurship is embedded in place and collaboratively achieved through social interaction and networking (Garud et al., 2021; Kalantaridis & Bika, 2006). We explore place not just as a milieu of entrepreneurial agency, but as a core and dynamic element of entrepreneuring, which influences the very why and how of entrepreneurial processes and practices (Slawinski et al., 2021).

Embeddedness imposes a moral obligation on entrepreneurs. Places are where life unfolds, where values are created, possibilities are processed, and responsibilities generated. Thus, ethical and moral obligations are set in part by place. Cresswell (2017, p. 319) explains that “place is seen as bounded, full, unique and subject to forms of interpretive understanding”. Place is thus overlaid with meaning, subjectivity, emotion and affect. Attachment to place influences how individuals and groups behave, and such behavior impacts on communities (Karlsson & Dahlberg, 2003), enforcing and reinforcing particular types of practice and behavior. Things always happen in place. Place is stable but not static, change occurs as a continuity from the past and is produced and reproduced by entrepreneurial actors (McKeever et al., 2015). Furthermore, entrepreneurs may be emotionally attached to a particular place and want to do right by it (Ratten, 2017). Attachment thus goes beyond place simply serving as a tool to help them achieve goals (Kibler et al., 2015; Ratten, 2017). Instead, attachment and especially a sense of belonging creates and maintains individual responsibilities to place (Anderson & Gaddefors, 2016).

Cresswell (2007) further argues that places are “profound centers of human experience” (p. 23). There is, after all, “no knowing or sensing a place except by being in that place and to be in a place is to be in a position to perceive it” (Casey, 1996, p. 18). The actions people take in a place will largely be influenced by how the place is perceived and valued (Guthey et al., 2014), its traditions and how things are institutionalized. Place is not produced by its local community on its own but instead emerges from the nature of relationships that develop within a context (Guthey et al., 2014). These relationships foster attachment to place, even passion for place. Place attachment matters for entrepreneurial action. It can support self-esteem, self-worth, self-pride and well-being (Low & Altman, 1992; Rollero & DePiccoli, 2010). Place can also constrain social mobility and individual progress (Fried, 2000), especially for people growing up or living in peripheral and rural areas when they do not fit or adhere to social norms. Place can also constrain entrepreneurial action. For example, a newcomer’s entrepreneurial efforts to improve a declining place may be challenged by different perceptions of that place (Anderson et al., 2019).

Polanyi and MacIver (1944) used the term embeddedness to describe the influence of social structure on the functioning of exchange arrangements. From their insights, a broad range of disciplines have elaborated on the concept, often as a counterpoint to the atomistic economic individual. Embeddedness, identified broadly as the nature, depth and extent of an individual’s ties to an environment, community or society. This fits with our perception that entrepreneurship is a socially embedded process with economic outcomes (Jack & Anderson, 2002). Entrepreneurs come to know what they can and should do within a place by entwining within this interwoven fabric of relationships where people learn and understand what they can and should not do within a place (Anderson, 1998; Huijbens, 2012). This yields an obligation to place (Jack & Anderson, 2002; McKeever et al., 2015).

How do entrepreneurs recognize and heed their ‘arc of responsibility’ to place (Dobell, 2012; Nordstrom et al., 2020)? We argue that place shapes what is legitimate and what is appropriate, creating expectations for how entrepreneurs should (or should not) act within a locality. Moral responsibility also includes being seen—and being seen as legitimate—within a locality. This is often conditioned on entrepreneurs’ doing the right thing. For example, during a downturn an entrepreneur has little work for his employees but keeps them busy with non-essential tasks. Why? Because the entrepreneur feels a moral responsibility to keep employees in work so they are not financially disadvantaged because of the downturn. Such behavior has been widespread during the global pandemic. Many entrepreneurs’ sense of moral obligation served and sustained places. Some benefitted from a reciprocal return from place-based customers who strived to support local ventures first and foremost. Many did not make it. Places selected out the types of ventures communities no longer needed. New ventures emerged to serve communities’ future needs (Jack & Anderson, 2002; McKeever et al., 2015).

Moral obligations may loom even larger for community entrepreneurs (Hertel et al., 2019), yet the specific role that places play in entrepreneurial actions remains less well understood than the benefits derived from entrepreneurs forging community-based enterprises (Hertel et al., 2021). Place-based resources are also critical for social and sustainable entrepreneurs (Vedula et al., 2022). But we still know relatively little about how place becomes a resource in the first place, let alone the work entrepreneurs perform to renew and regenerate the places they inhabit and depend on (Muñoz & Branzei, 2021):

We know little about how the sustainable entrepreneurship journey unfolds, particularly in a local context, where entrepreneurs face different placed-based expectations and thus different degrees of social legitimacy in their operating place (Kibler et al., 2015, p. 25).

By understanding the entrepreneur's attachment to place, as well as his or her concern for the community within which the entrepreneurial activity exists, we gain insight about how the entrepreneurial journey begins and unfolds. A sustainable entrepreneur's attachment to his or her place shapes their ambitions and strategies for managing legitimacy challenges in a local community. This allows for the creation of sustainable and ethical value, where entrepreneurs seek to protect local ecological resources while simultaneously enhancing community conditions (Kibler et al., 2015).

Entrepreneurship thus carries a moral obligation to do right by place. If someone is embedded in place and does business in place, they will take from place but also be looked on to give back to place. We do not claim that place determines, but it does exert a powerful influence in decision-making and the creation of opportunities. Entrepreneuring is rooted in decisions; decisions about how, when and which resources to give (Vlasov, 2021; Walther et al., 2021) or take (Hertel et al., 2019) from the places they co-evolve with.

The ‘arc of responsibility’ (Dobell, 2012) imbues entrepreneurship with a set of abiding interests and challenges as they iteratively draw from and give back to their community, social milieu and local ecosystem (Jack & Anderson, 2002). When embedded in place—especially a small place (Slawinski et al., 2021)—things get seen more clearly, as are the implications of entrepreneurial actions on a place. Entrepreneurs who have and hold this moral obligation will not look to harm a place; but repair it. They increasingly see economic progress and the stewardship of place as inter-connected (Anderson et al., 2019). Appreciating the moral obligations unfolding as entrepreneurs interact with place is part of ‘being local’. ‘Sense of place’ anchors, and practices of ‘place-making’ articulate how entrepreneurs keep exercising their moral obligation to place (Cartel et al., 2022).