Rethinking entrepreneurial agency through relational values and agentic capabilities

This article examines how non-market value systems and agentic capabilities shape entrepreneurial opportunity engagement. Drawing on data from four remote Indigenous communities in Australia, we use the capabilities approach lens to examine opportunity engagement through the tension between the availability of choice options and the process through which choices are made. Our findings demonstrate that priorities such as collective wellbeing and ancestral stewardship often supersede conventional economic goals and demonstrate that an individual’s sense of agency is an integral part of a larger relational web. We argue that value systems are directly linked to agentic capabilities, and hence opportunity engagement is often culturally grounded and capability oriented. Our work contributes to entrepreneurship-as-process and human-development scholarship by shifting attention from opportunity availability to the dynamics of engagement, refusal and reshaping. We theorise that agentic capabilities are relationally constituted. By highlighting the interplay of context and relational values, this study extends theoretical understandings of entrepreneurial agency and offers novel insights towards inclusive, place-based entrepreneurship programmes that empower community stakeholders.