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This paper aims to analyze how surviving norms from the Soviet time continue to shape women’s entrepreneurship in contemporary Russia.

The empirical data are based on observations and qualitative interviews in two Russian regions in 2002-2014 and also to a part on a survey from one of the regions. The analytical framework is based on Douglass North’s (1990) categorization of four main kinds of institutions which influence the way a society develops: legal rules, organization forms, enforcement and behavioural norms.

The analysis shows that it is important to incorporate norms connected to women’s societal roles to the institutional theory. The survival of norms might in fact imply that women’s entrepreneurship tends to conserve the ways the system works, rather than to contributing to changing it. Although the survival of such norms tends to prevent changes, the possibility to start private businesses, on the other hand, opened up new ways for women to fulfill their different societal responsibilities.

The paper is based on unique empirical data including some 200 interviews and observations from regular field trips to villages and small towns in Russia since the early 2000s.

This paper introduces the special issue’s six articles with different approaches to investigating gender perspectives on enterprising communities. The papers’ approaches are presented and discussed, and the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how they relate to the two main concepts of gender and enterprising communities.

This paper is conceptual.

Through the discussion of the articles, the concept of enterprising communities is found to be fuzzy and to contain a multitude of meanings. This paper elaborates on the community concept and its spatial and “of practice” dimensions.

First, the paper contributes by suggesting how the enterprising community concept could be delimited. Second, the research article contributes to gender perspectives on enterprising communities. It elaborates on what gendered enterprising communities are and how gender might influence enterprising communities.

The differences of urban and rural as social spaces, their functions in society, as well as their mutual dependence have been a subject of scientific thinking since the antique times. This chapter revisits the topic from a sociological point of view, studying the evolution of the functions of rural in relation to urban, and how this evolution was reflected in the basic streams of rural research. The text ends by discussing rural research in relation to present social, economic and ecological tendencies. It is argued that the post-productionist phase of rural studies is losing its plausibility, because of the return of material functions for the countryside, during such recent trends as the global food crises and the greenhouse effect. This chapter discusses the prognosis made by the three founding fathers of rural sociology, Pitirim Sorokin, Carle C. Zimmerman and Charles J. Galpin (1932) that the society is melting together into a ‘rurban’ society, and takes distance from this prognosis for several reasons, for example because ecological tendencies seem to renew rather than diminish the differences between rural and urban. It is further argued that ecosystems have increasing impacts on societies in the form of adapted ‘greenhouse rationalism’. Such changes place rural research in a crossroads, posing the question whether to pay attention to increasingly important impacts of ecosystems on society, or not.