Exploring the practice of business support in resource-constrained contexts

Despite extensive investment in entrepreneurial support organisations (ESOs), ostensibly similar support arrangements often generate markedly different outcomes for micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs). Existing research explains support through programme architectures, governance arrangements, network structures, and performance outcomes, yet offers limited insight into how support is actually accomplished in everyday practice, particularly in resource-constrained environments characterised by institutional fragmentation and limited organisational slack. Drawing on the recent turn to practice in contemporary social theory, this study examines how business support becomes workable under such conditions. We analyse 58 interviews with scientists, technology transfer officers, policymakers, financiers, and entrepreneurs across six ESOs in the Global South, complemented by observations and documentary evidence. Our findings identify four interrelated organising practices through which support is accomplished: parsing resource needs, entrepreneurial framing of academic work, prioritising appropriate technologies, and orchestrating relational ties. Rather than operating as discrete interventions, these practices function as mutually reinforcing accomplishments through which actors align materials, meanings, and competencies in situ. We contribute by re-theorising business support as a situated organising accomplishment rather than a programmatic intervention, organisational capability, or support architecture. This perspective opens the black box of support enactment, explains why ostensibly similar support arrangements generate heterogeneous outcomes, and reveals how resource constraints actively shape the forms of organising through which support becomes workable. In doing so, we extend scholarship on ESOs and technology transfer while offering practitioners a diagnostic vocabulary for strengthening support under conditions of constraint.