Using a Socio-psychological Approach for Understanding the Influence of Civil Society on Economic Activity

This paper proposes a socio-psychological approach for empirical research into the influence of civil society contexts on the practices of individual economic actors. This methodological approach is based on social theories that explicitly take into account the link between structure and agency, and the paper explains how such framework can be utilised in qualitative interview-based studies. To illus-trate the usefulness of such socio-psychological approach, the paper reports on the findings of a research project that used this methodology as it sought to investigate the influence of Christianity on SME owner-managers’ conceptualisations of practice.