In this article, we seek to open a debate within entrepreneurship scholarship around a prevailing reductionist view when it comes to non-western or alternative contexts. We argue it is incapable of capturing behavioral differences across contexts without making ethnocentric, narrow and simplified theoretical assumptions about ‘the rest’. Drawing on the sociology of absences, we explain why the concept of entrepreneurship, as it relates to development, has remained captive and constrained by western economic and cultural assumptions, which has been boosted by a worrying absence of self-criticism. This is problematic but equally full of missing opportunities. Drawing from cultural relativism and the sociology of emergences, in this paper we propose a refreshed agenda for advancing research at the intersection of entrepreneurship and development, marked by the possibility of alternative futures and the potency of hidden causes.