Over the past three decades, the domain of international
entrepreneurship (IE) has matured and developed into a field of study.
However, there are still areas where both thematically and especially
methodologically the field would benefit from more pluralistic
approaches. Especially comparative IE studies have been suggested in
review studies to provide substantial promise for added contribution to
the field, and novel methodological choices based on content analysis
and secondary data have been called for in IE research. This study aims
to respond to those omissions in the IE domain, by conducting a
comparative study of Finnish and Russian international entrepreneurship
through a discourse analysis supported by primary data in the form of
interviews of Finnish and Russian entrepreneurs. The COVID-19 pandemic
arriving globally in the first half of 2020 provides a timely topic in
which to conduct such a study. As a result, we analyse the discourse in
Finnish and Russian media about entrepreneurship before (2019) and
during (2020) the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions in each country. We
find both similarities and differences in the tone and level of the
discussion, and surprisingly the interviewed entrepreneurs are rather
critical of the media discussion related to entrepreneurship in the time
of the pandemic in their respective countries. We consider the
theoretical and methodological implications arising from these results
and suggest that the IE field would benefit from the added
methodological richness that content analysis and discursive research
methods can provide.