Call for paper: Doing Entrepreneurship at the Margins: Qualitative Insights

Doing Entrepreneurship at the Margins: Qualitative Insights

Positivist methodologies have historically shaped entrepreneurship research, supporting the field’s development by allowing the systematic detection of trends and behavioral patterns through quantitative, hypothesis-driven approaches (McDonald et al., 2015; Tiwasing et al., 2023). However, scholars have questioned the capacity of purely variable-based frameworks to capture the lived experiences of marginalized actors (Jack et al., 2013).

A key limitation of dominant approaches lies in their difficulty accounting for lived experience, particularly when legitimate knowledge is assumed to derive from singular and universal narratives. Marginalized entrepreneurs are frequently rendered invisible to institutions and mainstream scholarship despite their substantial contributions to local economies and organizing practices (Durepos et al., 2016). As a result, their everyday strategies, meanings, and forms of agency remain under‑theorized, even though they offer valuable insights into entrepreneurship as a situated and relational process.

Recent scholarship conceptualizes marginalization as a socially constructed and dynamic process shaped by unequal access to resources, power, and institutional recognition (Fluit et al., 2024). Entrepreneurship research has examined these dynamics across gender, race, migration, informality, disability, age, and Indigenous contexts (Pidduck and Clark, 2021), yet such work often remains fragmented or descriptive, limiting cumulative theoretical development. These challenges stem from mistrust, structural constraints, and the complexities of accessing underrepresented populations (Azungah, 2019; Lata, 2021; Serwadda et al., 2018; Villanueva et al., 2025), and are further intensified in Global South contexts, where such conditions shape research access and visibility (Kassouf et al., 2024), while Global North research agendas continue to marginalize local priorities and epistemic traditions (Prasad et al., 2019).

Against this backdrop, qualitative inquiry is particularly well suited to advancing entrepreneurship research at the margins. Qualitative approaches enable scholars to explore meanings, practices, and organizing processes that are often obscured by hypothesis‑driven designs (Liamputtong, 2007). While qualitative entrepreneurship research has gained visibility over the past two decades (Kibler et al., 2025), there remain calls to strengthen cumulative qualitative theorizing and to move beyond stand‑alone empirical models (Van Burg et al., 2022; Meyer and Tegtmeier, 2025).

This Special Issue responds to these debates by positioning entrepreneurship at the margins as an empirical site for qualitative theory‑building. Rather than treating entrepreneurship as a bounded domain, the Special Issue approaches it as a mode of organizing through which core concerns in organization studies, such as power, inequality, agency, legitimacy, and meaning‑making can be revisited and extended. In doing so, the Special Issue builds directly on ongoing conversations within Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management concerning reflexivity, lived experience, and the production of situated knowledge.

By foregrounding lived experience as an analytic entry point, the Special Issue invites theoretically generative, methodologically reflexive, and contextually grounded contributions that conceptualize marginality as an analytical lens rather than merely a setting. Overall, Doing Entrepreneurship at the Margins aims to advance a more inclusive and analytically robust understanding of entrepreneurship as organizing, while remaining closely aligned with QROM’s intellectual agenda.

List of Topic Areas

Entrepreneurship as organizing under conditions of marginalization.
Lived experience and everyday practices of entrepreneurs at the margins.
Marginality as an analytical lens for qualitative theory‑building
Power, inequality, and access in entrepreneurial organizing.
Informal, community‑based, and non‑market entrepreneurial activity.
Gendered, racialized, Indigenous, and migrant entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurship in Global South and under‑researched contexts.
Legitimacy, stigma, and boundary work in marginalized entrepreneurship.
Resourcefulness, bricolage, and survival strategies under constraint.
Care, affect, ethics, and relational practices in entrepreneurial organizing.
Methodological challenges and innovations in researching entrepreneurship in marginalized populations.

Submissions Information

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