Liminal Entrepreneuring: The Creative Practices of Nascent Necessity Entrepreneurs

Abstract

This paper contributes to creative entrepreneurship studies through exploring ‘liminal entrepreneuring’, i.e., the organization-creation entrepreneurial practices and narratives of individuals living in precarious conditions. Drawing on a processual approach to entrepreneurship and Turner’s liminality concept, we study the transition from un(der)employment to entrepreneurship of 50 nascent necessity entrepreneurs (NNEs) in Spain, the United Kingdom, and Ireland. The paper asks how these agents develop creative entrepreneuring practices in their efforts to overcome their condition of ‘necessity’. The analysis shows how, in their everyday liminal entrepreneuring, NNEs disassemble their identities and social positions, experiment with new relationships and alternative visions of themselves, and (re)connect with entrepreneuring ideas and practices in a new way, using imagination and organization-creation practices to reconstruct both self and context in the process. The results question and expand the notion of entrepreneuring in times of socio-economic stress.