Barefoot entrepreneurs

Abstract

This article makes a contribution to critical entrepreneurship studies through exploring ‘barefoot’ entrepreneur[ ing], i.e. the entrepreneurial practices and narratives of individuals who live primarily in marginal, poor and excluded places and contexts. Drawing on Max-Neef’s barefoot economics and a methodology based on the authoring and sharing of microstorias, the article asks how agents in deprived areas of Chile, Argentina, Zimbabwe and Ghana undertake entrepreneur[ing] from the margins or ‘periphery’. The article challenges us to seek better explanations for how these individuals apply their entrepreneurial practices, discourses, (social) creativity and novel organizational skills to maintain communal, organizational, familial and personal wellbeing. We conclude that their imaginary, their narratives and their overcoming of very real challenges as we encounter them through these microstorias, question the predominant conceptualization of entrepreneurship. We are emboldened to think again about ‘who is the entrepreneur?’ (Gartner, 1988) and what really are the principles and values that should be associated with the concept, the organization and the identities of agents involved.