While quantitative, positivist approaches have traditionally dominated entrepreneurship research, they often fail to capture the lived experiences of marginalized entrepreneurs who remain underrepresented in scholarship despite their significant contributions to local economies. Qualitative research is better suited to exploring the meanings, practices, and organizing processes that hypothesis-driven designs typically obscure.
This special issue invites qualitative research that examines entrepreneurship at the margins as a site for theory-building. The focus encompasses marginalized entrepreneurs across gender, race, migration, disability, age, and Indigenous contexts, particularly in Global South settings where research access challenges are compounded by institutional barriers and epistemic dominance of Global North perspectives.
Contributions should treat marginality as an analytical lens rather than merely a research setting, bringing together reflexive scholarship that advances cumulative qualitative understanding of entrepreneurship as organizing while exploring core themes of power, inequality, agency, legitimacy, and meaning-making.