Entrepreneuring in structurally constrained context : nuancing agency and privilege in poverty

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Abstract
This thesis explores entrepreneurial agency in the context of structural constraint. While entrepreneurship is often framed as a pathway to empowerment and mobility, such framings obscure how entrepreneurial processes unfold when multidimensional poverty, patriarchy, and institutional fragility shape everyday possibilities. The thesis examines how entrepreneurial agency is enacted, negotiated, and sustained when legitimacy and resources are uncertain, and how context itself is co-produced through these everyday practices. The research builds on an interpretive and practice-oriented design, grounded in narrative fieldwork from Pakistan. Drawing on several rounds of field engagement between 2017 and 2021, the thesis investigates how individuals sustain their emerging enterprises within the moral and social context of poverty. The role of structural constraint in entrepreneuring is discussed across four interconnected papers that I) explore how individuals in poverty engage in entrepreneuring and construct value within constrained conditions; II) examine how entrepreneurs narrate and give meaning to the social aspects of their work, showing how legitimacy is negotiated through storytelling; III) investigate how women act within the combined conditions of poverty and patriarchy, tracing the practices that allow them to continue and subtly reshape local norms; and IV) develop understanding of relational privilege, showing how education, family support, gendered positioning, economic capital, and social networks shape entrepreneurial possibilities and sustain certain forms of legitimacy within poverty. The thesis develops the concept of nuanced agency to describe how entrepreneuring unfolds through small, adaptive, and relational acts that sustain entrepreneurial life within constraint while gradually reshaping it. It also develops the concept of relational privilege to explain how uneven access to legitimacy and support differentiates entrepreneurial agency within poverty. Together, these ideas advance contextual and practice-based understandings of entrepreneuring by showing that context is not a backdrop but a co-produced field of relationships, expectations, and moral orders.

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