Hina Hashim

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.

The role of entrepreneurship in alleviating poverty has been extensively researched by entrepreneurship researchers and policy makers. The focus of this research has mostly been in the context of business, for example, the links between value creation leading and economic poverty amelioration. We believe that poverty is multidimensional and requires attention to detail. Similarly, we argue that entrepreneurship is more than an engine for economic outcomes; rather it is a process for socioeconomic value creation and change. Therefore, we approach entrepreneurship as a verb – ‘entrepreneuring’, an unfolding value process which points at the inherent processual character of entrepreneurship. We argue that entrepreneuring enables the context of poverty by creating different values. To understand its nuances, we explore the concept of ‘value’ in entrepreneuring that offers a means of escaping poverty. To do so, we conducted a qualitative narrative study of entrepreneurs in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, in an impoverished part of northern Pakistan. This article initially reviews literature about entrepreneurship and poverty. Next, we propose a conceptual framework to understand how and why entrepreneuring happens in the context of poverty, and who is involved. Finally, we provide a theoretical framework as to how entrepreneuring creates values that allow individuals to enable the context of poverty.

Entrepreneurship is often considered a male-gendered concept, and carries masculine connotations. However, the importance of women entrepreneurs and their contribution to the economy has recently been realized. Nonetheless, there is limited research about female entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship in the developing countries context. This paper challenges the implicit masculinism of the traditional entrepreneurship research, and aims to explore the enablers and constraints of female social entrepreneurship within the context of a developing country. Our theoretical focus is based on institutional and feminist perspectives, thus developing logic through reconciling predictions from these two competing theories. This integration contributes by offering novel insights about social entrepreneurship. Utilising an interpretive qualitative research approach, data from in-depth interviews with ten female social entrepreneurs of KP, Pakistan were analyzed using thematic analysis. Empirically, we identify and discuss a number of interesting and explanatory themes affecting female entrepreneurship such as “women empowerment, patriarchal culture, role of culture and societal norms, religious extremism and terrorism, forced entrepreneurs, change creators, unique institutional constraints, institutional corruption and security issues”. The findings highlight female entrepreneurs’ struggle for sustainability, and explain how this occurs. The paper also provides an interesting insight into how context determines social entrepreneurship in KP, Pakistan.