PDS 4: Inclusive Entrepreneurship 1 

Federica Fusaro

Caught in the middle: Navigating competing ecosystem expectations around inclusive entrepreneurship​

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Entrepreneurship is increasingly seen as a path to inclusion, with intermediaries (e.g., incubators)supporting marginalized groups’ access to resources. Yet, intermediaries themselves depend on resources from broader ecosystems. When embedded in both “inclusion-focused” and“mainstream” ecosystems, intermediaries may face competing expectations from distinct inclusionary approaches through entrepreneurship. Through a two-year ethnography of a French incubator for marginalized groups, we find that the intermediary’s efforts to appease tensions arising from its ecosystem repositioning inadvertently led to exclusionary dynamics. We contribute to scholarship on inclusive entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial ecosystems and intermediaries, highlighting the need for diverse inclusionary outcomes and support mechanisms.

BingBing Ge

Quiet Echoes: Methodological Discussions of Researching the Ge Trade Family​

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This research makes a methodological contribution to business history discussions in areas where a lack of archives leads to a lack of understanding. We investigate the business history of the trade family Ge, a significant component of a nationally famous trade group Dongting Shangbang (洞庭商帮) from the Ming dynasty (1368) in China. Through methodological bricolage, we collected and interpreted data using the Ge family’s surviving family genealogies (3rd edition, Year 1673; and 4th edition, Year 1924), oral history, field trips, and documentation. This research discusses the methodological implications of researching the less-studied contexts through family records and bricolage. We exemplify and contribute to the discussion of the imperatives of expanding business history research methodologically, as well as reveal key insights into Chinese family business history.

Seungah Lee

Chasing Dreams, Managing Disappointment: How Narrative Buffering and Purpose Decoupling Sustain Aspirational Ideals in Structurally Unequal Contexts

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Organizations frequently embrace ideals such as inclusion, empowerment, and innovation, even in settings where structural inequalities make these goals difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. This paper examines how such commitments are enacted and managed by an intermediary organization that seeks to support and facilitate access to opportunities on behalf of others, particularly in stratified institutional contexts where specific groups are systematically excluded or marginalized. Drawing on an ethnographic study of an accelerator in the United Arab Emirates, this paper examines how the widely valorized ideology of “entrepreneurship for all” is enacted in a structurally unequal context. The paper identifies two mechanisms that help the organization navigate this tension: narrative buffering, where culturally familiar and institutionally valorized scripts are employed to normalize structural barriers and recast exclusion as an individual growth opportunity, and purpose decoupling, which involves the internal reframing of organizational goals and success towards more abstracted aims such as mindset and culture development. This process is theorized as aspirational retainment, a dynamic in which commitments to social ideals such as inclusion are sustained through narrative and interpretive work, even as material access remains structurally constrained. While this process enables the organization to maintain coherence and sustain engagement among staff and participants even in the face of structural barriers, it comes at a cost. It can inadvertently suppress systemic reflexivity, thereby normalizing exclusion, reinforcing structural inequalities, and excluding the very people it aims to support and empower.​

Florence Villesèche

Delivering on the Promise of Entrepreneurship by Thinking Beyond Limiting Economic Assumptions:
An Extension of Lewis et al.’s “A Promise Not (Yet) Fulfilled”​

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In this commentary, we strengthen the potential impact of Lewis and colleagues’ contribution by elevating it beyond the traditional economic assumptions embedded in the opportunity–discovery perspective (Shane & Venkataraman, 2000).

First, we argue that their commitment to discovery theory leads them to downplay the role of wealth inequality in the existence of underserved needs. In response, we expand Lewis et al.’s (2024) framework by pointing to more sustainable solutions for advancing a more inclusive form of capitalism—moving beyond the typical economic preoccupation with markets as self-regulating systems and the reduction of information asymmetries as the primary equilibrating mechanism.