PDS 5: Inclusive Entrepreneurship 2
Stephanie Daher
“Not The Laws, but the Movements Behind Them”: Indigenous Women’s Movements and Business and Human Rights at the Marcha Das Mulheres Indígenas​
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Management research in the emergent area of Business and Human Rights (BHR) has acknowledged the need to understand community and grassroots organizing processes in relation to states and firms. Recent work in BHR has urged engagement with grassroots organizing perspectives, which have developed the tools to understand organizing processes, particularly in relation to the organization and dynamics of social movements. Building on this emergent and interdisciplinary dialogue, the current paper examines the Indigenous women’s movement in Brazil to understand how this Indigenous social movement navigates BHR in its relations with state and market actors. We draw on ethnographic data from the Marcha das Mulheres Indígenas (Indigenous Women’s March), examining four distinct approaches to BHR and theorizing the relation between those approaches: redress, negotiation, mediation, and entrepreneurship. We contribute to the emerging field of BHR within management research by better understanding the grassroots organizing approaches by which BHR is taken up and refashioned in practice, and the forms of agency and value orientations that underlie those distinct approaches.
Shelby Matevich
Entrepreneurship and transformative change in a biodiversity crisis​
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Biodiversity is declining at dangerous and unprecedented rates around the world.
Leading conservation institutions are calling for transformative change in conservation action and across technological, economic, and social factors—including paradigms, goals, and values. Entrepreneurship seems a likely ally for this task given its recognition as an agent of change—however, research at the nexus of entrepreneurship and biodiversity conservation is scarce. This theoretical contribution reflects adjacent literatures of social, environmental, and sustainable entrepreneurship for grand challenges. It places seminal entrepreneurship articles in dialogue with leading perspectives on the underlying causes of biodiversity loss, namely: disconnection from and domination over nature and people; concentration of power and wealth; and prioritization of short-term, individual, and material gains. It reflects on where entrepreneurship already makes meaningful contributions toward these challenges, where it falls short of transformative potential, and how an integration of the conservation social sciences can fill that gap. As researchers seek to articulate entrepreneurship’s role in addressing grand challenges, the conservation context may reveal new pathways—both for understanding entrepreneurship, as well as achieving transformative biodiversity action.
Léna Prouchet
Trapped in the Model: Ideological Intermediaries and the Persistence of Failed Entrepreneurship in the Peruvian Amazon​
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Why do entrepreneurship-for-development programs persist, even when they consistently fail to deliver lasting benefits and when practitioners recognize these failures? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Peruvian Amazon, we investigate how development intermediaries sustain belief in failing entrepreneurial models. We identify a recurring deflection cycle composed of three ideological traps—framing failure as progress, overstating isolated successes, and attributing failure to community deficiencies. These traps do more than justify poor outcomes: they constitute ideological work that enables practitioners to reconcile failure with their development ideals, allowing the ideology of entrepreneurialism to persist not in spite of failure, but through it. This paper foregrounds the role of intermediaries as ideological infrastructure. Positioned between funders and communities, practitioners translate, absorb, and stabilize externally imposed models at the point of practical friction. We show that their belief in entrepreneurship is not merely cognitive, but affective and moral, expressed through mundane everyday routines. This helps explain why recognition of failure does not lead to reform. Instead of prompting structural change, failure is reinterpreted through ideological frames that foreclose learning and legitimize persistence. Our findings bridge scholarship on entrepreneurship as a tool for poverty alleviation and research on entrepreneurialism as ideology by theorizing how entrepreneurial ideals are operationalized, defended, and naturalized in everyday practice. We argue that the three ideological traps form a durable infrastructure that displaces accountability and masks systemic misalignment, sustaining models that fail those they intend to serve. Rather than viewing development failure as a technical problem of “scaling what works,” our study highlights the need for ideological reflexivity. Only by interrogating the meaning systems practitioners use to make sense of failure can we begin to imagine alternative, community-defined approaches to entrepreneurship that move beyond the cycle of imposition, disappointment, and deflection.
Juliana Rodrigues
Enterprises for nature and biodiversity protection: Narratives of the Socio-bioeconomy in the Amazon rainforest​
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Protecting biodiversity, stopping deforestation, and restoring natural ecosystems are crucial to addressing our multiple societal and environmental crises — while supporting traditional communities that have historically safeguarded these environments. By leveraging the potential of the bioeconomy — and the influential argument of entrepreneurship in fostering development — an emerging trend focuses on developing enterprises rooted in socio-biodiversity to combine forest conservation and livelihood protection. These enterprises are characterized by robust collectives and encompass diverse activities such as agroforestry, sustainable production of non-timber forest products, traditional crafts, and community-based tourism. Recognizing that this trend features varying perspectives under a shared overarching goal, this research examines how entrepreneurship to support rainforest conservation is being framed by delving into the narratives of socio-bioeconomy enterprises in the Amazon rainforest region. Through ethnographic-informed field research conducted in urban, rural, and forest settings, the study identifies distinct narratives that convey different perspectives and principles guiding these entrepreneurial activities. The dominant narrative aligns with mainstream sustainable growth and market-driven approaches — while counter-narratives emphasize local conviviality, self-sufficiency, and bem viver — seeking to complement rather than oppose the dominant view. By exploring the intricate relationship between empirics and theories related to urgent issues, this paper contributes to emerging research on the intersections between biodiversity and business, shedding light on entrepreneurship from traditional communities’ perspectives.