Entrepreneurialism as an Emancipatory Pathway for At-Risk Groups

The growing recognition of societal grand challenges, and the belief that new organizations can play a direct role in helping to solve them (George et al., 2016), has led to a surge of new ways of understanding, enacting and promoting entrepreneurship. This has become more prominent in social contexts facing challenging or threatening life circumstances, where individuals, organisations and communities are increasingly using entrepreneurial activity to mitigate, alleviate or overcome social problems.
This emancipatory view of entrepreneurship has been welcomed by scholars and policy-makers alike, since prosocial entrepreneurial action, as "efforts to bring about new economic, social, institutional, and cultural environments through the actions of an individual or group of individuals" (Rindova et al., 2009, p.477), can potentially lead to positive societal change. In their view, entrepreneurial projects are indeed emancipatory efforts, whereby individuals make use of the entrepreneurial toolkit "to disrupt the status quo and change their position in the social order in which they are embedded and, on occasion, the social order itself' (p.478).