Call for Papers

Call for short papers (pdf)

Any economic landscape is filled with, buttressed, and given color by the “ninety-nine percenters”: everyday entrepreneurs who tend to be overlooked because they emphatically do not found “high-growth, technology-enabled, venture capital-backed businesses that do big initial public offerings, [and] make billionaires of their founders” (Welter et al., 2016, p. 312). Often operating in the informal economy (Webb et al., 2013; Williams & Shahid, 2016), these everyday entrepreneurs are sometimes overlooked accidentally because they are completely innocuous, while at other times observers look away deliberately because onlookers find their activities ill-fitting with personal or dominant societal values. In each case, mechanisms of invisibility (Trethewey, 1999) and stigmatization (Ashforth & Kreiner, 1999) render their entrepreneurial activities less visible to formal institutional actors.

Everyday entrepreneurs are overlooked, for example, because they (a) operate in the informal economy and go unrecorded as they are not registered; (b) belong to (socially) stigmatized groups or work in stigmatized industries; (c) make a living in the Global South in far-flung parts of global value chains; (d) perform their work domestically, in closed social circles, or in cooperatives; or (e) work in places or at times that do not fit the regimented lives of ordinary citizens. Importantly, overlooked entrepreneurs are not confined to the Global South or informal economies, as they are equally present in Western and developed contexts (Nason et al., 2025). Most ventures in high-income countries are small-scale, modest enterprises, with the majority of them never going to pitch to venture capitalists and having no interest in achieving high growth (Aldrich & Ruef, 2018; Naudé, 2024). These countless small business owners, side-hustlers, and self-employed individuals engage in everyday entrepreneurial activities that sustain their local economies, yet remain theoretically marginalized (Coffman et al., 2025; Smolka et al., 2025).

The fact that the “ninety-nine percenters” are overlooked is often framed as a—supposedly innocent—act of omission: entrepreneurship scholars are simply drawn to the remaining “one percenters” because high-growth, venture capital-backed technology ventures are just more attention-worthy. After all, as is the case in any game, most of the attention goes to the winners. But things are not that simple. We deliberately frame “overlooking” as an agentic and sometimes perfidious act of commission, as it involves a range of deliberately wielded mechanisms to obfuscate everyday entrepreneurial activity. It can even be seen as a form of institutional work (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006) that maintains existing power structures while denying agency to those at the margins.

We thus call for submissions shedding light on deliberate forms of overlooking such as (a) outsourcing to independent entrepreneurs at the bottom of the supply chain to avoid social, legal, and moral responsibilities by downstream actors; (b) preserving “purity” by not engaging with entrepreneurs from a different faith, caste, or social class; (c) deliberately destroying marketplaces where overlooked entrepreneurs dwell by rezoning or repurposing physical spaces of doing business; (d) looking away from business practices that are hard to ban or roll up for social reasons, such as selling opium in Central Asia or khat in Eastern Africa; and (e) ostracizing entrepreneurs rather than their clientele for offering stigmatized services such as undertaking, manual scavenging, and sex work. Understanding both the structural forces that render entrepreneurs invisible and the agentic responses through which those entrepreneurs create alternative spaces for economic activity is worth drawing attention to.

The consequences of being overlooked can be grave for those involved. They typically are denied access to formal resources like public debt financing, cannot draw on institutional recognition or support, frequently are denied access to courts and arbitrage, operate in institutional voids with formal structures failing to provide basic governance mechanisms (Mair & Marti, 2009), find it difficult to express voice and upward influence, and oftentimes work and live in illegality. In other words, they cannot play by the rules, because the rules often do not even apply to them. To cope with the consequences of being overlooked, these everyday entrepreneurs tend to counterorganize, often joining or inventing innovative organizational forms that help them consolidate and leverage whatever scarce means they have at their disposal (Baker & Nelson, 2005).

We therefore call for submissions that expand our knowledge on overlooked organizational forms like (a) informal credit and savings circles to pool resources, for example, in rural Iran; (b) solidarity funds and informal health and unemployment insurance schemes for those who are priced out of the formal insurance market, for example, among the self-employed in Western Europe; (c) cooperatives and burden-sharing organizational forms, for example, among Spanish olive growers or French communal wine farmers; (d) collective (political) action groups to plead with local politicians and governments for basic commercial facilities, for example, in the mega-markets of Western Africa; (e) trust-based, embedded ties as quasi-organizations, for example, among footwear entrepreneurs in the Italian Marche industrial district; and (f) informal coordination networks to absorb larger or more complex orders among colocated microenterprises, for example, textile workers in South Africa. Such communal and collective responses represent legitimate modes of economic organizing that challenge individualistic assumptions in entrepreneurship scholarship (Bacq et al., 2025).
Paradoxically, even though overlooked, everyday entrepreneurs tend to draw only scant attention from institutional custodians, they can contribute to institutional change (Seo & Creed, 2002). Through their persistent investment in the use of alternative channels for commerce and social exchange, they tend to build institutional “reserve circuits” that complement or bypass formal institutional structures.

We thus enthusiastically encourage research into how overlooked, everyday entrepreneurs (a) reclaim and rebuild destroyed commercial spaces after police clearance operations, for example, in Manila, the Philippines, or Kutupalong, Bangladesh; (b) create alternative modes of organizing and financing, for example, business credit systems among independent traders in Lagos; (c) reconfigure value chains from below, for example, self-applied quality standards used by informal mineral miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo; (d) enhance working levels of ethnic and cultural pluralism, for example, in Malaysian pasar malam/night markets, among Muslim, Indian, and Chinese microentrepreneurs; and (e) soften stigma through normalization and exposure, for example, among Dalit waste pickers in Bangalore, who are increasingly seen as recycling workers rather than urban scavengers.

In this sub-theme, we want to encourage exchange between scholars from different specializations within the broader management field (e.g., entrepreneurship, organization theory, sociology) using a variety of methodological approaches (e.g., ethnographies, interventions, narrative inquiry, participatory action research) and theoretical frameworks (e.g., social identity theory, feminist theory, endemic and grounded theories). We are also open to both empirical and conceptual contributions. We especially encourage submissions that engage seriously with the mundane, that resist romanticizing or even pathologizing everyday entrepreneurship, and that critically examine whether the “rules of the game” of scholarship in entrepreneurship itself capture the realities of entrepreneurs in most parts of the world adequately.
 

• Aldrich, H. E., & Ruef, M. (2018). Unicorns, gazelles, and other distractions on the way to understanding real entrepreneurship in the United States. Academy of Management Perspectives, 32(4), 458–472.
• Ashforth, B. E., & Kreiner, G. E. (1999). “How can you do it?”: Dirty work and the challenge of constructing a positive identity. Academy of Management Review, 24(3), 413–434.
• Bacq, S., Smolka, K. M., Slade Shantz, A. F., & Heugens, P. P. M. A. R. (Eds.). (2025). Necessity entrepreneurship: Getting beyond the binary. Emerald Publishing Limited.
• Baker, T., & Nelson, R. E. (2005). Creating something from nothing: Resource construction through entrepreneurial bricolage. Administrative Science Quarterly, 50(3), 329–366.
• Coffman, C. D., Cottle, G. W., & Sunny, S. A. (2025). Leaving necessity entrepreneurship behind: How entrepreneurs actualize desirable futures. Academy of Management Review.
• Lawrence, T. B., & Suddaby, R. (2006). Institutions and institutional work. In S. R. Clegg, C. Hardy, T. B. Lawrence, & W. R. Nord (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of organization studies (2nd ed., pp. 215–254). SAGE Publications. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781848608030.n7
• Mair, J., & Marti, I. (2009). Entrepreneurship in and around institutional voids: A case study from Bangladesh. Journal of Business Venturing, 24(5), 419–435.
• Nason, R., Muñoz, P., Haugh, H., Welter, F., George, G., & Prashantham, S. (2025). Recalibrating entrepreneurship research: A call to decolonize and embrace the pluralism of entrepreneurial activity. Journal of Management Studies.
• Naudé, W. (2024). Entrepreneurship is dangerously obsessed with growth and incompatible with current visions of a post-growth society. IZA – Institute of Labor Economics.
• Smolka, K. M., Bacq, S., & Heugens, P. P. M. A. R. (2025). Rethinking necessity entrepreneurship beyond binaries and toward communalism: A commentary on Coffman et al.’s “Leaving necessity entrepreneurship behind”. Academy of Management Review.
• Trethewey, A. (1999). Disciplined bodies: Women’s embodied identities at work. Organization Studies, 20(3), 423–450.
• Webb, J. W., Bruton, G. D., Tihanyi, L., & Ireland, R. D. (2013). Research on entrepreneurship in the informal economy: Framing a research agenda. Journal of Business Venturing, 28(5), 598–614.
• Welter, F., Baker, T., Audretsch, D. B., & Gartner, W. B. (2017). Everyday entrepreneurship—a call for entrepreneurship research to embrace entrepreneurial diversity. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 41(3), 311–321.
• Williams, C. C., & Shahid, M. S. (2016). Informal entrepreneurship and institutional theory: Explaining the varying degrees of (in)formalization of entrepreneurs in Pakistan. Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, 28(1–2), 1–25.