Empowerment and Emancipation in Entrepreneurship: - Towards a 'Change - Creator' Perspective

Entrepreneurship has been argued to play a significant role in driving change and profoundly impacts society. It is widely recognised as a catalyst for human development as well as fostering empowerment and emancipation, particularly among marginalised and oppressed individuals. The research stream examining entrepreneurship's transformative potential expresses ambitious goals that go beyond wealth creation, thereby generating important contributions to entrepreneurship research and broadening our understanding of entrepreneurship's change potential. However, more nuanced understandings of empowerment and emancipation in the entrepreneurial context are needed. This dissertation applies a sociologically-informed lens to create a theoretical foundation for entrepreneurial change creation, as well as for emancipatory entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial empowerment. In this way the research at hand develops a better understanding of entrepreneurship's potential to create change, in particular how entrepreneurial activity can be empowering and emancipatory. Building on the reciprocal relationship between agency and structure, this dissertation presents how entrepreneurs as transformative agents enact the structure that functions as a source of both resources as well as constraints. To create change entrepreneurs need to challenge oppressive constraints; and this calls for a critical understanding of relevant structures in society that enable entrepreneurs to engage in emancipatory and empowering action. The three essays in this dissertation each provide a different angle on entrepreneurship as change creation. The first essay lays the foundation for further research by providing a conceptual account of empowerment and emancipation in the entrepreneurship context this work explores their distinctions and shows through an illustrative example how they apply in an entrepreneurial context. The second essay empirically investigates the empowerment of late-career women entrepreneurs who face disempowering discourses of age, gender, and entrepreneurialism. Here, interviewees' narratives reveal empowered women who acknowledge society's expectations. The third essay reminds us that entrepreneurship must neither always be emancipatory nor always culminate in positive change within society but, instead, can generate further constraints, for example in form of ecological or social harm. Therefore, it is paramount that entrepreneurs engage in responsible action, and this essay develops a theoretical understanding of entrepreneurial responsibility by conceptualising it as an ethical dualism. Change requires more than the pursuit of mundane activities. To be change creators entrepreneurs must command a revolutionary spirit, disrupting the status quo not merely for the sake of creating novel models for revenue generation, but for achieving meaningful change that improves people's lives and contributes to more equal and just societies. This, then, is the fulcrum of entrepreneurial empowerment and emancipatory entrepreneurship.