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Introduction
Entrepreneurship in most existing literature is predominantly conceived as an economic phenomenon, exclusively reserved for a select group of individuals and limited to certain privileged contexts and settings. As such, the literature continues to show very little sensitivity to contextual factors that influence entrepreneurial activities (Gaddefors and Anderson, 2017; Newth, 2018) and to the wide inter-dependency between the social and economic spheres of everyday life. Rehn and Taalas (2004) suggest that we examine the phenomenon as it is actually practised in everyday life, and to look beyond certain delimiting specificities – that is, specific actors, settings and definitions, by locating daily entrepreneurial activities in the lived experiences of ordinary people, or what is known as “mundane entrepreneurship”.
In this paper, our position fares well with scholars who call for new ways of locating entrepreneurship within society and identifying it as an activity that emanates from everyday interactions between social actors and their world: an activity that can be essentially understood as an endless process of social change and transformation (e.g. Calás et al., 2009; Grant and Perren, 2002; Tedmanson et al., 2012). In carrying out a “focussed ethnography” using “participant observation” and “informal interviews” to explore the lived experiences of Palestinian women street vendors, our goal is to examine and understand how the mundane entrepreneurial practices of these women constitute a basis for resisting their marginalisation and impoverishment. In regards, we tend towards using “entrepreneuring [verb]” to challenge current theorising and to draw attention to a broader range of activities that display entrepreneurial elements aimed at generating not only economic benefits, but also diverse socio-political outcomes (see Al-Dajani and Marlow, 2013; Rindova et al., 2009).
Using Michel de Certeau’s notion of everyday practices, the aforementioned goal tends to accentuate the mundaneity (or everydayness) of entrepreneurship, as well as uncover the subtle resistance potential submerged in everyday entrepreneurial practices. Mindful of the need for clarity, the term “resistance” is not taken to pertain to long-term group struggle against enduring conditions of colonialism and slavery, but to “everyday forms of resistance” – a concept inspired by Michel de Certeau (1984) and Michel Foucault (1972, 1978) – representing small, ordinary acts of defiance by which individuals and groups express their dissatisfaction with the status...