This paper makes a contribution to critical entrepreneurship studies through exploring 'barefoot’ entrepreneur[ing], i.e., the entrepreneurial practices and narratives of individuals who live primarily in marginal, poor and excluded places and contexts. Drawing on Max-Neef’s barefoot economics and a methodology based on the authoring and sharing of microstorias, the article asks how agents in deprived areas of Chile, Argentina, Zimbabwe and Ghana undertake entrepreneur[ing] from the margins or ‘periphery’. The paper challenges us to seek better explanations for how these individuals apply their entrepreneurial practices, discourses, (social) creativity, and novel organisational skills to maintain communal, organisational, familial and personal wellbeing. We conclude that their imaginary, their narratives, and their overcoming of very real challenges as we encounter them through these microstorias, question the predominant conceptualisation of entrepreneurship. We are emboldened to think again about ‘who is the entrepreneur?’ (Gartner, 1988) and what really are the principles and values that should be associated with the concept, the organisation, and the identities of agents involved

This article, based on ethnographic research conducted with people in Brazil and Zimbabwe, reports organization/management experiences and narratives of poor and marginalized people of the south. South embodies the organizational struggle, survival skills and resilience of marginal and urban outcasts that inhabit inner cities, townships and slums. The article employs the notion of kukiya-favela organization, i.e. the organization of the excluded, to engage with them in order to: give voice to those who dwell at the margins of organization studies; make their narratives part of a subject that retains an elitist position; and re-address the Eurocentric management/organization discourse that imposes a legitimate justification for exploiting, excluding and labelling them as organization-less and urban outcasts of society. The article concludes that despite their marginality and exclusion they are able to construct local diverse meaningful (organizational) identities that can represent them with dignity in their struggle for justice and basic human rights. Finally, it reflects on the contribution this has for us, in organization studies, by opening new spaces for the study of organization[al] (lives) not from positions of ‘above’ or ‘against’ but ‘with’ ( Gergen, 2003 : 454).

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Finding conditions that are conducive to creative practice is a perennial concern in today’s accelerating world, but temporal theories that might shed light onto this problematic still lag behind the day-to-day practicalities of actually doing creative work. This chapter shows that clock time, with its realist focus on the ordered succession of past, present, and future, is inadequate as a basis for understanding the ways in which creative practice is temporally resourced. Drawing on the idealist philosophies of Bergson, Heidegger, and Mead, an alternative becoming temporality characterized by the timefulness of interpenetrating pasts and futures is elaborated. Rather than simply protecting pockets of time for innovation, timefulness evokes mindfulness, carefulness, and playfulness as actions to be nurtured if creativity is to flourish.

This paper examines the generative interplay between learning and playing in managing and organizing by taking a performative approach that theorizes learning/playing as an assemblage in which playing and learning emerge as co-evolving processes in practice. Addressing the methodological challenges associated with this performative approach, the learning/playing assemblage is probed using travelling concepts, which attend to the dynamic movements rather than the stabilities of organizing, functioning as proposed by Vygotsky as both a research tool and an emergent result of research. This notion of 'travelling concepts' is developed empirically by engaging with Mead's 'sociality', which he defined as the simultaneous experience of being several things at once. Three interweaving strands of sociality-relational, spatial, and temporal-are elaborated in the context of travelling with and through four artisan food production sites, each of which sought to engage differently with the aesthetics and functionality of the food we consume.