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 paper contributes to creative entrepreneurship studies through exploring 'liminal entrepreneuring', i.e., the organization-creation entrepreneurial practices and narratives of individuals living in precarious conditions. Drawing on a processual approach to entrepreneurship and Turner's liminality concept, we study the transition from un(der)employment to entrepreneurship of 50 nascent necessity entrepreneurs (NNEs) in Spain, the United Kingdom, and Ireland. The paper asks how these agents develop creative

This paper discusses the corporate city and the way it structures the experience of its inhabitants. The corporate city is seen here as the embodiment of power relationships of a distinctly postmodern nature, a means to preserve and promote hegemonic and homogenising discourses like globalisation and consumerism. Corporate design and architecture embody specific kinds of relationships, experiences and perceptions of space and place. We will suggest that the corporate city is homogenised, lacking richness of civic space, not just in terms of form but in terms of structures (both, spatial structures and the kind of social structures/interactions they invite). The activities of a group of traceurs practicing parkour are described and their philosophy is explained as a metaphor for active participation and dialectic relationship between the actual and the possible structures of the world. Richness of experience, strengthening of community, variety of activity, openness and possibility are irrelevant (actually, inimical) to the corporate forces that shape our cities today. However, as the experience of parkour demonstrates, extreme artforms of 'urban activism' but also, more importantly, human agency and the performativity of the everyday, are capable of transforming the otherwise alienating non-places, to grounds of possibility, creativity and civic identity.

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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