Fashion Entrepreneurs’ Experiences of Hope in a Precarious Ghanaian Creative Industry

Abstract

This paper explored creative entrepreneurs’ experiences of hope in navigating precarious working conditions in the Ghanaian fashion industry. The inquiry was motivated by a mistaken belief in the existing entrepreneurial literature that successful creative entrepreneurs enjoy a comfortable lifestyle. However, the reality in the creative arts sector is that individual entrepreneurs must deal with wave after wave of tumultuous work environments caused by precarity. Emerging research reveals that issues of precarity within the fashion industry have been intensified due to the influx of substitute goods and governmental structural adjustment programs. The fashion and entrepreneurship scholarship acknowledges that several fashion entrepreneurs are ‘hustling’ to build and sustain their labels and brands in the face of difficulties. However, we discovered that rather than giving up, entrepreneurs must persevere, resilient and bounce-back. Ghanaian fashion owners focus on and theorize the most prevalent practices of navigating, coping with, and managing compounded precarity: that of hope. In this paper, we examine the ‘practical dimensions of futurity’, how precarity is worked on, and how one may become more than one presently is or was fated to be. This notion is in contrast to the precarity-induced state of paralysis caused by waiting. This paper explores the strategies, practices, and spatial dynamics of hope in the Ghanaian fashion industry. Taking a comparative and intersectional approach, we explore the practices and narratives that fashion entrepreneurs construct in such dire work conditions. This fact has implications for how we think about hope and entrepreneurship in the fashion industry. By so doing, this study contributes to the ongoing conceptual debates regarding the nature of creative work in the fashion industry. Therefore, this paper, examined two (2) research questions: (i) what are creative entrepreneurs’ experiences of precarity in the Ghanaian fashion industry? (ii) How do creative entrepreneurs cope with precarity in the Ghanaian fashion industry?