What are we doing here?! Deprivation, family manoeuvres and a microbusiness ‘on the edge’

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper explores the living experience of a start-up enterprise as the author and co-founders navigate their deprived community context. Using a Polanyian lens on ‘householding’, it examines how they seek a hopeful future for themselves and their marginalized community through their entrepreneuring. Autoethnographic analysis explores experiences of investing themselves in the deprived UK community, from the position of a researcher living and entrepreneuring there. It exposes the slow processes through which the family temporarily and inadvertently comes to serve the business and starts to disembed from society. It identifies sets of just-in-time manoeuvrings and everyday repairs used to restore balance and keep the family re-embedding, while efforts to embed the business come at the expense of ‘householding’. By examining living experience from within a microbusiness start-up ‘on the edge’, the paper helps to critically re-think how entrepreneuring by people in deprived places is understood and experienced, with mixed consequences over time.