Spiritual bricolage among women entrepreneurs: reframing adversity

This study explores how women entrepreneurs within a resource-constrained context of Ethiopia utilize spiritual resources and spiritual bricolage in their entrepreneurial endeavours. Drawing on 52 life-story interviews, we find that by engaging in spiritual bricolage, women entrepreneurs reconstruct the meanings of risk, resources, constraints, and legitimacy, thereby maintaining persistence in the face of adversity. We demonstrate that this entrepreneurial reframing operates as a critical connecting mechanism between spiritual bricolage and sustained entrepreneurial motivation. Further, we identify three strategies for engaging with spiritual resources that can either facilitate or hinder entrepreneurial reframing: adventurous sourcing, diligent embedding, and relational anchoring. This study advances the bricolage and entrepreneurial motivation literatures and offers practical insights for supporting women entrepreneurs in economically constrained settings.