“If I Accomplish Nothing Else but Hope, That Will be Enough”: The Ethics and Morality of Market-Based Hope in Illness Entrepreneurship

Abstract How do entrepreneurs embody and enact hope as a motor for ethical agency—agency that builds one’s own and others’ capacities and capabilities to overcome a painful present? This study puts hope at the center of theorizing around the activities of entrepreneurs who leverage it both as a way to sketch a new life for themselves and to sell it to others. Through the case of illness entrepreneurs—recovery coaches for those suffering from chronic illnesses—we observe the moral struggles involved when hope becomes framed within the logic of the market. Recovery coaches at once embody hope (as formerly sick people who have recovered), neatly package and sell it (as entrepreneurs), and manifest it (opening up new spaces of possibility for themselves). The work involved in balancing these threads requires constant realignment of the entrepreneurs’ own hopes for a new life and their care for others. We show how, through these moral struggles, hope opens up new spaces of possibility and imbues people—both entrepreneurs and their clients—with the agency to move toward those new horizons. Conceptualizing the complex entanglements of hope, care, and ethical agency, our study represents a foray into recent calls for assembling and theorizing the ‘architecture of hope’ in organization and entrepreneurship studies. We also discuss whether this entrepreneurship, balancing hope and care to enable ethical agency, opens up new ways of understanding morality and agency in market contexts.