Entrepreneurial Becomings: Transformation, Crisis, and Aspiration in the Global Rise of Microentrepreneurship

ABSTRACT In the context of global economic and political crises, microentrepreneurship enjoys popularity both as a solution to poverty and as an empowering lifestyle based on values of independence and flexibility. While education, training, and engagement in entrepreneurship may have significant effects on self‐making, social and economic change from entrepreneurial formation remains ambivalent. In this introductory essay, we set out how becoming an entrepreneur is an unfinished project in the lives of economic subjects, entailing practices actively tested, reconfigured as adaptive responses to individual and collective crises and aspirations, and conceived as related to an anticipated and critically assessed immediate future self.