Abstract
In this paper we explore the intentional use of entrepreneurial agency by microbusinesses to construct a brighter future for constrained places. We draw on agency and performativity to highlight the transformative potential of entrepreneurial action in reimaging an economically marginal UK coastal town. Inspired by one author’s experience of establishing a food business in the town, our approach combines ethnographic and autoethnographic methods including qualitative interviews, reflective diaries and field observations. Analysis was iterative and leveraged our dual positions inside and outside the community, offering a methodological advantage for longitudinally examining entrepreneurial agency in context. Our findings show that, rather than context and structures shaping entrepreneurial agency, microbusinesses play an active role in shaping their constrained context. Through a mix of individual, and collective and what we term ‘aggregate’ agency – the informal yet purposeful collective assemblage of microbusiness action – they exert influence on their environment. Through a lens of performativity, we expose how microbusiness contributions to local, social and economic development are not incidental byproducts of entrepreneurial actions; rather, owners start-up with explicit social intentions and use their individual, collective and aggregate agency purposefully to signal hopeful futures for left-behind places.