Moving with the trouble: How vulnerability and critical hope enable reckoning with complicity in entrepreneurial initiatives

Abstract

Entrepreneurial initiatives aiming to transform organizations from the bottom up are often complicit with the power structures they seek to change, reproducing the old while trying to cultivate the new. To unleash the transformative potential of these initiatives, it is crucial to better understand how workers can productively reckon with complicity and how this reckoning drives the entrepreneurial process. We address these questions through a longitudinal, qualitative, single-case study in a private contemporary art museum in Russia, where museum workers strive to create a more inclusive and politicized organization. Drawing on research by social justice education scholars, we unfold how vulnerability and critical hope—here as affective orientations—enable workers to sense and address complicity in their entrepreneurial activities. We develop a process model that theorizes the interplay between these affective orientations and links them to the expansion or contraction of entrepreneurial activities and their reckoning with complicity. The study contributes to the surging interest in vulnerability and hope within entrepreneurship studies while providing new insights into how entrepreneurs remain affected by the contrary effects of their own efforts, channeling these experiences into imaginative actions toward different futures.