Entrepreneurship & Regional Development

Entrepreneurial (Im)mobilities: Ideas, People, and Things on the Move

The intense movement of ideas, people, and things in our contemporary world has created a compelling need to critically understand the diverse spatialities and temporalities of social change, embeddedness processes, and unfolding dynamic practices of entrepreneuring. In response, we aim to advance and expand our knowledge on what we acknowledge as entrepreneurial (im)mobilities, that is, the (in)ability and resistance of entrepreneurial ideas, people, and things to move and be moved in time and space. Accordingly, in this special issue, we seek to address entrepreneurial (im)mobilities by calling for a transdisciplinary dialogue among entrepreneurship scholars by attending to the emergence, performance and (re)production of entrepreneurial practices, forms, and contexts during these complex and demanding times.

The 21st century has introduced dramatic changes in the subject, location, and pace of global movements due to wars, human rights violations, poverty, environmental challenges, and broader lifestyle choices opened up by more accessible means of movement (Schiller and Salazar, 2013) – while paradoxically, the global prison population is on the rise (United Nations, 2024). In particular, forced displacement has taken a heavy toll, as every 3 out of 100 people on Earth have been forced to flee, forecasting more than 130 million people as of 2026 (Danish Refugee Council, 2025). Over 75.9 million of these are internally displaced (Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, 2024), and most (70%) are hosted by neighbouring countries with low and middle income (UNHCR, 2025). As ideas, people, and things move (Hannam et al., 2006), their (im)mobilities affect their environment, activities and the (im)mobilities of others (Sheller & Urry, 2006). Likewise, entrepreneurial activities have now become more complex, diversified, and geographically dispersed, with a notable increase in the number of entrepreneurs, who are refugees (Abebe, 2023; Mittermaier et al., 2023), internally displaced (Kwong et al., 2019; Al-Dajani et al., 2019), students (Nielsen & Gartner, 2017), lifestyle and commuters (Ivanycheva et al., 2024; Giménez-Nadal et al., 2020; Abreu et al., 2019), returnees (Bolzani, 2023), prisoners (Patzelt et al., 2014), and many more. They all become (im)mobile for political, environmental, and social reasons beyond purely economic motivations.

Entrepreneurship literature, especially with a particular focus on migration and context, has advanced our understanding of place and space but paid little attention to the critical role of temporalities (Lévesque & Stephan, 2020; Riaño et al., 2024) and the generative relationship between spatialities and temporalities (Verduyn, 2015). Privileging a spatial approach with assumptions like adaptation and embeddedness instead of change and transformation has led to a static view that left the field insensitive towards (im)mobilities emerging at an increasing pace and in diverse places. For instance, circular movements of cross-border entrepreneurs (Mittmasser, 2022; Smallbone & Welter, 2012; Welter et al., 2018; Riaño et al., 2024; Jones et al., 2018), of entrepreneurship in refugee camps (De La Chaux & Haugh, 2020), under temporary protection schemes (Yetkin & Tunçalp, 2024; Akçalı, 2023), of prisoners (Hwang, 2022), of lifestyle entrepreneurs (Ivanycheva et al., 2024) or via diversification (Evansluong et al., 2024)  and intergenerational succession of enterprising families (Miller et al, 2003) and of diasporas (Elo et al., 2022) are burgeoning examples that can hardly be captured without simultaneously taking temporalities as well as pertinent spatialities into account.

Given this, a more critical engagement with (im)mobilities is not just needed; it is essential in advancing our understanding of how diverse entrepreneurship practices may lead to dramatic consequences for entrepreneurial actors (Vershinina & Rodgers, 2020; Yeröz, 2019; Aygören & Nordqvist, 2015; Imas et al., 2012) as well as of social, economic, cultural, political and moral contexts (Watson, 2013; Doblinger et al., 2022, Ozasir-Kacar, 2024). We suggest a more reflexive approach to the deeply engrained onto-epistemic and ethical assumptions shaping what and how we can think of and know about matters of (im)mobilities in entrepreneurship theory and practice. We can (re)consider the formation and transformation of entrepreneurial motivations, identities, resources, processes, and ventures as highly dynamic and complex phenomena leading to increasingly diverse and hybrid subjects, value propositions and organisations. Only by critically engaging with (im)mobilities can we address the Western-centric, economic, and gender- and colour-blind models and dichotomies, i.e., including home versus host country, native versus immigrant, market versus family, opportunity-driven versus necessity-driven, structure versus agency (Tlaiss, 2019; Verduijn & Essers, 2013; Lassalle & Shaw, 2021; Ozasir-Kacar et al., 2023).

Indeed, the capacity and willingness to move cannot be taken for granted. Not all entrepreneurial actors are willing or capable of moving, and not everything can be moved easily. Notably, the movement in entrepreneurship often implies the involvement of other-than-humans as significant actors (Cnossen et al., 2024), such as animals, technologies, precious minerals, and plants traded across borders, as well as transportation and communication vehicles, ideas, money, deeds, diplomas, certificates, digital images, etc. Additionally, the organisation of (im)mobilities - human or non-human- is an entrepreneurial act. The availability of cheap flights and the dazzling nature facilitate decisions to live in another region or country for lifestyle entrepreneurs and commuters (Ivanycheva et al., 2024); the quality of inflatable boats or thousands of kilometres of lethal walk through the jungles determines the life chances and safe crossing for refugees (Colmenares, 2022). These (im)mobilities entail legal, illegal, formal and informal approaches and practices, including human and animal trafficking, smuggling, money transfers, and environmental destruction, which uncovers conflicts, violence, and dark forces in movement and settlement. These dark times point out the critical role of entrepreneurship in building peace or becoming complicit beyond pro-social motives. As such, a broader range of causes, impetus, and violence-induced aspects create complexity for managing (im)mobilities. Diverse political actors try to control the inflow of people, non-humans, and money through various interventions and international (non-)political collaborations (Solano, 2021) in line with their political agendas, which shapes the degree of public and private support available to (im)mobilities of entrepreneurial ideas, people and things (Szkudlarek et al., 2021).

In this special issue, we argue for entrepreneurial (im)mobilities that are more sensitive to space and time and critical to taken-for-granted assumptions. We can no longer presume similar answers to the fundamental questions of ‘what and who can move and stay,’ ‘for what reasons,’ ‘from where to where,’ ‘how to move and enterprise,’ and ‘with what effects.’ The emerging complexity and dynamism necessitate asking these questions critically again and seeking new theories to understand entrepreneurship in this era. The focus on (im)mobilities encourages expanding conceptual boundaries and understanding of connectedness and interdependencies between entrepreneurial humans and animals, spaces, times, regulations, power relations, and ethical concerns in a broader sense. We call for inquiries to extend our understanding of ‘entrepreneurial (im)mobilities: ideas, people and things on the move.’

Specific inquiries may include but are not limited to the following:

• Within which institutional, economic, political, and societal contexts do entrepreneurial activities take place by the entrepreneurial actors on the move? How do they navigate, interact with and enact context?
• How do the (im)mobilities of ideas, people, and things create and shape entrepreneurial opportunities, resources and processes?
• How should entrepreneurial support mechanisms and ecosystems (incubators, accelerators, co-working spaces, hubs, etc.) be (re)designed considering (im)mobilities of ideas, people, and things?
• How do entrepreneurial (im)mobilities shape entrepreneurial teams and networks?
• How is entrepreneurial education (re)designed along the entrepreneurial (im)mobilities?
• How do (im)mobilities regulate the (re)production and demise of entrepreneurial identities?
• What identity markers and politics become more or less significant for entrepreneurial actors on the move, policymakers and other institutional constituents? When and with what consequences do they enact (or not) their salient identity markers (i.e., gender, class, race, ethnicity, religion, (dis)ability, sexuality and otherwise axes of difference), values, beliefs, and emotions?
• How, when, and to what extent does entrepreneurship become a position of power for entrepreneurial actors on the move?
• How do entrepreneurs on the move respond to crises, such as economic and social inequalities, political disputes and conflicts, and environmental disasters?
• How do entrepreneurial (im)mobilities influence the framing of entrepreneurship as emancipation and peacebuilding?
• What is the dark (and the bright) side of entrepreneurial (im)mobilities considering the ethics of entrepreneurship?
• How do different meta-theoretical approaches, such as (post)colonial, transnational, and posthuman, inform research designs in entrepreneurial (im)mobilities? What challenges and opportunities do each bring, and how do we deal with them?
• How can various entrepreneurship research streams strengthen each other to produce a critical dialogue about understanding and studying entrepreneurial (im)mobilities?

To address these issues, we welcome conceptual and empirical papers that advance the theoretical understanding of ‘entrepreneurial (im)mobilities’ with different levels of analysis and various methodological approaches: quantitative, qualitative, and intervention. This includes novel approaches such as nethnographic, visual, performative, GPS, and sensor data-based methodologies that can capture ideas, people, and things on the move and over time.