Purpose: This reflective paper offers an overview on how refugee women's entrepreneurship scholarship evolved, and suggests research directions for the future development of the field.Design/methodology/approach: A reflective approach encompassing the evolvement of the field of refugee women's entrepreneurship research.Findings: Whilst refugee women's entrepreneurship scholarship and research, and its interlinks with resilience, empowerment, gender, and livelihoods theoretical framings have flourished in recent years, it remains a relatively young scholarship area, evolving from a broad social science multi-disciplinary base including refugee studies, economics, and development, rather than mainstream business disciplines.Originality/value: Refugee women's entrepreneurship offers a novel approach and contribution to the broader and established gender and entrepreneurship field. Nevertheless, critical research questions and gaps remain within the growing refugee women's entrepreneurship scholarship regarding the potential of entrepreneuring to empower refugee women socially, economically, and politically.

The adoption of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 5 on gender equality and the growth in the number of women entrepreneurs in the MENA region is likely to change the rules of the game. A growing body of research is addressing this and the factors pertaining to this growth, including digital entrepreneurship. However, little remains known about the growth and resilience of women-owned digital microbusinesses during adverse social and economic disruptions, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, in Saudi Arabia. Hence, this study explores the impact of emotions on the resilience of women entrepreneurs in “Saudi Arabia in transformation”, to explore the impact this has on shaping the digital entrepreneurship journeys of women entrepreneurs. A qualitative longitudinal approach was utilized to capture the processual nature of entrepreneurship during crises, and the broaden-and-build theory offered the theoretical framing for the study. Of the eight women-owned digital microbusinesses participating in this study, six survived the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings show that digital entrepreneurship contributed to sustaining microbusinesses during adversity, and entrepreneurs motivated by passion are also infused with positive emotions and positive thoughts and actions, empowering their resilience, despite the adversity.

With over 27.1 million refugees displaced globally across national borders as a result of protracted crises, conflict, and danger, resettlement in host nations remains challenging. One approach for empowering refugee women in their host nations is to enhance their economic participation through entrepreneurship. We contribute to the growing research on refugee women’s entrepreneurship by focusing on refugee women entrepreneurs as mentors to other refugee women and exploring the impact of mentoring upon the empowerment of refugee women business mentors. The aim of the study is to explore the impact of being a mentor on the empowerment of refugee women entrepreneurs settled in the United Kingdom. As such, the research question asks to what extent does being a mentor influence the empowerment of refugee women entrepreneurs. The qualitative study involved six refugee women business mentors who co-designed and led an entrepreneurship training programme for refugee women in the United Kingdom and charted their empowerment journeys through four potential empowerment junctures within the mentoring process. First, the refugee woman as a mentee, then as a member of a mentoring group, thirdly as a facilitator in the mentoring process, and finally as a reflective agent. Our contribution to the women’s entrepreneurship discipline lies in our finding that refugee women’s engagement as mentors enhanced their empowerment in ways that their entrepreneurship alone cannot.

Purpose: This conceptual, multi-voiced paper aims to collectively explore and theorize family entrepreneuring, which is a research stream dedicated to investigating the emergence and becoming of entrepreneurial phenomena in business families and family firms.Design/methodology/approach: Because of the novelty of this research stream, the authors asked 20 scholars in entrepreneurship and family business to reflect on topics, methods and issues that should be addressed to move this field forward.Findings: Authors highlight key challenges and point to new research directions for understanding family entrepreneuring in relation to issues such as agency, processualism and context.Originality/value: This study offers a compilation of multiple perspectives and leverage recent developments in the fields of entrepreneurship and family business to advance research on family entrepreneuring.

This special issue editorial reviews the literature on entrepreneurial agency in constrained contexts, highlighting existing research and discussing future outlooks. It centres around the paradox of embedded agency and how this concept has influenced our understanding of the relationship between entrepreneurial agency and contexts through the application of various methodological and empirical settings. In so doing, we contribute to the essential question of entrepreneurial agency in constrained contexts, drawing attention towards variable contextual specificities that filter internal and external structures thereby, influencing the way and degree to which entrepreneurial agency manifests itself. By reviewing the extant literature on entrepreneurial agency and showcasing highlights of the five manuscripts included in the special issue, this editorial contributes to literature by proposing three complementary perspectives on constrained entrepreneurial agency including agency in constrained contexts, constrained positions in context and interpretations and enactments of constraints in contexts . These three perspectives draw upon important conceptual, empirical and methodological issues and stress the need for more critical entrepreneurship research that expands our understanding of constrained entrepreneurial agency around external structural constraints, imposed positions of the individual or groups of entrepreneurs within contexts, or individual interpretations and enactments based on meanings, discourses and cognitions that shape experiences, respectively.