Disability entrepreneurship research: Critical reflection through the lens of individual-opportunity nexus

Abstract

The individual-opportunity (IO) nexus has been a highly influential perspective in entrepreneurship, but its market-focused and variance-deterministic character pose serious limitations where entrepreneurship is intended as a development policy for disabled people. The extant research in disability entrepreneurship converges in the recognition of structural barriers faced by disabled entrepreneurs, but in most cases, the multilevel challenges only translate to adaptive mechanisms at an individual level. When the IO nexus is adopted as a lens, its variance-deterministic setup and market-focused outcome definitions are in favor of entrepreneurs with conventional characteristics, but less helpful for a policy purpose where substantial non-economic value could be overlooked. Two critical points for consideration in disability entrepreneurship research are the role of context in which the disabled entrepreneurs are embedded, and the influences of different levels of analysis.