5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

Entrepreneurship spans from Silicon Valley unicorns to main-street businesses to Youtube influencers. It involves a zeal for economic self-improvement, venturing into risk-taking, and pursuing new, disruptive business ideas. Existing literature has focused on the entrepreneurial process and value creation practices while also shedding light on how new forms of entrepreneurship legitimize non-standard, precarious work, such as in the gig economy. What remains intriguing is how entrepreneurship keeps evolving around the world. For instance, there is a significant rise in newer forms of entrepreneurship operationalised by platforms such as Uber, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Instagram, YouTube, and collaborative entrepreneurial ventures, like startups, informal entrepreneurial groups, and communities of freelancers. This development has created platform-entrepreneurs and digital entrepreneurs, who inhabit a markedly different work-life reality than big entrepreneurs with behemoth businesses.

The progressive incorporation of people into formal financial systems worldwide is popularizing the idea of the entrepreneurial self and propagating practices associated with entrepreneurship. As formal employment opportunities decline globally, individuals across social categories seek economic relief and dignity through entrepreneurial endeavors. This begs the question how these new forms of entrepreneurship are advancing or compromising the normative goals of justice, equity, and sustainability. Investigating the underlying social and economic processes and outcomes of newer forms of entrepreneurship can answer this timely question about the contemporary economy. This session will engage with themes such as novel forms of entrepreneurship; capital raising and credit and debt relations; mobilities and meanings associated with entrepreneurship; and more. We welcome research across multiple methodologies.