Mitigating vulnerabilities experienced by everyday entrepreneurs in the informal economy: a strength-based approach

Everyday entrepreneurs in the informal economy provide essential services yet face intersecting vulnerabilities that threaten their subjective well-being. This conceptual article integrates a strength-based approach (SBA) with an entrepreneurship theories-based approach (ETBA) into a multi-level framework for mitigating vulnerability. The integration delivers what existing entrepreneurship theories do not. It makes vulnerability the focal construct and brings organizational and policy actors into the analysis as collaborators whose institutional capacities can be activated to support entrepreneurs. SBA-ETBA pathways moderate the negative relationship between vulnerabilities and subjective well-being, with the strongest mitigation arising when individual, organizational, and policy strengths are aligned. In support of the framework, we develop a diagnostic typology of six vulnerability domains (institutional and regulatory, financial and economic, operational and infrastructure, social and structural, knowledge and skill-based, environmental and climate) at the individual, organizational, and policy levels. The framework, propositions, and agenda advance entrepreneurship, customer vulnerability, and transformative service research.