From the Ground Up: An Anthropological Perspective on Bottom-Up Entrepreneurial Ecosystems in the French Ride-Hailing Sector

Entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE) research has largely developed around cases where formal institutions, orchestrating organizations and policy frameworks are presumed to design and maintain the conditions for entrepreneurship. This emphasis on intentional, top-down coordination sits uneasily with empirical realities in many contemporary environments—particularly those shaped by platform-mediated work, institutional voids and informality—where entrepreneurs build livelihoods in the absence of coherent support structures. This paper advances a theory of bottom-up ecosystem formation that explains how entrepreneurial ecosystems can emerge in such contexts. Focusing on the French ride-hailing sector, I draw on a six-month reflexive auto-ethnography as a full-time driver on Uber, Bolt and Heetch, complemented by fieldnotes, platform screenshots, peer interactions and online group observations. Combining anthropological sensitivity to lived experience with mechanism-oriented theorizing, I identify four interlocking mechanisms through which drivers collectively generate ecosystem-level order under algorithmic governance and institutional ambiguity: (1) micro-resilience cycles, (2) informal knowledge infrastructures, (3) hybrid governance negotiation, and (4) episodic collective agency formation. These mechanisms constitute what I theorize as emergent entrepreneurial infrastructure: a distributed, informally organized coordination system that arises from below rather than being designed from above. Integrating these insights, I propose the RISE framework—Resilient, Interactive, Self-organizing, Emergent ecosystems—which conceptualizes entrepreneurial ecosystems as emergent outcomes of distributed entrepreneurial agency operating under algorithmic and institutional constraints. The study contributes to the special issue and to JBV by: (1) reconceptualizing entrepreneurial ecosystems as actor-driven adaptive systems, challenging design-centric assumptions; (2) articulating the construct of emergent entrepreneurial infrastructure, shifting attention from infrastructure-as-provided to infrastructure-as-generated; (3) specifying four microfoundational mechanisms of bottom-up ecosystem formation in platform-mediated contexts; and (4) extending theories of entrepreneurial agency to environments where algorithmic management, precarity and informality are central features of entrepreneurial life.