Breaking Free or Locking In: How Socially Disadvantaged Individuals Achieve or Reject an Aspired Identity in an Entrepreneurial Context

This research examines how individuals achieve or reject an aspired identity when they perceive it as conflicting with some existing identities. We conducted an inductive, qualitative study of 61 socially disadvantaged women in China who were provided an entrepreneurial opportunity. This opportunity activated these women’s aspired identity of being business owners as well as their existing identities of being women from a humble background. They perceived these identities as in conflict, which generated internal obstacles to the attainment of their aspired identity. Adopting the identity network approach as our theoretical lens, we revealed three paths through which they navigated the perceived identity conflict—elevation, experimentation, or entrenchment—marked by different patterns of emotions, identity work, and inter-identity work. Further, we found that retrospective sensemaking of past failure and interpersonal sensemaking shaped the paths these women took to achieve or reject the aspired identity. Our study uncovers the emotional and cognitive dynamics that lead individuals to either be emancipated from or remain entrenched by the internal obstacles stemming from their perceived conflict between aspired and existing identities that hinders positive self-transformation, contributing to the literatures on identity formation and entrepreneurship-as-emancipation.