The nature of entrepreneurship for people with learning difficulties: a narrative inquiry

This thesis considers the nature of entrepreneurship in the lives of people with learning difficulties in the UK using the narratives of experience constructed in collaboration with three disabled entrepreneurs who run their own business. It offers an exploration of self-employment as an alternative route to work and considers the relevance of specialist employment support structures to the development of small business opportunities. Working collaboratively with people who are so often framed as marginalised, the study embraces disability studies and critical pedagogy as its theoretical mooring and weaves together personal experience, practice and scholarship to explore ways in which enterprise becomes a site of resistance to the social, cultural, political and structural barriers faced by many disabled people. The study reveals that although entrepreneurial activity aligns well with wider efforts to create more employment opportunities, employment support is frequently conceptualised, arranged and funded in ways that are incompatible with the broader benefits of pursuing entrepreneurial aspirations beyond the narrow confines of job creation. Furthermore, it proffers a reconceptualization of self-employment that considers the confluence of disability, enterprise and support as a ternary of hope, capable of subverting and disrupting notions of disability, independence and autonomy and replacing them with generosity, reciprocity and humility. Rather than analysing employment education, training and support as an isolated intervention “delivered” to disabled people, the study concludes that, central to the support mechanisms found helpful by people with learning difficulties pursuing their entrepreneurial ideas, it is this ternary of hope that transfers vitality to the communal vision of an alternative future. This thesis notes the significance of self-employment and recommends further reflexive empirical research regarding self-employment for and with people with learning difficulties in the UK.