Sentipensar Entrepreneurship: Experiences of Resistant Entrepreneuring in Chile

Abstract

While entrepreneurship is not a new phenomenon or notion (O’Donnell et al., 2024), as a field of study it remains emerging, interdisciplinary, dynamic, and evolving (Kuratko & Covin, 2025). The present thesis seeks to explore what non-hegemonic forms of entrepreneurship look like and if they enact resistance to capitalist modes of production, with the aim of bringing to the fore ways of thinking, doing, and being that remain obscured within mainstream discourse. I do so by considering entrepreneurship as it relates to the concept of autogestión. In English, autogestión is translated as ‘self-management’ but the complexity of the word in Spanish, particularly in the Latin American context, goes far beyond that. It is charged with socio-political implications, grounded in collectivist organisation and horizontal ways of working, that allow for people to collaborate on equal terms and bring short or long-term enterprises to fruition. In this way, the present research engages with experiences of entrepreneurship in Chile, specifically with enterprises that define themselves as autogestionados, to explore meanings, perspectives, and possibilities for this embodiment of entrepreneurship. Drawing on research from critical entrepreneurship studies, on its emancipatory possibilities (Dey, 2016a; Rindova et al., 2009) and the value of a contextualised approach (Baker & Welter, 2020), and from diverse economy scholarship, delving into the discursive power of capitalist narratives and expanding on ways to ‘take back the economy’ (J. K. Gibson-Graham et al., 2013), I place these propositions in dialogue with Latin American decolonial theories, to problematise entrepreneurship from a Latin Americanist onto-epistemology (Bautista Segalés, 2014; Lander, 2000/2023). Using a sentipensante (Fals-Borda, 2015) approach, I co-created a horizontal (Sitrin, 2006) meaning-making space of enquiry, to reflect on the practices and thinking of research partner entrepreneurs working within a specific territory. The purpose is not to create a broad understanding of entrepreneurship within this place, but to focus on lived experience, ways of being, doing, thinking —the values, ideologies, perspectives, and practices— that shape and feed what I have tentatively called resistant entrepreneuring.