Climbing to freedom on an impossible staircase: Exploring the emancipatory potential of becoming an entrepreneur-employer
研究英国南威尔士刚成为雇主的创业者，发现创业解放体验在成为雇主后受限，揭示创业作为解放的困境。
This article contributes to critical discussions questioning the emancipatory potential of entrepreneurship by examining the experiences of men and women entrepreneurs who have recently become employers in South Wales, the United Kingdom. Our research uses a co-creative visual method based in interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to explore transitions from entrepreneur to entrepreneur-employer in everyday contexts. Findings demonstrate how initial emancipatory experiences become increasingly bounded when becoming an entrepreneur-employer. This exposes a Catch-22 of entrepreneuring-as-emancipation as a symptom of neoliberal entrepreneurial discourses that constrain what entrepreneurs are encouraged to do: grow. We find a plurality of particular emancipations, but conclude that within a developed context entrepreneurship, and more specifically, becoming an entrepreneur-employer is a relational step through which perceived constraints become more readily experienced and emancipation never fully realised.