Breaking Free or Locking In: How Socially Disadvantaged Individuals Achieve or Reject an Aspired Identity in an Entrepreneurial Context
研究61位中国社会弱势女性在创业机会中如何应对渴望身份（女企业家）与现有身份（卑微背景女性）的冲突，发现三种路径：提升、尝试或固守，并揭示情绪和认知动态如何影响身份实现或拒绝。
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.