A RACIALIZED VIEW OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP: A REVIEW AND PROPOSAL FOR FUTURE RESEARCH

Entrepreneurship research, as with most organizational research, almost always adopts a race neutral lens through which racial inequality is understood as exogenous to organi-zational theories. This approach is problematic because entrepreneurship is an embed-ded process and cannot be understood independent of its contexts, and the contexts in which it unfolds are often marked by racial inequality despite the apparent absence of overt racial antipathy. We examine more than 100 articles that address entrepreneur-ship and race, with a focus on underrepresented minorities in the United States: African, Hispanic, and Native Americans. From these articles, we not only derive why minority entrepreneurs continue to be disadvantaged despite widespread support for their entre-preneurship, but we also elevate themes of racial agency endemic to entrepreneurship from marginalized racial positions. We argue that entrepreneurship research needs to consider race; that is, scholars need to incorporate racialized structures into their theo-rizing. Doing so not only will highlight the structural underpinnings of racial disadvan-tage for underrepresented minority entrepreneurs, but it also casts entrepreneurship as an essential mechanism for racial agency.