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NOTE: Since 2009 the title of the International Journal of Entrepreneurship Education (IJEE) has been changed to the title above. ISSN numbers: IJEE 1649-2269 and IRE 2009-2822
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ISSN Number: 2009-2822. Frequency: 4 Issues per year (online only)
#1728 - “I Will Have My Own Place” — The Entrepreneurial Intentions of Young People Experiencing Homelessness in Paris and New York
IRE Vol 23, Issue 2, 2025, Pages
Author(s): Julien Billion (ICN Business School, Puteaux, France & CEREFIGE (center), University of Lorraine, Nancy, France), Elen Riot (Laboratoire d’Économie Dionysien (LED), Université de Paris 8-Vincennes, France), Jonathan Labbé (IAE Nancy School of Management, Nancy, France), Christel Tessier-Dargent (Université de Saint-Etienne, France)
Abstract:
This paper explores the entrepreneurial intentions of homeless youth through the lens of effectuation theory. While entrepreneurship is often presented as a pathway to social and professional integration, little is known about how entrepreneurial intentions emerge among young people experiencing homelessness. Drawing on a four-year comparative qualitative study conducted in Paris and New York, this research examines how homeless youth envision entrepreneurship under conditions of extreme precarity. The study is based on an in-depth qualitative methodology combining urban ethnography, life-story interviews, informal conversations, and prolonged field engagement with twenty homeless youths. Data were analyzed using the Gioia methodology, ensuring a rigorous and transparent qualitative analysis. The findings show that entrepreneurial intention among homeless youth is primarily driven by aspirations for autonomy, emancipation, and control over an uncertain future rather than by opportunity recognition or profit maximization. These intentions closely align with the core principles of effectuation, including means-driven action, affordable loss, strategic partnerships, and the leveraging of contingencies. Across both cities, homeless youth engage in an effectual mode of action shaped by survival practices, peer-based networks, and improvisation. By extending effectuation theory to the context of homelessness, this study contributes to research on entrepreneurial intention under conditions of extreme marginalization and offers insights for the design of tailored entrepreneurial support programs grounded in homeless youths’ lived realities.
Keywords: Theory of effectuation; homeless youth; international comparison; intention; entrepreneurship; work.