The art of holding on: cross-perspectives on the many forms of resilience among individual entrepreneurs

Contemporary entrepreneurship unfolds in an environment where crises no longer appear as exceptional disruptions, but as persistent, overlapping conditions of economic and social life. The Covid-19 pandemic, inflationary pressures, geopolitical instability, climate disruption, technological acceleration, and growing psychological fatigue have reshaped the everyday experience of entrepreneurial activity. For many individual entrepreneurs, running a business now means navigating a landscape of continuous uncertainty, where adaptation is not an occasional response to crisis but a permanent condition of survival and development. Against this backdrop of persistent instability, resilience has become an increasingly important conceptual and analytical lens through which contemporary entrepreneurial trajectories can be understood. Initially developed and widely mobilized in fields such as psychology, ecology, and risk management, the concept now occupies a growing place in entrepreneurship research. This shift signals a broader reorientation in the study of entrepreneurship itself: away from idealized representations of the entrepreneur as a rational, autonomous, and performance-oriented actor, and toward a more situated understanding of entrepreneurial experience, attentive to its relational, emotional, biographical, and contextual dimensions…