Hina Hashim

My research can be described as the study of entrepreneuring under structural constraint. I am interested in how people engage in entrepreneurship in contexts where action is possible, but never straightforward. My work focuses especially on poverty, gender, legitimacy, agency, and the everyday practices through which people find room to act.

My research journey began with an interest in social entrepreneurship and women’s entrepreneurship in Pakistan. Early in my work, I was interested in how people start and continue businesses in contexts where formal support is limited and where social norms strongly shape what is considered acceptable. Over time, this interest broadened into a larger concern with how entrepreneurship unfolds in contexts marked by poverty, patriarchy, institutional fragility, and unequal access to recognition.

Theoretically, my work builds on contextual and practice-based approaches to entrepreneurship. I draw on scholarship that understands entrepreneurship as formed through social relations and local conditions. Rather than approaching entrepreneurship only as business start-up and growth, I study entrepreneuring as a situated process of doing and negotiating.

I completed my PhD in Business Administration at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences with the thesis Entrepreneuring in structurally constrained context: Nuancing agency and privilege in poverty (link to thesis). The thesis brought together several strands of my research by examining how entrepreneurial agency unfolds in contexts of multidimensional poverty. Drawing on qualitative narrative fieldwork in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan, I explored how entrepreneurship is lived, narrated, negotiated, and sustained when resources, legitimacy, and institutional support cannot be taken for granted.

One of the central themes in my research is the relationship between structure and agency. I am interested in how people act within constraint without assuming that they are either fully free or fully trapped by their circumstances. This has led me to examine how entrepreneurial agency is shaped through value creation, storytelling, gendered expectations, and subtle forms of privilege.

Another important theme in my work is context. I understand context not simply as the background to entrepreneurship, but as something lived and negotiated through everyday action. This perspective helps me examine how entrepreneurial possibilities are shaped within particular social and institutional conditions.

At SLU, I am part of the Entrepreneurship and Innovation for Sustainable Development research group at the Department of Economics. I teach and supervise within business administration, particularly in research methods, entrepreneurship, leadership, sustainability, and qualitative research.

GoogleScholar Profile: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=CykskqIAAAAJ&hl=en

Publications
Journal articles
Hashim, H. & Gaddefors, J. (2023). The value of entrepreneuring in the context of multidimensional poverty. The International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, 24(2), 88–104. https://doi.org/10.1177/14657503231156338 

Cunningham, J., Xiong, L., Hashim, H. & Yunis, M. S. (2022). Narrating the ‘social’: The evolving stories of Pakistan’s social entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, 34(7–8), 668–685. https://doi.org/10.1080/08985626.2022.2077990

Yunis, M. S. & Hashim, H. (2020). The gendering of context: A fresh perspective of women social enterprise in Pakistan. Business and Economic Review, 12(1), 25–48. https://doi.org/10.22547/BER/12.1.2

Anderson, A. R., Younis, S., Hashim, H. & Air, C. (2019). Social enterprising informing our concept: Exploring informal micro social enterprise. Social Enterprise Journal, 15(1), 94–110. https://doi.org/10.1108/SEJ-04-2018-0034

Lent, M., Anderson, A., Yunis, M. S. & Hashim, H. (2019). Understanding how legitimacy is acquired among informal home-based Pakistani small businesses. International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal, 15(2), 341–361. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11365-019-00568-7

Yunis, M. S., Hashim, H. & Anderson, A. R. (2018). Enablers and constraints of female entrepreneurship in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan: Institutional and feminist perspectives. Sustainability, 11(1), 27. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11010027

Yunis, M. S., Jamali, D. & Hashim, H. (2018). Corporate social responsibility of foreign multinationals in a developing country context: Insights from Pakistan. Sustainability, 10(10), 3511. https://doi.org/10.3390/su10103511

Doctoral thesis
Hashim, H. (2025). Entrepreneuring in structurally constrained context: Nuancing agency and privilege in poverty (Doctoral dissertation, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences). https://pub.epsilon.slu.se/38817/1/hashim-h-20251111.pdf

Book chapter
Gashi Nulleshi, S., Hashim, H. & Krasniqi, B. A. (2025). ‘Bees are family’: Beekeeping artisans influencing rural entrepreneurship in Kosovo. In De Gruyter handbooks in business, economics and finance. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110755077-010