An Entrepreneurial Process for Exploiting Vulnerable People’s Labor

In this chapter—“An Entrepreneurial Process for Exploiting Vulnerable People’s Labor”—we take an even bigger step toward the dark side of entrepreneurial action in response to chronic adversity. In this chapter, we take the perspective of victims to explore a destructive entrepreneurial process that involves multiple actors—namely, that of exploiting vulnerable women and girls for human trafficking. We focus on the destructive entrepreneurial practices used to exploit vulnerable individuals for their labor to explain how entrepreneurs (as actors within the human-trafficking system) methodically target impoverished women and girls and transform their autonomous objections into unquestioned compliance. We show that through the entrepreneurial practices of (1) deceptive recruiting of the vulnerable, (2) entrapping through isolation, (3) extinguishing alternatives by building barriers, and (4) converting the exploited into exploiters, these entrepreneurs diminish and eventually eliminate vulnerable workers’ autonomy. In doing so, we shed light on the illegal entrepreneurial process of exploiting vulnerable individuals’ labor and ruining their lives by eliminating their free will.