Uncertainty, discrimination, and socioeconomic marginalization in host countries lead many refugees to entrepreneurial bricolage. Understanding their bricolage practices is crucial to designing policies and programmes to support refugee entrepreneurship, yet little is known about how refugees enact bricolage practices where institutional support is lacking, resources are constrained and where they contend with war trauma due to displacement. In the first study of its kind, we use interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) and draw on the concept of ‘bricolage’ to investigate Ukrainian refugee practices in the UK and Romania. Our findings affirm the importance of understanding the contexts which shape these refugees’ practices. Importantly, they draw much-deserved attention to how the war trauma that refugees carry with them influences their bricolentrepreneuring journeys. We state our theoretical contributions and explore the implications for effective policy making to support ‘entrepreneurship at the margins’.

Full article available on Taylor & Francis website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2025.2473101