Layered demands and intersecting constraints: adaptive entrepreneurial agency in women-led microenterprises in Greater Vitória, Brazil

This study investigates how women entrepreneurs in Greater Vitória, Espírito Santo (Brazil), navigate entrepreneurial decision-making within a microenterprise-dominant regional economy. Drawing on Stewart’s Demand–Constraint–Choice (DCC) framework, the study uses a qualitative interpretive design based on 24 semi-structured interviews across service, commercial, and community-oriented sectors. Findings show that entrepreneurial decision-making reflects the interaction of layered demands, intersecting constraints, and adaptive agency. Women simultaneously negotiate market, operational, socio-emotional, and mission-related demands while responding to mutually reinforcing financial, labor, institutional, and gendered constraints. Entrepreneurial agency emerges as a process of adaptive calibration balancing economic viability, relational responsibilities, and long-term sustainability. The study refines the DCC framework in three ways: conceptualizing demands as multidimensional and simultaneous, constraints as cumulative and mutually reinforcing, and choice as a relationally and territorially embedded process of adaptive decision-making. By foregrounding the underexamined subnational context of Greater Vitória, the study also advances regional entrepreneurship scholarship by demonstrating how localized institutional conditions and market structures shape women’s entrepreneurial action in emerging economies.