From margins to the centre: methodological pathways for researching marginalised entrepreneurs and Global South contexts

Purpose Entrepreneurship research has broadened its empirical focus to include marginalised actors and Global South contexts. However, inclusion is often applied primarily at the level of sampling without reconsidering the epistemic conditions through which entrepreneurial practices are recognised, interpreted and theorised. Consequently, extractive assumptions about whose knowledge counts persist. This article presents the Visual–Inductive–Transformative Approach (VITA), a justice-oriented methodological approach for studying inclusive entrepreneurship by connecting lived entrepreneurial experience to contextually accountable theory development. Design/methodology/approach VITA extends Donna M. Mertens' transformative paradigm through an entrepreneurship-specific protocol that combines participant-guided visual inquiry, multimodal evidence and inductive–abductive theorising. It positions marginalised actors as collaborators rather than as data providers by involving them in shaping and interpreting evidence. It does so through a five-link voice-to-claim chain which links capture, participant explanation, multimodal corroboration, mechanism coding and theoretical abstraction which preserves contextual meaning. The protocol covers research design, evidence generation, participant co-curation, ongoing consent, analysis, ethics and dissemination for different audiences. Findings VITA enables theorisation of partially visible practices through which marginalised entrepreneurs secure legitimacy, mobilise resources and sustain ventures under structurally constrained conditions. An illustration from Ghana shows how an asset-based survey pattern served as a diagnostic trigger, with interviews, photographs, artefacts and observed practices revealing how rural youth entrepreneurs selectively combined formal and informal practices to secure institutional access, mobilise resources and negotiate household relations. Cross-case analysis conceptualised this mechanism as considered (in)formality and showed its uneven effects, including how marginalised entrepreneurs' asset-making pathways can reproduce vulnerability for others. Originality/value VITA advances entrepreneurship methodology by providing a traceable route from participant-guided evidence to theoretical claims without detaching those claims from contextual meanings or agreed permissions. It distinguishes the curated entrepreneurial encounter as the unit of analysis from the evidence bundle assembled around it, embeds ethics and dissemination within the research process, and specifies when multimodal, participant-guided inquiry is most appropriate in entrepreneurship research.