Addressing Precarity in Social Enterprises: Examining Tunisian Women's Infrapolitical Tactics

Social entrepreneurship is presented as a promising way to overcome women's precarity, especially in the Global South. However, there is scant documentation of such endeavours, especially if we want to understand how locals seize such 'alternative' organizing opportunities. In this article we examine how women in Tunisia experience and negotiate their positions inside and outside the social enterprise. We show how these women are affected by constraints but also how they deploy a range of infrapolitical tactics to try and overcome interconnected layers of precarity -- individual, organizational and institutional. We identify three types of tactics: infra-institutionalization tactics, infrafeminist tactics, and infra-entrepreneurial tactics. We thus address the limits and potential of social entrepreneurship as a de facto better way to address precarity and ultimately develop sustainable economies in the Global South. We contribute to diversity research and to the decolonizing of management and organization studies by studying the agency of organizational participants with a de-centred, intersectional gaze. We furthermore contribute to scholarship by providing an intersectional feminist reading of agency in relation to social entrepreneurship in a setting where local populations tend to be regarded as passive beneficiaries or as interested only in day-to-day survival.