Female social-housing residents and pre-entrepreneurial identity: the first step towards entrepreneurship within local economic development

Placing entrepreneurship at the forefront as a path to employment for unemployed female social-housing residents, this paper reports on research carried out within Balsall Heath, Birmingham, UK. The field of entrepreneurship is fragmented and known for varied opinions (Keating and Higgins, 2016; Audretsch et al., 2007), with entrepreneurship and identity research growing, this paper aims to narrow these fragmented gaps. This paper seeks to contribute to limited research upon pre-entrepreneurial identity, as the first-step in forming a tailored entrepreneurship support programme and enhance understanding of identity at the pre-entrepreneur stage. A qualitative research methodology is adopted, through traditional storytelling, people naturally arrange their lives, events and experiences into stories as they are 'narrative thinkers' (Graham et al., 2015:345). Grounded-theory analysis is applied in aiding the creation of a theoretical framework through practice-based theory (Rae, 2004b). Findings are presented through an emergent model of pre-entrepreneurial identity, classifying emerged themes through two characteristics: tangible and intangible