On the Thursday before Christmas in 2016, I met with one of the former traders who had come into London for an annual catch up with old friends from his market days. James was one of the original archetypical city traders who populated the City in the 1990s. From a working-class background, he had started working straight from school when trading was like the Wall Street images that populate the public imagination: shouting trades, gobby masculinity, extravagant client hospitality and promises of a moneyed lifestyle. James had enjoyed many parts of this and still felt close to those who had shared his formative years of work. But he had also been prudent when others had not and had been described affectionately by others as ‘keeping his head about him’. He’d saved, carefully managed assets, maintained healthy relationships with his wife and children, and was now financial independent in his 50s.

We ordered our coffee just outside Mayfair and James shared his recent experience of retraining in compliance and starting a new job. For many, moving from ‘front’ to ‘back’ office would be a confronting shift. I had been told by others people in the City that compliance was viewed by many as a bureaucratic distraction, while some even dismissed it as a parasitic function within their businesses, given that it did not directly make money – a necessary but derided inconvenience, like taxes. Yet there had been a recent shift in power across the financial services caused in part by new regulatory measures and expectations brought in after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis alongside the increase in automation that was killing traditional modes of trading and brokering.

This chapter shares an empirical account of what became a longitudinal phenomenological study of working through ageing. However, it would be disingenuous to suggest that it began as either longitudinal or wedded to a critical phenomenological way of viewing the world. Rather, the research started in 2010 in a North London pub talking to a group of friends about ageing. At the time, we were all in our mid to late 20s, living in London but working in very different sectors, and I was using their personal anecdotes about office politics to test drive some thoughts. At that point, my idea was to sequentially look at different occupations in order to compare how people talk about their experience of ageing at work, spending a few months in three different organizations. There was never any intention to start a decade-long endeavour: rather, I was keen to focus on the way in which ageing ‘gathered ground’ through reference to different relations, objects and bodies at a particular point in time. One of our group casually mentioned that ‘I work at a hedge fund. Why don't you come and talk to us, our boss would like this kind of thing’. I quickly Googled ‘hedge fund’ and his company, which I will refer to here using the pseudonym HFUK, wrote up a one-page research overview which was emailed to the firm via my friend and waited. What followed was speaking to group of 25 people, plus a wider constellation of people associated with the firm over the course of the next ten years.

At the start of the book, I described Sofia's experience of the London riots. Through her story and the stories of other entrepreneurs, the purpose of the book has been to understand more about resilience as a process and to show that, like a muscle or a capability, resilience is something we can develop.

Based on insights from the interviews and weekly diaries of entrepreneurs in crisis, and the different studies I’ve presented, we’ve learned that the resilient entrepreneur is the individual who brings their awareness to how they think, feel, and act. It's the individual who adjusts accordingly and in specific ways, including those ways outlined across the different chapters.

Until now, the resilient entrepreneur has been an elusive concept, either overlooked, sidelined by research favouring organizational resilience or tied to certain personality traits. Personality traits, while important, only tell us part of the story.

The resilient entrepreneur engages in ‘resilience work’: the work we undertake to adjust our attention, thinking, situation and/or resources in ways to reduce the stress created by adversity or minimize the likelihood of its occurrence. Figure 12.1 captures these elements of resilience work. When the strategies involved in resilience work are applied consciously and actively, they serve as practices that assist individuals in difficult periods.

When presenting parts of this study at conferences, seminars and workshops, one of the most common questions I was asked is how a phenomenological approach might practically inform how we undertake qualitative longitudinal research. As such, it feels disingenuous not to disclose some of the more applied aspects of this study in the hope that it may help others undertaking fieldwork researching ageing or using a phenomenological lens in empirical work. As discussed in Chapter 3, the practical experience of undertaking longitudinal research is rarely discussed in studies of work. Part of the reason for this may be that qualitative longitudinal accounts are relatively rare in management and organization studies. Similarly, while it is more common for studies across the humanities and social sciences to draw on a phenomenological lens to understand a given research phenomenon, relatively few discuss how a commitment to phenomenology informs the way in which researchers themselves experience the empirical research process as related to negotiating fieldwork.

For me, a qualitative longitudinal approach sits comfortably with exploring ageing. Given that ageing is an experience that we often get to know in and through time, exploring it through a methodological mode that recognizes the richness of temporality feels like a good place to start. Longitudinal research is broadly concerned with ‘how time interacts and interplays with the collection and analysis of qualitative data’ (Saldana, 2003: 5) and is often chosen due to a concern with understanding and tracking patterns and changes over time.

In this chapter, I introduce what a theory of working through ageing might encompass. Specifically, I consider how a phenomenological approach can help to further conceptualize working through ageing as the amalgam of self-world encounters experienced in and over the life course. To inform this, I draw together recent critical phenomenological accounts with a revisiting of the work of Simone de Beauvoir, exploring the fertility of her theoretical conversations for understanding the practical and ontological experiences of growing up and older in work.

Phenomenology is an approach emerging from accounts in early 20th-century continental Europe and traditionally associated with the intellectual canon of Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. This initially sought to interrupt the backdrop of distance and objectivity associated with the scientific method through declaring a ‘going back to the things themselves’. Here ‘going back’ is not simply about understanding an object or phenomenon in its context, but also grasping how perception is an active, situated, relational activity that is always doing something. Rather than think of judgement, acknowledgement or thought as a neutral filter that happens after an a priori or independent act of cognition, phenomenology considers the very act of perception as imbued with meaning or intentionality.

Such ideas have been subject to valuable critical interventions within feminist theory that show the experiential realm is neither neutral nor apolitical. Feminist theory has emphasized a contemporary phenomenological concern with being-in-the-world with others as an inherently and profoundly uneven and interdependent experience grounded in our corporeality

I also wanted to include some final thoughts for those who might be interested in further researching entrepreneurs in crisis and resilience, discussing ways in which research could be extended.

The contributions of this research

At the time of writing, I see the contributions of the research undertaken and presented in this book as being three-fold, which include: (a) identifying strategies that enable entrepreneurs in a crisis to strengthen their resilience and consolidating these into different kinds of adjustments that comprise resilience work, (b) introducing concepts from other fields to the areas of crisis management and entrepreneurship and (c) consolidating some of the existing research on the topic of individual resilience and adversity and extending it with new stories and insights from entrepreneurs in crisis.

Identifying strategies that enable entrepreneurs in a crisis to strengthen their resilience and consolidating these into different kinds of adjustments that comprise resilience work

For entrepreneurs in crisis, the road to recovery can be a lonely one. A crisis can be especially difficult for entrepreneurs and take its toll on their wellbeing. The research presented in this book aims in part to flag to these individuals some of the strategies that their counterparts have employed and with some degree of success to minimize the stresses involved in managing a crisis.

Prior research on entrepreneurship and crisis management tends to focus mostly on organizational-level responses to a crisis and is written up in academic journals, many of which are inaccessible to those it affects, practically or otherwise.

Mark wasn't too concerned about the possibility of more riots in his future. ‘It's a waste of time worrying about that’, he told me. ‘Probably, we’ll close the door if it does, but it's not something that I waste a lot of energy worrying about.’ He reflected:

When I asked why that might be the case, he said, ‘I can't give you a reason. It's just I want to be here, but I don't want to be here. I can't think of any other way of putting it.’ He elaborated:

In certain situations, as with Mark, a crisis can leave us disengaged, not only psychologically but also behaviourally. We might react by reducing or even withdrawing our efforts which may cause problems down the road, especially if prolonged.

Vivek, who was in his late 40s when we met, had moved to London from South Asia. He prided himself on a strong work ethic which he used to start his own shop over a decade before. His busy convenience store, located in an East London neighbourhood, was targeted during the London riots. Vivek set the scene: ‘If you put a bomb on the shop, it was like that. With the ceiling down, electric wires hanging there, lights hanging, the counter was completely flat, fridge broken, freezer broken.’ Yet, despite the extensive damages, what angered him most were the scattered takeaway boxes, carelessly discarded on what little of the business remained: ‘They went out’ and came back again to ‘eat chicken and chips in the shop’. He explained, ‘They had a party inside!’

Vivek described to me the day after the London riots, when his world as he knew it had ended:

For entrepreneurs and business leaders

As I was reflecting on the implications of the research and findings presented throughout the book for entrepreneurs and other business leaders, three immediately came to mind. The first is that a crisis for your business can significantly impact you. Your energy, your resources and your identity are often entwined with that of your business, especially those of you who are small business owners. This knowledge underscores the need to safeguard your health during a crisis and not to focus on the health of the business alone. The pandemic in recent years demonstrated that a crisis can endure and do so with no clear end-date in sight, while the London riots showed us that the aftermath of a crisis can be difficult, and its effects long lasting.

A second implication is that, as an entrepreneur or a business leader, you would benefit from reviewing the different kinds of strategies available to you that might help reduce stress and the negative emotions you may be experiencing, how these strategies might be employed and what role they might play in terms of enabling you to become more resilient. Some of the strategies we’ve covered within the book you can initiate on your own and will require you to make a small investment of your time and effort (for example, positive self-talk, distraction). Some strategies will mean working more closely with others (for example, institutions, staff, customers) and will demand a greater investment of your time and effort (like offsetting resource losses).