Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore and analyse the barriers entrepreneurs with disabilities (EWD) face when establishing their own enterprises, as well as the supporting factors in starting and running a business. Design/methodology/approach This is an explorative study. Data were collected using semi-structured interviews with ten Hungarian entrepreneurs with physical disabilities or sight-loss, during the summer of 2018. Findings The paper classifies the barriers and supporting factors, as personal, economic and social. Based on the perceptions of the entrepreneurs, personal characteristics, identity and various types of family support play an important role in becoming entrepreneurs, but the entrepreneurial ecosystem generally is not favourable in Hungary, and there are no special support programmes focussing on EWD. Research limitations/implications Sample size is a serious limitation: the ten entrepreneurs do not represent in any sense the entire EWD community in Hungary, so the patterns found cannot be considered a generally valid picture. Originality/value The article contributes to the literature on entrepreneurship and disabilities, especially through the systematic review of the possible barriers and supporting factors and to the existing empirical body of knowledge by shedding light on the barriers and supporting factors in a rarely investigated region, in Central Europe: Hungary.

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PurposeWhile it is argued that entrepreneurship provides considerable freedom, it is also underlined that it might have the potential for exclusion and oppression. The study contributes to this debate and aims to investigate how entrepreneurs with disabilities (EWD) ascribe meaning to freedom in a contested terrain informed by entrepreneurial autonomy as well as constraints due to impairments and an ableist social environment.Design/methodology/approachThe study uses a qualitative approach and builds upon the critical concepts of negative, positive and social freedom as a theoretical lens for the in-depth analysis of the twenty-nine semi-structured interviews with EWD in Hungary.FindingsFindings indicate that EWD experiences freedom in ambivalent ways. Engaging in the discourse of entrepreneurship offers a subversive discursive toolkit to debunk the constraints established by ableism, enabling both negative and positive freedom. However, individualism being at the heart of entrepreneurship results in othering and undermines social freedom. Thus, while entrepreneurship offers greater individual freedom in both a negative and a positive sense for people with disabilities (PWD), it nevertheless fails to promote collective social change.Originality/valueContributing to the critical disability literature, findings contrast the view that having an impairment only reduces a person's abilities and highlight that it also affects the very nature of liberty. Contributing to critical studies on entrepreneurship, the case of EWD provides empirical evidence for understanding the simultaneous emancipatory and oppressive character of entrepreneurship through the interplay of the subjective experience of freedom related to disability and entrepreneurship.

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