Survival Is Triumph Enough: Rhythmic Resilience Amid Chronic Adversity and Acute Shocks

Contexts of adversity generate a wide range of challenges that expose entrepreneurs to compounding hardship yet paradoxically stimulate entrepreneurship as a means of regaining control. Existing research often portrays adversity in two distinct ways, either as a one-time disruptive event or as a persistent condition of the same underlying hardship, overlooking how adversity increasingly unfolds as chronic adversity compounded by multiple acute shocks—a setting that characterizes the lived reality of many entrepreneurs in today’s turbulent world. In such contexts, entrepreneurial resilience is not oriented toward recovery or thriving but toward enduring recurring crises, resource scarcity, and persistent uncertainty. We conducted an inductive, longitudinal study of 32 displaced entrepreneurs living in conflict-affected regions of Iraq. Our analysis reveals a process model of rhythmic resilience in a context of chronic adversity compounded by acute shocks. We show that resilience unfolds through dynamic cycles of withdrawal, reengagement, and adaptation over time that sustain survival across household, venture, and community levels. Yet these processes entail difficult trade-offs, giving rise to a resilience–survival paradox in which entrepreneurs protect survival at the expense of personal well-being, business growth, and social ties.