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Abstract

Paul Downs’s Boss Life: Surviving My Own Small Business offers an unorthodox contribution to entrepreneurship scholarship through its raw, first-person chronicle of small business ownership. This review critically examines the memoir’s value as a form of lived ethnography, arguing that its granular, longitudinal account of running a custom furniture business transcends conventional entrepreneurial narratives. Methodologically, Downs’s meticulous documentation of daily operations, including cash flow crises, personnel conflicts and strategic dilemmas, provides unparalleled empirical insight into small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) management, capturing phenomena such as emotional labour, improvisational decision-making and the recursive link between personal and organizational well-being often obscured in retrospective case studies. Thematically, the book challenges the heroic entrepreneur trope by foregrounding vulnerability, structural constraints and the existential distinction between profitability and liquidity. Its narrative strategies reframe failure as inherent to small business survival while its exploration of human capital bricolage, innovation resistance and psychological burdens aligns with contemporary debates on effectuation, emotional labour (Cardon et al., 2012; Shepherd, 2009) and institutional embeddedness. Though limited in generalizability and theoretical explicitness, Boss Life serves as a vital pedagogical tool and methodological exemplar urging scholars to embrace narrative approaches to illuminate the contingent, non-linear realities of SME ownership.

Keywords

Entrepreneurial ethnography SME management lived experience cash flow management emotional labour autoethnography

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Book review: Paul Downs,Boss Life: Surviving My Own Small Business

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