SMEs COVID-19 Experiences through a Liminality Lens

The COVID-19 pandemic crisis has left a global mark on how businesses and their customers interact in the marketplace. Notably, SMEs (small and medium enterprises) and their employees have observed and experienced unprecedented changes. Prolonged periods of restrictions and different geopolitical responses have cultivated unique responses and shown entrepreneurial resilience. The following chapter presents a conceptual Liminality Framework to explain how SMEs navigate the liminality generated by the COVID-19 pandemic through mechanisms of entrepreneurial resourcefulness, thereby shifting the trajectory of their businesses to a “new normal”. Drawing upon entrepreneurial bricolage theory, the framework provides a useful lens through which to view the impact of this phenomenon on SMEs and to more closely examine the temporality, contextual conditions, mechanisms, and tension resolutions. In turn, SMEs have seen shifts in their meaning of place/space, work-life balance, business ecosystem, and the balance between in-person and virtual commerce. As a result, the framework positions liminality as a state of in-between through which SMEs navigate business foci, personal priorities, and environmental conditions (i.e., regulative directives, industry factors, community behaviour, customer behaviour, and employee factors) through which entrepreneurial resourcefulness can allow SMEs to learn, transform and resolve tensions, resulting in a “new normal”.