“If I Accomplish Nothing Else but Hope, That Will be Enough”: The Ethics and Morality of Market-Based Hope in Illness Entrepreneurship, 2025, Geiger

[Dolphin]

“If I Accomplish Nothing Else but Hope, That Will be Enough”: The Ethics and Morality of Market-Based Hope in Illness Entrepreneurship - Journal of Business Ethics

How do entrepreneurs embody and enact hope as a motor for ethical agency—agency that builds one’s own and others’ capacities and capabilities to overcome a painful present? This study puts hope at the center of theorizing around the activities of entrepreneurs who leverage it both as a way to...

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“If I Accomplish Nothing Else but Hope, That Will be Enough”: The Ethics and Morality of Market-Based Hope in Illness Entrepreneurship​

• Original Paper
• Open access
• Published: 06 January 2026
• (2026)
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“If I Accomplish Nothing Else but Hope, That Will be Enough”: The Ethics and Morality of Market-Based Hope in Illness Entrepreneurship

• Susi Geiger &
• Olya Loza

Abstract​

How do entrepreneurs embody and enact hope as a motor for ethical agency—agency that builds one’s own and others’ capacities and capabilities to overcome a painful present?

This study puts hope at the center of theorizing around the activities of entrepreneurs who leverage it both as a way to sketch a new life for themselves and to sell it to others.

Through the case of illness entrepreneurs—recovery coaches for those suffering from chronic illnesses—we observe the moral struggles involved when hope becomes framed within the logic of the market.

Recovery coaches at once embody hope (as formerly sick people who have recovered), neatly package and sell it (as entrepreneurs), and manifest it (opening up new spaces of possibility for themselves).

The work involved in balancing these threads requires constant realignment of the entrepreneurs’ own hopes for a new life and their care for others.

We show how, through these moral struggles, hope opens up new spaces of possibility and imbues people—both entrepreneurs and their clients—with the agency to move toward those new horizons.

Conceptualizing the complex entanglements of hope, care, and ethical agency, our study represents a foray into recent calls for assembling and theorizing the ‘architecture of hope’ in organization and entrepreneurship studies.

We also discuss whether this entrepreneurship, balancing hope and care to enable ethical agency, opens up new ways of understanding morality and agency in market contexts.

 

[Dolphin]

Methods​

In seeking to establish how entrepreneurs can enact hope as a motor for ethical agency, we need to study up-close the spaces of possibility that are opened up or closed down in these market-based contexts. We explore these issues in the market for ME/CFS and Long Covid (henceforth simply ME/CFS) recovery services. This market is one in which both sellers and buyers are often desperate for hope: the entrepreneurs in this market are frequently former sufferers who had to contend with major biographical disruptions caused by the illness and who have to reinvent themselves. They draw on their experience—both of being ill and finding their way to recovery—to offer their services as recovery coaches to the wider ME/CFS, Long Covid, and chronic illness community. Importantly, they also typically develop their services in response to what they perceive as the failings of mainstream healthcare markets and the hopelessness that they experienced navigating these markets. They engage in entrepreneurship often as somewhat accidental entrepreneurs, having undergone major life and financial disruption through prolonged illness but rarely having planned for an entrepreneurial existence.

[..]

On the basis of these insights, the current paper is based on a more targeted empirical inquiry concerning the market for hope built in this space of suffering: extensive secondary data collection and 12 narrative interviews (ranging between 75 and 120 min) with 11 recovery coaches (one was interviewed twice) who were all former ME/CFS sufferers. Table 1 describes our participants’ details and aliases.

 

[Arnie Pye]

How many times can people seeking to monetise "hope" keep making money before their clients decide they are just being exploited and/or lied to?

 

[Sean]

The only hope I want is via realistic robust studies. Anything else is a methodological and ethical cesspit.

I regard recovered patients – to the extent they actually exist – as one of the more misleading sources of insight, ideas, and progress. Especially when they are making a buck from their hope peddling.

 

[Yann04]

The problem is most recovered patients are constantly told by our oppressors that they must have done things “right” or believed the “right thing”. So obviously many will start to believe that over time because its a flattering narrative and they don’t hear it challenged. It’s also an effective belief to kind of “deal with” the trauma of getting sick. In the sense that believing even if it happened again you could make it out is very comforting.

I think it’s perhaps similar to the narrative that wealthy people are somehow “special” or “more deserving” and if everything was set equal they would come out on top again.

 

[SNT Gatchaman]

11 recovery coaches (one was interviewed twice) who were all former ME/CFS sufferers

Interesting to see descriptions of still having to limit their activities: stated or implied. Eg —

Hope manifested in our interviews with recovery coaches strongly not just in care for others but also in their own hopeful dispositions toward the future, particularly their vision of fleshing out a new way of living and working.

One of the persistent moral struggles our participants described was trying to help as many fellow sufferers while keeping themselves from overworking and relapsing. Achieving alignment was not only about living the values they wanted to put out into the world; it was also about finding a balance between the amount and type of work they do and their personal wellbeing. QT for instance emphasized how she continuously sought to balance her own wellbeing needs with helping her client base:

I think that, probably the biggest challenge now is managing the growth of the business, and how many people I can coach and teach, with my own mindbody needs, and finding balance in my lived work-life

PJ similarly said she was ‘very disciplined’ about her personal boundaries and limits to her energy reserves: “I protect what I have got.” For her, this means that there was a ceiling to how many people she can support at any one time.

 

[Trish]

A more useful study would be long term follow up with the hope peddlers' clients.

How many clients have been seriously harmed by trying to live up to all this toxic positivity? How many are suicidal because they are told they aren't trying hard enough and find hope is false hope? This whole thing sickens me.