James Latham

Narrative construction of the social entrepreneurial identity

Purpose – This paper aims to examine the process by which the social entrepreneurial identity can be constructed through narrative, concentrating specifically on the construction of the identity of the ideologically inclined social‐activist entrepreneur.Design/methodology/approach – A case study approach is employed of a social‐activist entrepreneur who established a refugee help centre in a major Australian city. The data are presented through the genre of allowing the narrator to enjoy the primary voice in the form of an extended narrative.Findings – The findings show how the social entrepreneur constructs his identity through crafted divisions based on oppositional and appositional principles of setting apart (a claim of separation) and bringing together (a claim of similarity). It is emphasised how the impact of the particular audience and the possibility of narrative omissions can both influence the narrative product as it is constructed by the social entrepreneur.Practical implications – The analysi...

Power as Practice: A Micro-sociological Analysis of the Dynamics of Emancipatory Entrepreneurship

This paper contributes to a recent movement to reframe entrepreneurship theory into a more critical and reflexive mode. It builds on the processual notion of entrepreneuring-as-emancipation to theorize a balanced conception of agency and active constraint rooted in the notion of power rituals. We develop a micro-sociological analysis of power rituals that conceives power reproduction and entrenchment as a ‘practice-based’ activity that focuses on what power holders and subordinates concretely do, think and feel. This makes emotion a key dimension of entrepreneurial agency and redefines constraining barriers to agency in terms of a social process of ‘barring’. This novel approach is illustrated using an autobiographical account of a social entrepreneurship project. On the basis of this analysis, a number of insights are provided into the ways in which the power-as-practice approach can inform wider debates in organization studies where the notions of agency and constraint are linked to issues of power and resistance.

Entrepreneurship and the innovative self: a Schumpeterian reflection

Purpose – This paper draws upon the Schumpeterian statement that effective change only comes from within. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether this notion can be applied to personal life and practices displayed by certain individuals wishing to innovate themselves by recombining given personal resources with the purpose of establishing a new person enterprise.Design/methodology/approach – The approach used in this article is to conceptually propose and argue a reading of entrepreneurship as the agency of an innovative subject, embedded in a Foucauldian technology of the self based on self‐care and self‐knowledge.Findings – The analysis leads to the finding that the individual who challenges (or resists) destiny, or a given personal order, and manages to establish a new personal order, is entrepreneurial in so far as s/he changes the way of doing things, or a static way of living.Research limitations/implications – The paper suggests theoretical implications for further research. The use of ...

Creating the illusion of employee empowerment: lean production in the international automobile industry

A range of studies have pointed out the gap between management rhetoric and reality about employee empowerment in lean automobile plants. However, how managers in lean plants manage to carry off this illusion has received less attention in the literature. In this paper we adopt a critical approach to analyse some of the major studies in the lean automobile literature and identify a range of factors employed by lean managers which effectively explain how employee empowerment is silenced, despite corporate rhetoric to the contrary. We use the concept of heterogeneous engineering and associated post-structural ideas to demonstrate how the illusion is perpetrated in practice, paying attention to an actual case study in a lean automobile plant.