Karen Verduyn

Critical perspectives in entrepreneurship research

In the face of the extraordinary events of the late 2000s ‘global financial crisis’, it may have been expected that some drastic rethink of the unquestioning idealization of the entrepreneur as prototype ‘homo economicus’, all aspirational and risk-taking would flood the world’s media and preoccupy social commentators. One might have expected social, political and business media to pursue empirical research and theoretical analyses seeking out new forms of financial and organizational life to militate against the obscenely unequal, grossly exploitative and boom-crash ethos of market economics. It could equally have been imagined that newly awakened ‘captains of industry’ would

Emancipation and/or oppression? Conceptualizing dimensions of criticality in entrepreneurship studies

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to use the attribute “critical” as a sensitizing concept to emphasize entrepreneurships role in overcoming extant relations of exploitation, domination and oppression. It builds on the premise that entrepreneurship not only brings about new firms, products and services but also new openings for more liberating forms of individual and collective existence. Design/methodology/approach – Honing in on Calas et al.s (2009) seminal piece on critical entrepreneurship studies, and building on Laclaus (1996) conceptualization of emancipation as intimately related to oppression, the paper explores different interpretations of emancipation and discuss these from a critical understanding of entrepreneurship. The paper then employs these interpretations to introduce and “classify” the five articles in this special issue. Findings – The editorial charts four interpretations of emancipation along two axes (utopian-dystopian and heterotopian-paratopian), and relates these to vari...

Entrepreneurship as practice: grounding contemporary practice theory into entrepreneurship studies

With this special issue we aim at furthering the entrepreneurship as practice perspective by grounding the broader and contemporary ‘practice turn’ in social science (Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina, and vo...

An Uncommon Wealth . . .Transforming the Commons With Purpose, for People and Not for Profit!

The overemphasis on individualism in much normative entrepreneurship discourse belies the powerful role played by local level and communal forms of barter, culturally based collectivist models of organization, social enterprise, and other forms of co-investment. Following Rindova et al., we argue innovation in entrepreneurship can be an emancipatory process with broad change potential to bring about new economic, social, institutional, and cultural environments. New forms of productive social relations and cooperative effort generate new ways of liberating individual and collective existence. However, the dark side of entrepreneurialism also casts its shadow over the pursuit of an idealized commons. Romanticizing forms of collective entrepreneurialism as a means for elevating vulnerable groups may have contrary effects, especially for those already socially and economically marginalized. Theorizing entrepreneurship from a critical perspective, we draw on Laclau’s emancipation–oppression dualism. We explore the contradictions and potentialities of locally based communal entrepreneurship as expressions of a dynamic tension, which is simultaneously both transformative and exploitative in orientation.

Entrepreneuring and process: A Lefebvrian perspective

This article engages with processual thinking building upon contributions that posit entrepreneuring as fluid, not necessarily intentional nor necessarily planned, yet as open and indeterminate taking inspiration from the works of French philosopher Henri Lefebvre. Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis connects ‘becoming’ to ‘everydayness’, considering lived rhythms, respecting all events and, by doing so, offering a markedly fragmentary detailed understanding of rhythmicity. Seeing entrepreneuring as an active intervening in the spatio-temporal rhythms of everyday life, a Lefebvrian perspective allows for not only a subtle, nuanced and dynamic analysing of how disruptions of existing rhythms lead to smaller or larger changes to ‘reality’, but also points at how such changes are not neutral.