Michela Betta

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.

Three Case Studies: Australian HIH, American Enron, and Global Lehman Brothers

In this chapter I examine three events that had unprecedented effects on the capitalist economy, business, and society of many Western countries, and to some extent of the whole world. I refer to the collapse of Australian HIH and American Enron in 2001 and the collapse of Global Lehman Brothers in 2008. The reconstruction of some of the most relevant facts surrounding their fall provides new insights into the causes of their bankruptcies. The reasons behind their crises and failures were to some extent unique. There were outdated managerial practices in the case of HIH, audacious managerial and accounting practices related to risk taking in the case of Enron, and out of control financial, banking, and managerial practices related to the securitization of toxic obligations and debts in the case of Lehman Brothers. But the three businesses had one bad habit in common: the accumulation of debts based on borrowed money and speculative thinking in terms of their profit. It now appears that HIH and Enron paved the slippery slope that led to the Great Recession, also known as the global financial crisis (GFC), of 2006–2010. These three cases serve as a reminder that even powerful corporations can capitulate when their actions and transactions breach the conventions of good economic and business practices that still represent the commonly accepted limits of the free market economy.

From Destiny to Freedom? On Human Nature and Liberal Eugenics in the Age of Genetic Manipulation

In his book on the fears plaguing the European cultures and societies between the 14 and 18 centuries, the French historian Jean Delumeau argues that the French Revolution would not have paved the way into the future or permanently removed the old fears from the collective mentality if it had not been progressively overcome by an economic and technological revolution (si elle n’avait pas été progressivement doublée par une révolution économique et technique). A crucial aspect emerges from this quotation: The idea and belief that political transformations precede technological and scientific transformations, or that political changes create the conditions for their development and implementation. Historians have the inclination to read past epochs moving from codes and discourses embedded in political contexts and strategies. They tend, in other words, to read the past moving from one point, identified by them as a (revolutionary/epistemological) caesura, towards the present time, from which they write their facts. Such an approach is rooted in an understanding of scientific and technological changes as derivatives from political pragmatism. To this methodology the idea of progress is fundamental. It goes back to the 18 century. There the idea of a new society emerged which was considered capable of turning its own fate into a progressive improvement through rationality (enlightenment), revolution (Marxism), or ‘‘social evolutionism’’ (liberalism). The validity of this grid has been recently questioned by an analytical approach that avoids describing history as a continuity of interconnected events initiated by political actions unavoidably leading to our present condition, and regulated by intelligible metaphysical rules. Fundamental to this analytic is the idea that people are embedded in a cultural rather than political system made of different fields of knowledge, also called codes.

Academic Referencing on University Library Websites: A Call for Clear, Coherent and Correct Categorisation

Abstract Although commendable in many respects, some university library websites categorise academic referencing styles and systems in ways that are unhelpful and inaccurate. In this article, the four major styles of referencing (Harvard, Oxford, Vancouver and Modern Language Association) are described in sufficient detail to demonstrate that they should be clearly differentiated from each other. Where appropriate, systems that fall within these styles are also described to illustrate that they should be grouped according to the style within which they belong but should also be clearly demarcated. As a result of this, recommendations are made that university library websites provide clearer and more coherent, complete and accurate information about referencing.

The Contradictions of Capitalism: A Schumpeterian Analysis

In this chapter, I discuss the works of Joseph Schumpeter. He was mainly concerned with capitalism and the conditions for its survival. He understood capitalism to be a rational organizational form that included a capitalist system (economy and business), a capitalist order (capitalist institutions and government, politics, and bureaucracies), and capitalist society (culture, mentality and habits, schemes of moral values, and middle-class expectations). Schumpeter argued that the capitalist system contributed to the prosperity of order and society. But he also thought that the capitalist system was exposed to internal contradictions that made it unstable. Threats came also from external sources. He viewed bureaucracies as being driven by political elites too eager to regulate the capitalist system, while cultural movements embodied by public intellectuals condemned capitalism for social and ethical reasons. Schumpeter linked their criticisms to a fundamental inability of capitalism to make itself emotionally attractive.

The Inequality of Capital: An Economic Critique

In this chapter, I discuss recent contributions to the literature concerning development and movement of capital under current capitalist conditions. I have emphasized the critical positions of several authors. Their works have initiated a debate about political, social, and fiscal strategies for a more effective control of capital, redistribution of wealth, reduction of poverty, and improvement of incomes. Current capitalism is understood to be structurally global, socially unfair, and concentrated in the hands of financial elites. The inequality caused by capital is perceived to originate from the cultural supremacy of the capitalist discourse that continually revises the definition of merit. Although it remains difficult, and probably even impossible, to agree on a single definition of capitalism, there seems to be agreement about its effects. Today’s capitalism is considered to be fundamentally detrimental to both the economy and society, and in need of reform. What capitalism does today is not only a matter for market and political forces. Society is implicated in capitalism, and so is ethics. How far this latter implication goes remains to be seen.

Governmentality and the Economy: A Foucauldian Perspective

In this chapter, I continue my historical contextualization of capitalism. I deal with how capitalism became synonymous with liberalism and, later, neoliberalism. The terms liberalism and neoliberalism came to describe the politico-philosophical discourse underpinning capitalism. Drawing on some of Foucault’s works, I reconstruct how liberalism grew out of a reflection about good government. To describe liberal thinking about government, Foucault used the term governmentality. Governance became central to liberalism. It was exercised over people via economic interest. In developing the notion that individuals are driven by material interests, rather than abstract liberties, governmentality made people’s economic interest its goal. The most crucial innovation of liberalism was the market where economic interest could be pursued. Through their economic interest, individuals became predictable from a governmental viewpoint. In being predictable they became governable. Although liberalism created the market as a place where individuals could exercise their economic freedom, liberalism always retained the ultimate responsibility about the free market economy. Later forms of liberalism, also known as neoliberalism, introduced a more radical understanding of government by shifting from governance to self-governance. Government became minimal and responsibility for economic activity was transferred to individuals in the market.