Critical Perspectives on Entrepreneurship

Challenging Dominant Discourses

Caroline Essers, Pascal Dey, Deirdre Tedmanson, Karen Verduyn, Caroline Essers, Pascal Dey, Deirdre Tedmanson, Karen Verduyn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138938878
• eBook ISBN: 9781317382003
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Entrepreneurship is largely considered to be a positive force, driving venture creation and economic growth. Critical Perspectives on Entrepreneurship questions the accepted norms and dominant assumptions of scholarship on the matter, and reveals how they can actually obscure important questions of identity, ideology and inequality.

The book's distinguished authors and editors explore how entrepreneurship study can privilege certain forms of economic action, whilst labelling other, more collective forms of organization and exchange as problematic. Demystifying the archetypal vision of the white, male entrepreneur, this book gives voice to other entrepreneurial subjectivities and engages with the tensions, paradoxes and ambiguities at the heart of the topic.

This challenging collection seeks to further the momentum for alternate analyses of the field, and to promote the growing voice of critical entrepreneurship studies. It is a useful tool for researchers, advanced students and policy-makers.

1 Critical entrepreneurship studies

A manifesto

Caroline Essers, Pascal Dey, Deirdre Tedmanson and Karen Verduyn

This edited collection on critical entrepreneurship studies aims to explore, and thereby expand our understanding of entrepreneurship by elaborating on this popular and widely invoked discourse using different critical perspectives. The reason to write (and read!) this book is at least twofold. First, even though entrepreneurship is a very diverse, multifaceted and contested phenomenon, and regardless of the fact that entrepreneurship research has become increasingly more hospitable towards alternative theoretical influences and methodological procedures, it is fairly uncontroversial to say that the majority of entrepreneurship research is still functionalist in nature (Perren and Jennings 2005). Research in this tradition is mainly interested in entrepreneurship as a purely market-based phenomenon: a ‘special’ trait or set of behaviours which drive venture creation and which precipitate economic growth. Hence, one reason why we deem this edited collection to be important relates to the observation that aside from a ‘few exceptions, the extensive literature on entrepreneurship positions it as a positive economic activity’ (Calas et al. 2009, p. 552). This focus on entrepreneurship as a ‘desirable’ economic activity, perceived unquestioningly as positive, obscures important questions about who can sensibly be considered an entrepreneur and who can not (Jones and Spicer 2009); how entrepreneurship works ideologically to conceal the true state of reality (Armstrong 2001; Costa and Saraiva 2012) or to make people do things they would not otherwise do (Dey and Lehner 2016); or how entrepreneurship fuels inequality and perpetuates unequal relations of power (Curran and Blackburn 2001; Kenny and Scriver 2012). Second, although critical approaches may still inhabit a marginal position in the broader academic discourse on entrepreneurship, we assert that critical research has gained noticeable traction over the past decade. Various contributions have been discussed at the influential and important platform of critical management studies conferences, as well as at the annual meetings of the Academy of Management.

In light of the ongoing dominance of functionalist approaches as well as recent signs of change towards more critical and nuanced perspectives, we offer this book as a collection of critical narratives which render visible diverse examples of non-traditional entrepreneurship as well as usually overshadowed aspects of ‘traditional’ entrepreneurship. The chapters in this book interrogate entrepreneurship from a range of differing perspectives. They each reveal how extant research has tended to privilege entrepreneurship as a distinct field of economic action and an exclusive activity for distinct groups of people, while at the same time illustrating examples of other, more collective and value-based forms of entrepreneurial organising and exchange. Accordingly, the book takes issue with and exposes some of the dominant ideologies, intellectual traditions and prevailing assumptions which bind entrepreneurship within the dictum of profit maximisation and wealth creation (Görling and Rehn 2008; Rindova et al. 2009). At the same time, the book assumes a proactive stance in seeking to position entrepreneurship as an activity, behaviour or process which can be linked to new ethical and political possibilities. Together, the chapters give voice to unheard stories, places and potentialities of entrepreneurship which are usually left out of existing research (Steyaert and Katz 2004). In this book, entrepreneurship is reconceptualised as a social change activity that moves against the grain of orthodoxy in order to realise spaces of freedom and otherness (Dey and Steyaert 2016; Hjorth 2004; Verduyn et al. 2014; Essers and Tedmanson 2014).

It is our explicit hope that this edited collection will further the momentum for alternate analyses of entrepreneurship within the field of critical scholarship. We have chosen to include illuminating chapters that aim to explore how political and socio-cultural factors influence entrepreneurial processes, identities and activities, and have sought to extend entrepreneurship research horizons by highlighting new critiques and contexts that challenge existing orthodoxies.

The book is divided into five thematic parts. In Part I, we contest the neo-liberal aspects of entrepreneurship discourse by showing other meanings of entrepreneurship, including social entrepreneurship initiatives. In Chapter 2, Karin Berglund uses three examples of social entrepreneurship from the Swedish context – a green self-reliant community, a case of supporting women’s entrepreneurship, and a project that combines artistry and entrepreneurship – as a vehicle to, through the concept of the precariat, discuss how social entrepreneurship may be political. Through the discussion of standing, the chapter addresses questions such as: Where is social entrepreneurship headed and what does it bring with it? Is social entrepreneurship a path toward sustainability in its ambition to criticise capitalism and non-sustainable society, and to offer more socially, environmentally and culturally sustainable solutions? Or does it indicate, rather – like the precariat – a fragmentation of society which contributes to political exclusion?

In Chapter 3, by drawing upon Gibson-Graham’s work, Isaac Lyne illustrates the resistance to homogenising notions of ‘community’ conveyed by the discourse of social enterprise. He applies critical resource flow analysis to draw out meaningful claims on resources, the way resources come to be mobilised, and how ‘surplus’ is generated and distributed not only through social enterprise but also through religious festivities and non-monetary exchanges. In Chapter 4, Gerard Hanlon investigates the relationship between entrepreneurship and contemporary capitalism. Taking its cue from the work of Kirzner, Hanlon’s contribution suggests that the essence of entrepreneurship is increasingly characterised by the capture of value and not, as common sense has it, creation, innovation and production. Specifically, Hanlon points out that entrepreneurship is increasingly engaged in the use of property rights as a means of capturing value produced beyond the corporation through ‘free’ labour and the enclosing of skills and knowledge developed elsewhere. In doing so, it encourages a society based in secrecy and mistrust. This contribution concludes that entrepreneurship plays an eminent ideological role in how it justifies a new regime of accumulation. This regime is more unequal; it appears to be increasingly located in rent as opposed to the search for profit-driven efficiencies within the production process and, somewhat unexpectedly, is characterised by capital’s growing uninterest in the how or where of production.

In Part II, we aim to show how an ideological dichotomy has been constructed in what we perceive to be hegemonic entrepreneurship research, and between notions of entrepreneurship, economic development and self-employment. We focus here on entrepreneurship for self-employment in non-Western contexts. In Chapter 5, Alia Weston and Miguel Imas expand their theoretical ideas on the barefoot entrepreneurs (i.e. people who dwell at the margins of our society) by exploring them as a reflection of decolonial practices founded on art-resistance and socio-economic principles of a transformative humanistic kind. They discuss these ideas in order to give these entrepreneurs voice and a platform to engage with the ongoing struggles, lives and experiences of marginalised and forgotten communities. These disenfranchised communities have been deprived of a voice by neoliberal capitalist practices that invoke entrepreneurial activity. The entrepreneurial activity imposed by this economic system legitimises their exploitation and marginalisation, continuing to colonise their discourses, identities and daily lives. Critically in this chapter, they question this neoliberal practice in order to further decolonise and expose its exploitative nature. By decolonising, they seek two things: first, to reconstruct entrepreneurship as an emancipatory creative activity that build solidarity among all communities; and second, an entrepreneurship that redistributes economic power and helps communities on a sustainable path.

In Chapter 6, Deirdre Tedmanson and Michelle Evans explore how entrepreneurship research is largely bound by Western organisational discourses. The purpose is to call into question the hegemonic performativity of conventional discourse about heroic (white male) styles of leadership in entrepreneurship. Tedmanson and Evans explore Indigenous leadership subjectivities to reveal new ways in which order and leadership is enacted in cultural contexts through participation and inclusivity, rather than top-down command (Peredo and Anderson 2006; Spiller et al. 2011). The contradictions and tensions inherent in assumptions which idealise Western hierarchical understandings of power and authority are deconstructed. Using contemporary empirical research, relational forms of collective and collaborative leadership are explored in the context of Indigenous entrepreneurship in Australia. The chapter focuses on the social transformation occurring in the development of Indigenous entrepreneurship driven by community connectedness rather than by any simplistic reproduction of ‘homo-economicus’ (Evans 2012; Tedmanson et al. 2012). Writing from an Indigenous worldview and standpoint (Foley 2008; Moreton-Robinson 2003), the authors explore leadership as the creation of a ‘space of belonging’ and critically analyse how the co-creation of entrepreneurial effort strengthens Indigenous community efficacy (Tedmanson 2014; Evans 2012).

Part II ends with Peter de Boer and Lothar Smith’s contribution (Chapter 7), in which they explore the role of the so-called Warung restaurants. The fundamental question they ask is whether these restaurants, characteristic of the informal economy, support the endeavours of cities aspiring to be part of the global economy. Basing their findings on research conducted among owners and customers in the city of Yogyakarta as well as various government agencies concerned with their existence, they conclude that these Warungs are strongly intertwined with the formal economy. Fundamentally they are an efficient way of providing the lowest classes of the city with an affordable, decent meal. However, in a more subtle manner these Warungs also provide a certain social fabric to the city; they are places that give meaning to the lives of the urban poor. Hence, this case also shows the importance of (informal) small business ownership, an economic activity often seen as ‘marginalised’ and less ‘real’ entrepreneurially in mainstream entrepreneurship literature.

In Part III, we demonstrate how traditional entrepreneurship research furthers an archetype of the white, Christian entrepreneur – which marginalises ‘Other’ ethnic entrepreneurs. The contributors critically discuss how ‘Other’ entrepreneurs construct their entrepreneurial identities in relation to their ethnic identities, and how this challenges public discourses about ethnic minorities. In Chapter 8, Jones, Ram and Villares draw particular attention to the importance of context when examining ethnic minority businesses. They problematise prevailing tendencies to view entrepreneurship as an unfettered route to social mobility for ethnic minority and immigrant groups. They argue that the conceptualisation of ethnic minority entrepreneurship needs to recognise the diverse economic and social relationships in which firms are embedded. This signifies a weakening of ethnicity as an explanatory factor implied for the anatomy of immigrant and ethnic minority enterprise. Ethnic minority entrepreneurs do not necessarily opt for entrepreneurship because they essentially have more entrepreneurial ‘genes’ than other ethnicities, but start businesses for a variety of reasons. Their surrounding structures have an impact on their motivations and possibilities, and it is important to scrutinise these surroundings when theorising ethnic minority entrepreneurship – seeing it in a less essentialist way – and to analyse how different groups of ethnic minority entrepreneurs seek agency through these structures to enterprise. In Chapter 9, while drawing on De Clercq and Voronov (2009), Thoelen and Zanoni investigate the narrative use of ethnic minority identity for constructing legitimacy through ‘fitting in’ and ‘standing out’. By doing so they aim to bridge individual and organisational levels of inquiry to understand how ethnic minority entrepreneurs’ identities may be used as an asset for business achievement. Based on in-depth interviews with ethnic entrepreneurs in the creative industries, they identify four types of use of the ethnic minority background: the ‘ethnic’ creative strategy, the ‘hybrid’ creative strategy, the ‘heroic’ creative strategy and the ‘neutral’ creative strategy. The study contributes to the stream of literature approaching ethnic minority entrepreneurs as agents instead of structural ‘dopes’, by highlighting the heterogeneous ways in which ethnic minority identity and background can be deployed for business strategies and how they construct these identities in relation to the public discourse on ethnic minority entrepreneurs. The objective of the final chapter of this section (Chapter 10) is to scrutinise a particular group of entrepreneurs, namely migrant female entrepreneurs with a Turkish or Moroccan background (a group usually and typically excluded in not only popular discourse but also in mainstream entrepreneurship literature) within a typical Western society, one that firmly ascribes to individualism. Verduyn and Essers combine the stories of female ethnic entrepreneurs with Dutch institutional stories to see on what premises these women, and these institutions, base their stories, and if and how they show overlap or contrast. Since centre–margin positionalities are central to our investigations, deconstruction analysis is used as an inspirational source for the analysis. It reveals that the institutional stories resonate strongly with the hegemonic, positive discourse on entrepreneurship, whereas these women’s stories are more ambivalent, and in many ways resist the institution’s point of view.

Part IV discusses the way entrepreneurship is traditionally constructed around discourses of a masculine, male subject. Using various feminist lenses, the authors explicate how gender and entrepreneuring come together to generate different experiences of entrepreneurship. In Chapter 11, Marlow and Al-Dajani argue how an important facet of the feminist critique of contemporary entrepreneurship has been the increasing focus of the influence of gender upon women’s experiences of business ownership; analyses of how women have been excluded from the dominant entrepreneurial discourse, or are positioned in deficit and lack as entrepreneurial subject beings (Ahl 2006; Ahl and Marlow 2012). Indeed, feminist theory has emerged as a convincing theoretical critique to expose the limiting gendered bias within the current entrepreneurial project (Calas et al. 2009). Yet this stance in and of itself is now recognised as constrained by presumptions of gender as generic and also in being premised upon a US/European-centric stance (Al-Dajani and Marlow 2010). To advance feminist critiques of entrepreneurship, the chapter argues that it is now imperative to develop analyses which recognise how institutional influences arising from differing cultures, contexts and locations (Welter 2011) influence women’s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• 1 Critical entrepreneurship studies: a manifesto
• Part I Contesting neoliberal aspects of traditional entrepreneurship approaches
• Part II Locating new forms of Indigenous and community-based entrepreneurship
• Part III Critiquing the archetype of the white, Christian entrepreneur
• Part IV Challenging the gendered subtext in entrepreneurship
• Part V Deconstructing entrepreneurship
• Index