Critical Perspectives on Entrepreneurship: Challenging Dominant Discourses

by Caroline Essers (Editor), Pascal Dey (Editor), Deirdre Tedmanson (Editor), Karen Verduyn (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781138938878
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	02/09/2017
Series:	Routledge Rethinking Entrepreneurship Research
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Caroline Essers is an Associate Professor Entrepreneurship at VU University Amsterdam and an Assistant Professor Strategic Human Resource Management at the Radboud University Nijmegen, Faculty of Management. Her work has been published in the Organization Studies, Organization, Human Relations, Gender, Work and Organization, British Journal of Management, Entrepreneurship and Regional Development, and International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour & Research. She is a board member of the Entrepreneurship Studies Network (special interest group of the Institute for Small Business and Entrepreneurship), and an Associate Editor for Gender, Work and Organization.

Pascal Dey is a senior lecturer at the Unversity of St. Gallen (Institute for Business Ethics). His most recent research project investigates emancipatory forms of organizing via the twin prism of dialectic and actor network theory. Apart from his academic work, he has gained extensive experience as a strategy consultant and business founder while operating at the intersection of sustainability, organic food production and development aid. Pascal has published in various journals, such as Organization, Social Enterprise Journal, International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour & Research, and Journal of Social Entrepreneurship.

Deirdre Tedmanson is an associate researcher for the Hawke Research Institute for Sustanaible Societies and actively involved with both its Social Policy Research Group and Centre for Postcolonial and Globalization Studies. In addition to her lecturing and research interests with UniSA and the DKCRC, she is a Research Scholar with the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research at the Australian National University where she is completing a PhD in political science and public policy. Deirdre has published in Organization, Gender, Work and Organization, the Management Learning Journal, International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour & Research and Organization Studies.

Karen Verduyn is a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration of VU University Amsterdam, and programme director of the Amsterdam (joint) MSc in Entrepreneurship. She has published in such journals as the International Review of Entrepreneurship, the Journal of Enterprising Communities, Entrepreneurship and Regional Development, International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour & Research and Organization. She is a board member of the Entrepreneurship Studies Network (special interest group of the Institute for Small Business and Entrepreneurship), and the International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business.

Table of Contents

1. Critical Entrepreneurship Studies – a Manifesto Caroline Essers, Pascal Dey, Deirdre Tedmanson and Karen Verduyn

Section 1: Contesting Neo-Liberal Aspects of Traditional Entrepreneurship Approaches

2. Social Entrepreneurs: Precious and Precarious Karin Berglund

3. Social Enterprise and the Everydayness of Precarious Indigenous Cambodian Villagers: Challenging ethnocentric epistemologies Isaac Lyne

4. Reasons to be Fearful: The ‘Google Model of Production’, entrepreneurship, corporate power, and the concentration of dispersed knowledge Gerard Hanlon

Section 2: Locating New Forms of Indigenous and Community-Based Entrepreneurship

5. Emerging Entrepreneurship in South America Miguel Imas

6. Challenging Leadership in Discourses of Indigenous Entrepreneurship in Australia Deirdre Tedmanson and Michelle Evans

7. Feeding the City: The importance of the informal Warung restaurants for the urban economy in Indonesia Peter de Boer and Lothar Smith

Section 3: Critiquing the Archetype of the White, Christian Entrepreneur

8. Injecting Reality into the Migrant Entrepreneurship Agenda Monder Ram, Trevor Jones and Maria Villares

9. Bringing Strategy Back: Ethnic minority entrepreneurs’ construction of legitimacy by ‘fitting in’ and ‘standing out’ in the creative industries Annelies Thoelen and Patrizia Zanoni

10. A Critical Reflection on Female Migrant Entrepreneurship in the Netherlands Karen Verduyn and Caroline Essers

Section 4: Challenging the Gendered Sub-Text in Entrepreneurship

11. Critically Evaluating Contemporary Entrepreneurship from a Feminist Perspective Susan Marlow and Haya Al-Dajani

12. On Entrepreneurship and Empowerment: Postcolonial feminist interventions Banu Ozkazanc-Pan

13. Bridging the Gap Between Resistance and Power Through Agency: An empirical analysis of struggle by immigrant woman entrepreneurs Huriye Aygören

Section 5: Deconstructing Entrepreneurship

14. Governance of Welfare and Expropriation of the Common: Polish tales of entrepreneurship Dorota Marsh and Pete Thomas

15. Deconstructing Ecopreneurship Annika Skoglund

Editorial Reviews

This is an excellent book. Critical studies are gaining ground in the entrepreneurship field; and this edited volume provides a much needed overview that challenges our thinking on what constitutes entrepreneurship and why. The chapters highlight the value of critically reviewing well-known phenomena such as minority, ethnic, indigenous entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship, gender and entrepreneurship. The editors have done a superb job in assembling such knowledgeable contributors. A must read for all of us interested in the contribution critical perspectives can make to entrepreneurship research.

Friederike Welter, Institut für Mittelstandsforschung Bonn, and University of Siegen, Germany.

The coming of Essers, Dey, Tedmanson and Verduyn’s excellent collection is in itself a manifesto for the strength of critical entrepreneurship studies. As contributions to this field, each and every chapter voices entrepreneurship as a social change activity capable of speaking back, explicitly or implicitly, to what the 'entrepreneur' of neoliberalism attempts to conceal. At the same time, each chapter articulates a whole other world of possibilities. A 'must read' to act upon!

Marta B. Calás, Professor of Organization Studies and International Management, University of Massachusetts, USA

Adopting a proactive stance for highlighting new critiques and contexts of entrepreneurship, this thought-provoking collection of critical narratives discusses entrepreneurship as a social change activity. With an interest in non-traditional entrepreneurial activities, this authoritative volume advances critical scholarship and fosters a new agenda for entrepreneurship research in the coming decade.

Denise Fletcher, Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg

From the Publisher