The Routledge Companion to Entrepreneurship (original) (raw)

entrepreneurship creates actual value potential for users to act upon. This act on the part of the user can be a purchase decision. Such an act makes the user (of this potential) into a consumer. The offer-what is there to consume-is the value potential. The decision to purchase means the value of the offer is greater (to the user) than the price at which it can be purchased. An mp3 player, when it first appeared, represented a value offer for a user. Economists interpret the act to purchase it for, say, $200 as the result of an economic decision: my ownership and use of the mp3 player is worth more to me than the price at which it is offered. We all know the economic basis for a purchase decision is but one of many, where aesthetic, social, political and psychological grounds often are of greater importance for explaining the decision to buy. The point here is simply to exemplify entrepreneurship as this social creation process that rigs action in fictional anticipation of actual actionable value potential. For this we have suggested that fabulation (narratively performed imagination; Hjorth 2013) and organization creation (Gartner 2012; Hjorth 2010, 2012a, 2012b) are central. Seeing entrepreneurship as part of the central forces shaping society also makes its philosophy important as it provides concepts for how to reflexively think about this entrepreneurship-society relationship. How is actionable value potential actualized then? Actualization, which has no resemblance to actual models, progresses via differentiation-it creates an original organizational coherence in which new value in turn can be actualized (Hardt 1993). This is creation as no order stands model. This is also why it is driven by fictional anticipation-imagination has to provide the images of what could become actual. We are not yet in the realm of economy here, where we find concepts like risk, uncertainty (Knight 1921) and ambiguity (the latter already at the border of economic thought). Rather, this is thinking's groping after what is not yet there, a becoming sensible of thought. Imagination, Massumi suggests (2002a: 134) can also be called intuition (philosophical intuition concerns that for which there are no facts as yet available; Hofmann 2010), or a feeling of thought groping after the un-thought, a movement in the freedom of the postinstrumental and preoperative. 1 This is where we find entrepreneurship's white canvas (Hjorth 2003), its entre-space (Steyaert 2000) and its space for play (Hjorth 2005). This is thus another way in which we arrive at thinking's challenge in entrepreneurship studies: our study centres on how action is rigged, through social processes of organization creation, in fictional anticipation of actual actionable value potential. There are connections to Kirznerian alertness (if we think this upstream into imagination or intuition) and Shackle (see Popp and Holt 2013) who, when rethinking economy and history, stress inceptive thought, a concept that comes close to what we have described above as fictional anticipation. 2 Philosophy shares this interest with us, and we have much to learn from this 'partnership'.