Entrepreneurship and process studies (original) (raw)
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The Routledge Companion to Entrepreneurship
2014
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'.
Dynamics of Entrepreneurial Process seen from a Local Perspective
The excessive fluidity in our daily life is conducting us through an ecological, social and economic degradation. Society need to rethink its consumption and production practices. For this, entrepreneurs should switch the ideas of order, rationality, predictability, and determinism for those of disorder, adaptability and randomness, to deal with changing times and to develop themselves in a sustainable way. The aim of this communication is to describe why entrepreneurial processes are neither static nor deterministic but follow the principles of dynamics. These principles have to do with the emergence of attractors and boundaries that interrupt the system function, creating both disorder and new organisation, in an endless recursive cycle. So, the way in which entrepreneurship is studied and supported should consider these dynamics. This contribution lays on the theoretical and methodological layer for allowing entrepreneurs to define more accurately their value proposition, using t...
Entrepreneurial Studies: The Dynamic Research Front of a Developing Social Science
Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 2006
Entrepreneurship has developed from a subdiscipline of management studies reliant on alien terms and cognitive methods toward a separate field with increasing complexities of its own. While not fully mature, entrepreneurship shows all the signs of a maturing field from its increasingly internal orientation and the establishment of key areas of research through to an enhanced, discipline-specific, theoretical approach with a professional language of its own.
We examine the growing disconnect between the process-oriented conception of entrepreneurship taught in the classroom and theorized about in premier journals and the variance-oriented conception of entrepreneurship that characterizes empirical studies of the phenomenon. We propose that a shift in inquiry from entrepreneurship as an act to entrepreneurship as a journey could facilitate process-oriented research by initiating a dialogue about the nature of the entrepreneurial journey, when it has begun and ended, whether it might be productively subdivided into variables or events, and what if anything remains constant throughout the process. Finally, we propose that a clearer understanding of the entrepreneurial journey is necessary to distinguish the field horizontally from research on creativity and strategy, and vertically from research on more practical business functions or more abstract systems-level concepts.
Going with the Flow in Entrepreneurship Research
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2013
Viewing entrepreneurial opportunities as emergent social structures invites a self-organization perspective that redirects entrepreneurship enquiry towards the deep set of simple, recursive rules that drive the entrepreneurial process. As a flow working against constraints, entrepreneurship creates opportunities of many shapes. Future research should aim to understand the momentary operation of the flow rather than its ultimate destination.
Towards a mythic process philosophy of entrepreneurship
Journal of Business Venturing Insights, 2018
Drawing on the archetypal theory of the hero's journey, we present an analysis of Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey to theorise on a primordial organisation of entrepreneurial processes. We conclude by discussing opportunities implied by a mythic-process approach in developing new meaning for the ‘beginnings’ and ‘ends’ in the process philosophy of entrepreneurship.