Identity Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

In the contemporary economic imaginary, the concept of entrepreneurship occupies a central if conflicted position, simultaneously representing both conformity and resistance. On the one hand entrepreneurship has come to signify the upholding and cementing dynamic that makes modern market capitalism possible (du Gay, 1991), and to engage in entrepreneurship is thus in this sense to be part of a conservative discourse. On the other hand, entrepreneurship is commonly symbolized as representing a disruptive, even revolutionary force (Anderson and Warren, 2011), one where talk of “mavericks” (Hall, 1997; Silver, 2012), “rebels” (Ket de Vries, 1997) or disruption more generally (Bilton, 2013; Ries, 2011; Stross 2012) is common in the discourse of the same. Within contemporary capitalism, then, to present oneself as an entrepreneur is to occupy a complex space betwixt and between the corporation – a form which the entrepreneurial organization often strives to turn into – and the “outsider” who challenges the very same corporate world. Entrepreneurship can thus, although this is not acknowledged in the existent literature, come to signify resistance, but a very complex form of resistance – one that can quite easily, and often by necessity (e.g. by alignment with venture capital or the likes), become re-inscribed into the same corporate structure to which it tries to formulate resistance.
Our paper will inquire into this implicit but unacknowledged and unstudied contradiction by way of a case-study based on a highly successful start-up venture, SoundCloud, in which both the founders and the employees struggle to negotiate their positions between being a successful company within an obviously corporate framework, and exhibiting an organizational identity that emphasizes resistance to the very same frameworks. In both their discourse and their acts, people in the company attempt to highlight how working in an entrepreneurial organization represents resistance to (assumed) more restrictive and less ethical forms of corporate engagements. At the same time, they are embedded in notions of contemporary capitalism such as market share, growth, valuations, return on investments and the likes.
What we aim to do, in other words, is to develop the theory of organizational resistance (e.g. Ashcraft, 2005; Fleming and Spicer, 2007; Mumby, 2005) by highlighting the way in which modern discourses of entrepreneurialism (Down and Reveley, 2004; Jones and Spicer, 2005; Malach-Pines wt al., 2005; Ogbor, 2000) contain a complex and fundamentally contradictory relationship between resistance and conformism, and how this plays out in the lived practices of a start-up venture. By paying attention to the contradictions that emerge when a company attempts to hold on to an image of being an outsider whilst being aggressively courted by surrounding industrial dynamics (including but not limited to raising several rounds of financing and winning industry awards and similar accolades), we extend the theory of resistance in organizational settings. Namely by demonstrating the manner in which discourses of resistance can be part of a greater corporate ideology, and also by highlighting the conflicts that identifying with a “pre-packaged” (i.e. discursively pre-determined) notion of resistance and otherness can bring to an entrepreneurial organization.