EaP Forum

Hi all, Inge Hill from Coventry University has organized a great workshop on 19 Jan entitled "Strategy as Practice meets Entrepreneurship". You can find more details in the events section of the website. After the session, I'll post a summary and some pictures/videos! Cheers, Neil

www.entrepreneurshipaspractice.com eap4.audencia.com (under construction) ABOUT THE CONFERENCE The 4th version of this conference aims to advance understanding of entrepreneurship-as-practice, foster network ties, facilitate collaborative writing relationships, and build a strong community of practice scholars. To do so, we have developed a Research Conference and PhD Symposium that educates interested scholars as well as develops empirical and conceptual papers regarding the ‘practice turn’ taking place in entrepreneurship studies. Building on the first (February 2016 at VU Amsterdam), second (February 2017 at University College Dublin Quinn School of Business) and third (April 2018 at Linnaeus University) Entrepreneurship-as-Practice conferences, this conference and PhD symposium bring together the growing community of researchers who embrace the “practice turn”. Initiated by such calls as Steyaert (2007) and Johannisson (2011), the entrepreneurship-as-practice movement is now gaining traction, witnessed by such contributions as De Clercq & Voronov (2009), Tatli et al. (2014), Goss et al. (2011), Keating et al. (2013), Chalmers and Shaw (2017), Dimov (2018) and Matthews et al. (2018). Practice theorists of entrepreneurship studies share a number of common assumptions. First, instead of thoughts and ideas hidden inside individual entrepreneurial minds, the central focus of inquiry are the spontaneously expressed, living, responsive, relational practices occurring out in the world between us for all to see. Second, practices are seen as the relevant unit of analysis for the exploration of entrepreneurial phenomena. Although there is no one definition of practice possible, they are fundamentally collaborative and relational activities, not solely reducible to the agents who carry them out. As they are defined by Schatzki, practices are organized by the enactment of sequential bodily activities, mediated by ‘things’ and their use, and drawing upon practical knowledge. Practices bring together actors, activities and contexts, thus interrelating social structures and human agency (Dodd et al., 2016; Hill, 2018; Tatli et al., 2014). Consequently, EaP research aims to observe, theorize and unfold the practices―as ways of doing and saying things―carried out by practitioners (entrepreneurs and their partners). CALL FOR PAPERS 4th Annual Entrepreneurship as Practice Conference and PhD Symposium 3-6 April 2019 Audencia Business School, Nantes, FRANCE www.entrepreneurshipaspractice.com eap4.audencia.com (under construction) Drawing on these shared assumptions, recent scholarship has advanced entrepreneurship research in several ways. First, entrepreneurship-as-practice continues to move away from understanding ‘who’ an entrepreneur is towards the importance of collaborative activity, performance, and work in the creation and perpetuation of entrepreneuring (Gartner et al., 2016; Keating et al., 2013; Matthews et al., 2018). Second, theories of practice help us understand the critical role of the body, practical know-how and material objects in organizing entrepreneurship. Third, theories of practice help us perceive and better understand the reproduction and transformation of practices and practical knowledge related to entrepreneurial phenomena across time and space. However, emphasizing the intricate socially-situated nature of practices comes with considerable ontological, theoretical and methodological implications. These will be addressed during the Conference and PhD Symposium. For background and information on EaP literature, prior conferences and other pertinent materials, please go to: https://www.entrepreneurshipaspractice.com/ STRUCTURE OF THE CONFERENCE AND PhD SYMPOSIUM The Conference will be held over three and a half days: The first day, April 3rd will focus on theoretical issues, the second day April 4th on methodological issues, and April 5th on a paper development workshop. The conference will include keynote lectures and workshops, a panel session on publishing entrepreneurship as practice research and a working paper development session. Publication Opportunities (Download Calls for Paper HERE) • Following the Conference, on the 6th of April, we will run a PDW for the Organization Studies Special Issue “Organizational and Institutional Entrepreneuring: Processes and Practices of Creating in an Organized World”. Best papers will be selected for participation in this workshop. • Participants will be offered to submit their paper to the "Research Handbook on Entrepreneurship as Practice", Research Handbooks in Business and Management series, Edward Elgar Publishing Participating scholars are welcome to choose one or more days of the conference when registering. PhD candidates who want ECTS credits for their participation are required to attend all three days of the conference, as well as generate additional work beyond what is required by other participants in the conference. www.entrepreneurshipaspractice.com eap4.audencia.com (under construction) We welcome papers addressing theories of practice and creative organizing from a variety of disciplinary and methodological perspectives. Entrepreneurship, management, strategy, social sciences, humanities studies are all welcomed. Potential although not exclusive topics that may be addressed include: Theoretical Challenges: What are the differences between the individualism, structuralism and practice traditions of entrepreneurship research and how can they be combined? How is the process approach to entrepreneurship (entrepreneuring) similar and different from practice approach? How can we carve out insights and theories without the traditional aim of reification and generalization, given practice theories’ phenomenological roots? How can we theoretically cope with the enormous diversity of practices in which entrepreneurship is implicated? How can entrepreneurship studies help to theorize the reproduction and transformation of practical knowledge? How can we incorporate embodiment and sociomateriality into our understanding of practices related to entrepreneurship? How can an EaP perspective rejuvenate our thinking about traditional entrepreneurship related topics of innovating, creating opportunities, networking, venturing, strategizing, financing and organizing? What is the value of existing theoretical frameworks of practice for entrepreneurship research, and when should we employ or go beyond them? How can EaP be used as a platform for critical studies of entrepreneurship? Methodological and Empirical Challenges: How does one begin an EaP study, such as selecting and entering a site for observation? As theories of practice guide us to study the real-time and unique instances of practices related to entrepreneurship, how can we observe, analyze and theorize about these unique instances, whilst still accounting for their relations to other practices? What are some common research questions that can be formulated and answered using an EaP perspective, and which practice theory is appropriate for which research questions in entrepreneurship? How can one catalogue and rigorously analyze large amounts of video-based ethnographic data? What can we methodologically learn from the history of the Strategy as Practice (SaP) community? Abstract / Paper Submission All scholars who are interested in the paper development workshop and PhD candidates wishing to attend the conference should submit an abstract (of less than 1,000 words) by December 15, 2018 to eap4@audencia.com. Abstracts should not exceed two single-spaced pages, and may not exceed the maximum limit of 1,000 words. They should present the purpose of the research, the relevance of the problem, the literature review, the methods and the main findings. 3 to 5 keywords and an indicative Topic of the Conference should be included. Authors will be notified of acceptance or otherwise by January 15, 2019. Full working papers are due for February 28, 2019. Full working papers should have the following structure: introduction, literature review or conceptual framework, methodology, results, discussion and conclusion. The text should be 10-15 pages, characters Times New Roman 12, single spacing. Abstracts and papers should be written and presented in English. All working papers will be assigned to discussion groups. Each group member will be responsible for providing feedback on the papers received during the working paper session on April 5. Important Dates: December 15, 2018 Abstract Submission Deadline PhD Symposium and Research Conference January 15, 2019 Notification of Acceptance PhD Symposium and Research Conference February 28, 2019 Full Paper Submission Deadline March 1, 2019 Registration Deadline April 3 - 5, 2019 Conference Dates April 6, 2019 Organization Studies Special Issue PDW Conference Fees: Fees for PhD Symposium and Research Conference attendees are to be determined and posted by December 1, 2018. www.entrepreneurshipaspractice.com eap4.audencia.com (under construction) Organizing Committee (extract) Claire Champenois (Audencia Business School), Miruna Radu-Lefebvre (Audencia Business School) William B. Gartner (Babson College and Linnaeus University), Bruce Teague (Eastern University Washington), Neil Thompson (VU University Amsterdam), Ola Byrne (UCD Dublin) Audencia Business School & Nantes EAP4 will be held at Audencia Business School, Nantes, France on April 3-6 2019. Founded in 1900, Audencia Business School is one of France’s elite Grande Ecole higher education institutions – ranked 6th in the nation (SIGEM). World renowned for education and research in business and management, it ranks among the top 100 worldwide (The Economist). Among the 90 tenured faculty members, seven focus on Entrepreneurship. http://www.audencia.com/en/ Nantes is a modern innovative and green city with old-world flair city. It is two hours from Paris (by train), one hour from London (by plane), and 45 minutes from the Atlantic Coast (by car or train). For Further Information and Questions, please contact eap4@audencia.com References Chalmers, D. M., & Shaw, E. (2017). The endogenous construction of entrepreneurial contexts: A practicebased perspective. International Small Business Journal, September(1967), 19–39. De Clercq, D., & Voronov, M. (2009). Toward a Practice Perspective of Entrepreneurship: Entrepreneurial Legitimacy as Habitus. International Small Business Journal, 27(4), 395–419. Dimov, D. (2018). Opportunities, language and time. Academy of Management Perspectives, in press. Dodd, S. D., Pret, T., & Shaw, E. (2016). Advancing understanding of entrepreneurial embeddedness : forms of capital , social contexts and time. In F. Welter & W. B. Gartner (Eds.), A research agenda for entrepreneurship and context (pp. 120–133). Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Pub. Gartner, W. B., Stam, E., Thompson, N. A., & Verduyn, K. (2016). Entrepreneurship as practice: grounding contemporary practice theory into entrepreneurship studies. Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, 28(9–10), 813–816. Goss, D., Jones, R., Latham, J., & Betta, M. (2011). Power as practice: A Micro-sociological Analysis of the Dynamics of Emancipatory Entrepreneurship. Organization Studies, 32(2), 211–229. Hill, I. (2018). How did you get up and running? Taking a Bourdieuan perspective towards a framework for negotiating strategic fit. Entrepreneurship and Regional Development, 1–35. Johannisson, B. (2011). Towards a practice theory of entrepreneuring. Small Business Economics, 36(2), 135– 150. Keating, A., Geiger, S., & Mcloughlin, D. (2013). Riding the Practice Waves: Social Resourcing Practices During New Venture Development. Entrepreneurship: Theory and Practice, 38(5), 1–29. Matthews, R. S., Chalmers, D. M., & Fraser, S. S. (2018). The intersection of entrepreneurship and selling: An interdisciplinary review, framework, and future research agenda. Journal of Business Venturing, (June 2016), 1–0. Steyaert, C. (2007). ‘Entrepreneuring’ as a conceptual attractor? A review of process theories in 20 years of entrepreneurship studies. Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, 19(6), 453–477. Tatli, A., Vassilopoulou, J., Özbilgin, M., Forson, C., & Slutskaya, N. (2014). A Bourdieuan relational perspective for entrepreneurship research. Journal of Small Business Management, 52(4), 615–632.

Editors: Daniel Hjorth & Trish Reay Submission Deadline: May 31, 2019 In this special issue we call for papers that address the topic of entrepreneuring with a focus on processes and practices. In contrast to many studies of entrepreneurship, we want to draw attention to ‘starting’ and ‘actualising,’ rather than entrepreneurship that was already ‘started’ at some point in the past. We draw attention to the fact that the processes and practices of entrepreneuring take place in the context of an already organised world, and this tension interests us. It is important to understand how organizational and institutional aspects of entrepreneurship add friction, resistance, or leverage to these processes. As a result, we see that this research topic is ripe for investigation. We define entrepreneuring as the process of creating organization (the latter being practices and processes of organizing as well as the socially verified entity delimiting those practices and processes as belonging). Entrepreneuring is thus the process that makes new ways of organizing and new organizations come into being. It occurs at multiple levels – group, organizational and institutional. We see that it is possible to create new forms of organization in an organized world, and some forms of entrepreneuring may create new organized worlds. This is where and when an interesting mixing of the entrepreneurial, the organizational and the societal happens. We believe that this view of entrepreneuring is still relatively unexplored. Our call for this special issue is grounded in a view that some types and styles of organizing are done because an organization is already in place; in addition, there is organizing that is a process of creation – bringing an organization or institution into being. Entrepreneuring refers to the latter – the creation of organization or institution that seeks to add a new practice or socially verified and recognized ‘entity’ to the world. It is critical, we believe, to give attention to how organization-creation happens within an organized world. This is where practices and institutions are particularly important in understanding such processes. Suggesting that scholarly interest in entrepreneuring requires attention to imagination and the artificial, we seek to focus on how creative processes open the way for extending beyond present experiences. We challenge scholars to approach the process of entrepreneuring as a poetics of business that includes particular attention to imagination (Gartner, 2007) or the artificial (Sarasvathy, 2003). Entrepreneuring is thus associated with breaching or moving beyond presently dominant (normal) institutional arrangements, organizations, and practices (Garud, Hardy & Maguire, 2007). We propose that entrepreneuring is grounded in a particular imagination-practice relationship (Schatzki, 2001: 3) of tension, from within which the artificial, the virtual-made-actual finds nurture and is crafted (Rosenberg, 1960: 88). Since entrepreneurship gives attention to practices that ‘tend toward their own elaboration regardless of our explicit intensions.’ (Spinosa, 2001: 200), we turn here instead to entrepreneuring as a process of creation. A society where entrepreneurship has become institutionalised is also where entrepreneuring as a ‘creation process’ can be unfairly stereotyped as entrepreneurship, a recognizable ‘field of practices’ (Schatzki, 2001). We are interested in how entrepreneuring, as imaginative-poetic extensions beyond the present, institutionalised limits of experience, happens in various societal, institutional and organisational contexts. Theorising entrepreneuring: processes and practices Our conceptualisation of entrepreneuring helps us focus on the tension between processes and practices. Entrepreneurship might today be a practice, but entrepreneuring can hardly be so. To be a practice, Heideggerians would say it has to maintain, or pay heed to a telos according to which it would pass as entrepreneuring. Given the difficulties in entrepreneurship research to agree on what entrepreneur(ship/ing) is, what its purpose is and how it is brought out most worthily, this seems not so likely. However, given the recent decades of institutionalising entrepreneurship – via educational systems, public support- and ecosystems, and media images – it is perhaps over-defined, over-coded and is presently merely discursively productive of an all too recognisable practice. Yet, entrepreneuring happens in this world of institutionalised entrepreneurship practices. What would entrepreneuring be – a ‘process of a certain style’ that is defined by morphing and differentiating from itself, escaping attempts to recognise it? Is entrepreneuring a creation process that, like any craft, makes use of certain tools in order to make new things for someone to use. The worth of entrepreneuring is then that it leads to the creation of new organisations or institutions that provide value for users (Hardy & Maguire, 2018; Hjorth, 2014; Hjorth, Holt & Steyaert, 2015). Submissions to this special issue Entrepreneuring can happen in many different circumstances and by different types of actors. For example, individuals can make a choice to start up new business(es), groups or teams can engage in the development of for-profit or not-for-profit enterprises, organizations can behave entrepreneurially, or actors at the field level can engage in institutional entrepreneuring. We encourage submissions investigating these or other situations of entrepreneuring. To us, this is also where organization- and entrepreneurship studies intersect -- within the themes of creativity and innovation. However, there has so far been little attention to this overlap, and we accordingly call for scholarly work to remedy this oversight. What does this all mean for this Special Issue? As we have pointed out elsewhere (Hjorth and Reay, 2017), we look forward to papers that can tackle the issues we have raised above in creative, surprising, and provocative ways. This resonates with our emphasis on “the importance of ongoing organizational creation that is associated with unusual knowledge-creating processes, and with interests in art, aesthetics, philosophy and even play…” (Hjorth and Reay, 2017: 4). Especially for this Special Issue we are curious to see how we might move scholarly interest and engagement with the concept of entrepreneuring (Steyaert, 1998; Rindova, Barry & Ketchen, 2009). We do so by inviting papers that address the challenge to understand and study entrepreneuring as an organization- or institution-creating phenomena, in the wake of the process- and practice-turns in social sciences. With this special issue we seek submissions that consider how we can now describe, study and theorise about entrepreneuring as a process of making something new in the context of an already organized world. We want to update our collective capacity to understand the process of entrepreneuring at multiple levels. How is it done in today’s world? Has the practice of entrepreneurship changed over time and how does this impact entrepreneuring? As the practice of entrepreneurship becomes a ‘normal’ and expected aspect of everyday life, we ask what has been lost as a result? One the other hand, how do the politics and ethics of entrepreneuring impact the practice of entrepreneurship? How does the practice of organizational or institutional entrepreneuring happen in society at or across multiple levels – individuals, groups, organizations, institutions? Tackling questions like these, this special issue invites empirical and theoretical work that deals with questions such as the following: How is entrepreneuring possible in a world that expects entrepreneurship from almost all and everyone? How is entrepreneuring done when it must be carried out within a world where entrepreneurship itself is highly institutionalised? How can process- and practice-theory inform the study of entrepreneuring as a process of creating organization and institutions? How can we learn from empirical examples of entrepreneuring hitherto lingering outside the span of organizational scholars’ attention? How can we understand entrepreneuring in situations of failure vs those of success? How can institutional entrepreneuring involve creative or tactical use of institutionalised practices of entrepreneurship? How is business school education presently transforming education – as a highly institutionalised practice – via entrepreneuring as processes of creating new organisation of education? How does societal support and/or designed ecosystems for entrepreneurship impact on entrepreneuring? How can we address the theoretical and methodological challenges with studying entrepreneuring as an organisation or institution creation process? If attention to imagination, the poetic and the artificial enables us to understand entrepreneuring, how might this be so? PDW We will run a PDW for this Special Issue directly following upon the 4th biannual Entrepreneurship as Practice conference, to be held at Audencia Business School, Nantes, France, 3-5th of April, 2019. Thus, Saturday 6th of April, 2019, 09.00 - 12.00. Submitting authors are not obliged to participate at this PDW, and papers presented at the PDW are not guaranteed publication in the Special Issue. We offer this PDW as an opportunity to develop papers for submission. Submitting your paper Please submit your manuscript through the journal’s online submission system (http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/orgstudies). You will need to create a user account if you do not already have one, and you must select the appropriate Special Issue at the “Manuscript Type” option. The Special Issue Editors handle all manuscripts in accordance with the journal’s policies and procedures; they expect authors to follow the journal’s submission guidelines (http://journals.sagepub.com/home/oss). You can submit your manuscript for this Special Issue between 15th and 31st of May 2019. For further information please contact Daniel Hjorth (oseditorhjorth@gmail.com) or Trish Reay (oseditorreay@gmail.com) For administrative support and general queries, you may contact Sophia Tzagaraki, Managing Editor of Organization Studies, at osofficer@gmail.com. References Gartner, W. B. (2007) Entrepreneurial narrative and a science of the imagination, Journal of Business Venturing 22: 613-627. Garud, Hardy, & Maguire, S. 2007. Institutional Entrepreneurship as Embedded Agency: An Introduction to the Special Issue. Organization Studies 28(7): 957-969 Hardy, C. & Maguire, S. 2018. Institutional Entrepreneurship and Change in Fields. In Greenwood, R., Oliver, C., Lawrence, T. B. & Meyer, R.E. (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism, 261-280. London: SAGE. Hjorth, D. (2014) Entrepreneuring as organisation-creation, in Sternberg, R. Kraus, G. (Eds.) Handbook of Research on Entrepreneurship and Creativity, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 97-121. Hjorth, D., Holt, R., & Steyaert, C. (2015) Entrepreneurship and Process Studies, International Small Business Journal 33(6): 599-611. Hjorth, D. and Reay, T. (2017) Organization Studies: Moving Entrepreneurially Ahead, Organization Studies 39(1): 7-18. Rindova, V., Barry, D., & Ketchen, D.J. (2009). Entrepreneuring as emancipation. Academy of Management Review, 34(3), 477–491 Rosenberg, H. (1960) The Tradition of the New. Cambridge: Da Capo Press. Sarasvathy, S. D. (2003) Entrepreneurship as a science of the artificial. Journal of Economic Psychology 24: 203-220. Schatzki, T. R. (2001) Introduction: practice theory, in Schatzki, T. R., Knorr Cetina, K., and Von Savigny, E. (Eds.) The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. London/New York: Routledge, pp. 1-14. Spinosa, C. (2001) Derridian dispersion and Heideggerian articulation: general tendencies in the practices that govern intelligibility, in Schatzki, T. R., Knorr Cetina, K., and Von Savigny, E. (Eds.) The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. London/New York: Routledge, pp. 199-212. Steyaert, C. (1998) A Qualitative Methodology for Process Studies of Entrepreneurship, International Studies of Management and Organisation, 27(3): 13-33.