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.