Abstract
Between 2001 and 2005, Chris Steyaert and Daniel Hjorth ran a series of workshops exploring the boundaries of entrepreneurship research, themed around the four elements, water, air, earth and fire, in ‘Movements of Entrepreneurship’. These created a unique locus for pioneering, challenging and (often) heterodox work. In the four ‘Movements’ workshops, papers were presented, discussed, argued over, challenged and celebrated. Selected pieces were then carefully crafted into book form and have become recognized as treasure chests of inspirational contributions from some of the most original scholars in the field. The first water-themed book presented a broad oceanic wave of new approaches to entrepreneurship. Second, the air book breathed the spirit of narrative and discourse through the international entrepreneurship community. Third, the earth book explored grounded forms of entrepreneurship, from social enterprise to regionally contextualized change.
The three books and the conversations generated by the four workshops have continued to provoke entrepreneurship scholars to consider diverse and creative approaches beyond those within traditional business studies, management and economics. ‘Movements’ also managed to achieve the difficult balance of embracing novelty and challenging the status quo without alienating the mainstream of entrepreneurship (too much). Indeed, a feature of both the workshops and the resultant books has been strong support from leading international scholars of entrepreneurship, including – to name but a handful of my personal heroes – Howard Aldrich, Alistair Anderson, Nancy Carter, Alan Fayolle, Bill Gartner, Patty Green, Benson Honig, Bengt Johannisson, Jerry Katz and Richard Swedberg. Hjorth and Steyaert are to be congratulated for the warmth of the books’ reception, the mythology surrounding the workshops, the top level global support that they secured and the legitimation that they have helped to create for diverse methods, theories, perspectives and studies. As Katherine Campbell notes in the current volume: ‘we need to be entrepreneurial in our research – risk-taking, rule-breaking, innovative’ (p. 117).
The fourth workshop, held in Iceland in summer 2005, lived up to its fiery theme by all accounts with much passionate debate. The foci of the workshop revolved around politics and aesthetics and cognate lenses were borrowed. Control and creativity, image and identity, policies and places all acted as novel perspectives for making sense of entrepreneurship. These themes are given a thorough and varied exploration in the resultant book, the final in the elemental ‘Movements’ series. The book is opened and closed by the editors, with the remaining contributions gathered into four themed sections of three chapters each: entrepreneurial policies, places, identities and images. The chapters challenge perceptions of what is ‘proper’ entrepreneurship research, and come replete with naked women urinating in baths, whip-wielding libertines, game-playing mavericks, Nietzschean camels, poems, monumental artistic installations, creative destruction in the cityscape and stories of the dispossessed. It is much to the credit of the editors and authors alike that this provocative book balances such radical material with intellectually rigorous, critical reflection. The result is a celebration of the imaginative, heterotopic potentiality of entrepreneurship studies.
In their introduction, Hjorth and Steyaert remind us that the original aim of their project was to create a disruptive voice, a space, an event in entrepreneurship that is deliberately minor, alternative, non-mainstream, unossified. As such, their task has always been political in that it is inherently subversive and revolutionary. Moreover, it has always been aesthetic, due to the radical creativity that it enacts and promotes. The editors argue that production of self, whether as scholar, reader or entrepreneur, is a performative, politicized co-creation. Thus, their aim is to engage reader passion and aesthetic sensibility in order to challenge their perception of the entrepreneurial domain and where its border posts may lie.
The three chapters in Part 1, Entrepreneurial Policies, explore various aspects of control and creativity within institutions. Christian Maravelias argues that within the systematized world of bureaucratic institutions, freedom meant that work was kept separate from the rest of one’s life, that the controls and duties of the workplace did not impinge beyond its boundaries. Many modern critical management theorists contrast this freedom-as-autonomy with the post-bureaucratic pervasiveness of (controlling) institutions. Maravelias presents an alternative argument, postulating that provision of opportunity or potential, to an idealized entrepreneurial self, can act to offer a different kind of freedom. Maravelias’ entrepreneurial self instinctively and pragmatically enacts it’s own environment by engaging with opportunity and risk in an ongoing but unreflective advance, so that ‘freedom is literally a potential’ (p. 30).
Caroline Wigren and Leif Melin contrast competitive models of regional innovation systems (technocratic, rational, linear, controlling, mimetic) with a collaborative model (ambiguous, grounded, learning-centred, interpretative and dialogic). Their illustrative example of the competitive model in Sweden shows how institutionalized power can continue to repress entrepreneurial freedoms at the community level. Lauretta Conklin Frederking’s chapter also focuses on a specific example which has the potential to enable entrepreneurship and innovation, that of the USA’s National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Conklin Frederking describes the NEA’s creation as ‘a story of entrepreneurial action’ (p. 58), which ‘cultivated opportunity, participation and consumption in the cultural industry’ (p. 65). The very success of the NEA appears to have created a bureaucratic backlash which has challenged innovation and diversity, undermining this example of governmental entrepreneurship by repositioning the NEA as a political means of control and consistency. Or perhaps, Conklin Frederking suggests, this move from innovative creative entrepreneurship to controlled stability is a transition within the entrepreneurial cycle itself.
Moving on to Part 2, Entrepreneurial Places, we encounter three chapters which consider diverse types of locus as they interact with entrepreneurship: art, the city and the family. Pierre Guillet de Monthoux tells us the story of ‘The Gates’, a remarkable 2005 installation by the Christos. He considers this story as an example of organized, managed collaboration ‘between at least four kinds of actors: technicians, artists, audience and critics’ (p. 78). Guillet de Monthoux’s Art–Firm narrative contains, he proposes, insights into the aesthetic of creative performativity which can help free those trapped by managerial control. Timon Beyes takes entrepreneurship to be ‘a revolt against fixed and stable hierarchies’ and, as such, a practice that is always situated. Thus, the material socio-spatial, including the urban, can be read for entrepreneurship. Beye’s Berlin example of multiple recreations and abandonments developed for the Palast der Republik highlights the inherent potential for shared material deterritorialization, undoing and reordering. Katherine Campbell, whose contributions were also a highlight of the second and third ‘Movements’ books, develops a critical feminist approach to the family firm. Campbell suggests that rather than dividing realms and roles to keep work and the family conceptually separate, as current family firm theory does, a feminist approach would reintegrate into ‘a contiguous and contentious whole’. This reintegration would embrace the values and emotions associated with family firms (instead of deriding them as unprofessional), recognize the interdependence of individual and collective prosperity and reconsider the priority of business survival over the transformative ongoing life of the family. Thus Campbell’s proposal is both political and passionate.
Part 3, Entrepreneurial Identities, highlights the extraordinary diversity that this book manages to present, with a chapter each for the Marquis de Sade, Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary and a pair of Australian Aboriginal entrepreneurs. Campbell Jones and André Spicer select a deliberately provocative figure as a means to consider what is excluded from entrepreneurship discourse and why – the politicalized policing of our frontiers. Jones and Spicer choose the French Revolution as a highly discontinguous period of institutional entrepreneurship, characterized by dramatic outbursts of liberty through creative destruction, in the form of rational reform deliberately breaking with uncritical tradition. I was charmed to see that first on their list of liberating institutions was ‘the establishment of classical French cuisine’, given pride of place over the metric system, inner city planning, the Grands Ecoles and large-scale social movements (p. 133). However, it is institutional entrepreneurship in the area of sexuality that Jones and Spicer choose to illustrate, through the story of de Sade and the Libertines, ‘the horrific possibilities of entrepreneurship at the extreme’ (p. 134). They find these possibilities, generated by the unfettered discourse of innovative rational self-interest, to include an utter disregard of the Other and the moral implication of entrepreneurship.
Another very unusual and inspirational take on entrepreneurship is provided by Lorraine Warren and Alistair Anderson, who explore the purposeful identity play of Michael O’Leary. O’Leary’s embodiment of the rhetoric of entrepreneurship is a deliberately constructed performance-discourse, engaging our aesthetic and emotional senses to make entrepreneurial meaning. Unlike de Sade, it is the irrational and emotionally engaged side of entrepreneurship which O’Leary so dramatically enacts. On a personal note, it was a unusual joy to see that a paper co-written by my own treasured collaborator, Alistair Anderson, was for once among the most mainstream in a collection. This may be a first-time experience for one of entrepreneurship’s perennial innovators.
James Reveley and Simon Down present yet another political facet of entrepreneurship: its use as a potentially oppressive policy tool in the (re-)subjugation of marginalized indigenous peoples. Reveley and Down explore, through life history interviews, Aboriginal entrepreneurship ‘from below’, paying special attention to the formation of identities and agency. From a position of stigmatized spoiled identity, entrepreneurship was deployed to fulfil ‘a desire for greater material and ontological security & allowing for the expression of creativity’ (p. 166). Ironically, for the two entrepreneurs presented within this chapter, politics – in the form of the Australian government – has been both the source of their identity disruption and stigmatization, and through education and enterprise development, the vehicle for them to address this dislocation. Of course, their creative, agential, transformational self-presentation is, in itself, a highly entrepreneurial act.
Part 4 examines a variety of Entrepreneurial Images, imaginatively considered through a range of aesthetic forms, including the parable. Richard Weiskopf and Chris Steyaert draw on Nietzsche to explore the use of parable, specifically reflecting on his famous camel–lion–child retelling of human development through metamorphosis. They take us from the camel of tradition, weighed down by positivist ‘science’ and politics, to the leonine ‘no’ of critique, which reasserts ambiguity and challenges orthodox monoliths, thence to the child of becoming, an affirmative, ethically and aesthetically conscious politics of entrepreneuring. Bent Sorensen’s piece begins with the confession that his first thoughts when invited to write for the book were of ‘a naked woman in a bathtub filled with milk’. His chapter, like that of Weieskopf and Steyaert which precedes it, calls for more positive but critical considerations of entrepreneurship as a response to the ‘blind belief in scientific utopianism’ which typically produces only too real dystopias, as reflected in the robust individualism of Rambo and Wall Street (the movie, if not the locus), and the closely related methodological individualism of the business school. Sorensen illustrates his thinking with a discussion of the body, immanence and the counter-actualization of transcendence through embodiment, drawing on a piece of improvised theatre (the naked lady in the bath) and Christianity. He also argues for two other counter-actualizations, that of ideology with practice and individualism with community. Moving from his exploration of radical art and religion back to entrepreneurship, Sorensen concludes that we can indeed overcome our origins in dystopian hypercapitalism, instead engaging in ‘entrepreneurial experimentation in order to bring forth impracticalities that can foster immanent, utopian imaginations’ (p. 218). While no doubt the provocative style of Sorensen’s piece will rattle a few cages, this in itself is no bad thing, and many readers will surely concur with his call for us to recognize and respond to the political philosophy already inherent in entrepreneurial studies. Creating our own ‘good place’, encouraging engagement, exploring the fringes and challenging the established is surely, after all, what the ‘Movements’ series has been about.
Hjorth and Steyaert conclude the book – and, indeed, this elemental ‘Movements’ series – with a hope that their manifesto will continue to be a manifestation, a call to the processual ontology of becoming, embracing contextualization, enculturation, interdisciplinarity and creativity. The works collected in this book and throughout the series have embodied this vision and, I am sure, will continue to move our community towards their disruptive imaginative space. Each of the book’s chapters is followed by a haiku, written by the incomparable Bill Gartner, in the spirit of artistic creativity and political provocation that Hjorth and Steyaert chose for their fire motif. There can be no more appropriate way to end this review, or to reinforce Hjorth and Steyaert’s call for us to ‘keep looking at the movements’, than by sharing one of Gartner’s haikus:
Unburdened book bags At field’s edge. Sentinels watch New games being made.