Abstract
While popular representations of entrepreneurship remain dominated by ruthless, masculine individuals with ‘sharp elbows’ (Boyle, 2008), academic accounts of the idea and its practice are widening well beyond that archetype. This book contributes significantly towards that process in two ways. First, it proposes a poststructural analytical frame that should expand understanding and discussion, and second, the authors make a strong argument for ‘seeing entrepreneurship’ outside the classic small business context. This is exemplified in the cover photo of a man squatting on the street alongside a cardboard sign reading, ‘Entrepreneur, I am hungry and have no home, I will clean your car windows’ (more of this below).
The book is structured into nine fairly short chapters. It begins by laying out the conceptual frame from which the rest of the analysis follows. Introducing their theoretical project, the authors rather cutely invoke Schumpeter’s notion of creative destruction to symbolise what they are about to do to the majority of entrepreneurship research. In this Jones and Spicer refer, as they do throughout the book, to philosophical concepts: here, it is the practice of unmasking, drawing on Heidegger’s ideas. Through this notion, the authors draw a distinction between two forms of truth: the pursuit of correctness (in the commonplace or everyday sense of the term), and struggling to produce different ways of thinking that help to illuminate ideas. It is the latter that interests them and which frames their project.
Chapter 2 follows convention in reviewing existing understandings of entrepreneurship, both empirical and conceptual (although with emphasis on the latter), to work towards a critical perspective on ‘it’. Chapter 3, reworking previous analysis published by the authors (Jones and Spicer, 2005), suggests a psychoanalytic perspective on entrepreneurship and the entrepreneur to be symbolic structures, objects of desire that will remain always out of reach.
Chapter 4, presented as a genealogy of the political economy of entrepreneurship, explores the historical social construction of value and valuation. The conclusion of this section of the analysis refers back to psychoanalysis through the idea of fantasy. Chapter 5 locates entrepreneurial activity within a broader system of production and consumption, arguing that entrepreneurs are granted licence to behave excessively or wastefully. Chapter 6, under the provocative title ‘Is the Marquis de Sade an entrepreneur?’, revolves around the question of who or what is excluded from understandings of entrepreneurship. Once more, conceptually the analysis alludes to psychoanalysis through the notion of repression. Chapter 7 takes this analysis further with an account of ‘unlikely’ entrepreneurs, such as those living in poverty or working illegally. Cases such as people working to pick cockles around the British coast serve as empirical material to explore issues of exclusion and exception.
Chapters 8 and 9 begin to construct an ethical frame for understanding enterprise, concentrating on the status of ‘others’ in entrepreneurial work and discourses. It is perhaps here that the core of the book is to be found (some readers might wish it came earlier and formed a more consistent thread throughout). As the authors note, they ‘have found that entrepreneurship is an empty concept, but at the same time one that is filled with economic, political, legal and moral ramifications’ (p. 110). However, they also have ‘found’ that entrepreneurship is ‘crippled’ by lack of attention to the existence, status or ethics of engaging with the other. This, then, emerges as the central theme (moral, perhaps?) of this highly original engagement with entrepreneurship in all its forms. In short, this book intends to ‘put to bed the myth of the [individual] entrepreneur as the centre of action and to show ways in which we can think beyond the entrepreneur as the focus of attention’ (p. 112). Alongside commentaries on the activities of entrepreneurship researchers (should be more creative and less normative) and policymakers (should recognise the social nature of enterprise), this theoretical contribution should ensure a wide readership for the book. Hopefully, as the authors desire, in a variety of communities.
This is all positive. The authors are extremely convincing in their desire to unmask the radically social nature of entrepreneurship, providing what feels like a research agenda, dealing (mostly) respectfully with previous work in their chosen field and gifting readers a constructive account of enterprise. Following the credo of this book, it is almost an ethical obligation to ask whether there is anything that might have been thought during this decade-long project, anything on which that the authors have left the mask. I would suggest two things. First, there is, as far as I can read from and into the text, an almost complete exclusion of gender (or indeed sex as a category – there is frequent enough reference to the activity). This is exemplified by the absence of gender as an index term, but more significantly as a means of thinking entrepreneurship. I find this especially puzzling, given the authors’ close engagement with journals such as this one or Entrepreneurship: Theory & Practice, both of which are publishing increasing numbers of gendered analyses of entrepreneurship. As both authors locate themselves within the critical community of management and organisation scholars, allegedly concerned with taken-for-granted power relations, puzzlement might even become bafflement. Perhaps this lack is an artefact of the conceptual framework? Or perhaps it is a door left deliberately closed for other scholars? Whatever the reason, it would have been good at least to acknowledge its existence.
Second, there is a concern relating to the theoretical neighbourhood within which the authors locate their analysis. The notion of an entrepreneurial ethic is extremely well set out, conceptually robust and a helpful addition to ways of seeing enterprise. However, what worries me as a reader and researcher is the research ethic of holding ‘others’ up to the light as examples of exclusion. The photograph that is reproduced on the book cover is the most striking manifestation of this: I could neither find a credit for it to give a sense of where it comes from, nor extract a sense of the person beyond their analytical status. While clearly the project of recognising the other is driven by an ethic oriented towards positive social change, it might be worth reflecting on the integrity of the other as a human being alongside their academic value in this project.
Notwithstanding these puzzling aspects, this book is of considerable value both conceptually and empirically for a wide range of readers. It is written in such a way as to engage multiple communities, students, scholars, policymakers or entrepreneurs. I look forward to the ideas that it sets out encouraging all of us to engage more closely with fundamental conceptual issues within the study of entrepreneurship and small business.