Abstract
‘How could anyone be against entrepreneurship?’ This is not only the heading of the first chapter of Against Entrepreneurship but is also the most pressing question imposed on the reader. The potential absurdness of questioning the glory of entrepreneurship is exactly what makes this book interesting. Decades of entrepreneurship research have established a standing within management research justifying its existence or level of interest (Landström and Harirchi, 2019), and there have been a myriad of urgent calls to politicians and practitioners to foster and appreciate the value of entrepreneurship, accept the probability and potential of entrepreneurial failure (Kibler et al., 2017), or recognise its potential in transformations (Kuckertz et al., 2020). However, we might have finally come to a point where entrepreneurship researchers need to be encouraged to abandon this path of promoting entrepreneurship as a panacea. Therefore, I recommend this book to researchers who are in entrepreneurship-hype bubbles and seek to challenge their environment as well as to those who are confronted by entrepreneurship doubters and seek to understand and rebut their arguments.
While it is important to consider what we can gain from an against perspective (or also whether such an evaluation is even a scientific endeavour), the anthology unfolds its value by counterbalancing the prevailing narrative, which, for the most part, propagates a pro-entrepreneurship view and thereby creates exaggerated enthusiasm. Literature opposing this stance exists but is still scarce. Critical entrepreneurship studies typically address topics like entrepreneurs harming themselves or others (e.g. their employees), the negative effects of entrepreneurial failure, entrepreneurs engaging in ‘parasitical’ activities, such as corruption, discrimination, tax avoidance, informal entrepreneurship, the reproduction of capitalist ideologies, or turning almost any into profit-maximising entrepreneurship.
Instead of merely touching upon a possible dark side, downside, or destructive side of entrepreneurship (Shepherd, 2019), Against Entrepreneurship seeks to explore whether there is a reason to disapprove of entrepreneurship as a concept that is socially constructed.
Editor Anders Örtenblad is a professor of organisation and leadership at Nord University in Norway. Örtenblad invited 24 researchers from Northern and Middle European institutions and Brazil, Kuwait, the United States, and New Zealand to contribute. Their studies encompass the fields of management and organisational studies, institutional theories, economics and entrepreneurship, innovation, leadership and human resource management, communication, sociology, ecological economics, ethics, psychology and global political economy. As a result, the contributors contemplate being against entrepreneurship from various perspectives, such as Marxism, lexical semantics, the philosophy of science and psychology. This cross-disciplinary approach to criticising entrepreneurship reflects the eclecticism of the phenomenon among researchers.
The book consists of 15 chapters as well as an afterword. In the first chapter, Örtenblad provides a brief discussion on the tradition of criticism of entrepreneurship and describes how the anthology seeks to contribute to this stream of literature. Of the remaining 14 chapters, Chapters 4 to 8 provide arguments in opposition to the entrepreneurship discourse, and Chapters 9 to 15 argue against specific entrepreneurship practices. Therefore, they vary greatly regarding their degree of criticism, ranging from highlighting ‘paradoxes, tensions, and ambiguities’ (Trehan et al., 2020: 113) in entrepreneurship to arguing against entrepreneurship as endangering free will and being the source of social inequality and ecological crises (e.g. Chapters 3 and 5, respectively).
Overall, there are certainly valid points justifying the disapproval of certain practices and the accompanying symptoms of entrepreneurship, such as physical or mental harm, social inequality or damage to mankind or nature. However, this might also be due to the decisions of authors to work with the entrepreneurship definition they prefer, ranging from entrepreneurship being any business activity equated with self-employment to it being the backbone of capitalism and thus projecting as much evil into the phenomenon as they desire, which clearly departs from the progressive, opportunity-focused understanding dominating the entrepreneurship research community.
Throughout the chapters, entrepreneurship researchers will come across arguments that reflect a misunderstanding of entrepreneurship in society and potentially in other disciplines. The arguments against entrepreneurship are thus closely linked to arguments against business activities in general, capitalism, neo-liberalism or opportunistic behaviour (e.g. by labelling individual behaviour as entrepreneurial when it really should fall under the category of the crazy things people do for money).
Unfortunately, the authors contributing to the anthology offer only a few explicit alternatives, which are anything but new, such as sustainable or responsible entrepreneurship, and those alternatives only address specific dark sides, downsides, and destructive sides but not entrepreneurship as a concept. One neglected alternative to the wealth-creation focus, might be the emancipatory perspective, which emphasises entrepreneurial change efforts (Rindova et al., 2009).
The volume certainly captures the state of the art of the critical entrepreneurship research community and will challenge the positive entrepreneurship hero myth. This can help construct an even more critical and possibly realistic understanding of entrepreneurship, which, because of its cross-disciplinary approach, could highlight the integrative or translative efforts necessary to enable yet more interdisciplinary research.