Abstract
Entrepreneurship stands at a critical juncture. Responsible, as the prevailing neoliberal consensus will have it, for shaping and driving economy and society in the second half of the 20th century, it is uncertain as to whether and to what extent it will continue to do so in the different circumstances of the 21st century. Critics of the state of researching entrepreneurship argue that to date this has been characterised more by activity than by analysis, more by research than by reflection, more by exhortation than by (critical) examination, more by advocacy than by censure. The discourse of entrepreneurship (or of enterprise more generally) is for the most part an ineluctably positive discourse of change, growth, innovation, transformation (of individuals, communities, organisations, technologies, industries and markets), self-actualisation, identity formation and emancipation. This is a discourse that has transcended the economic-based notion of the entrepreneur as founder/innovator of an enterprise (a la Schumpeter, Kirzner, von Mises, etc.) to become a metaphor encompassing a wide variety of social practises as a general model of social subjectivity (Marttila 2013): as Pozen (2008) has expressed it, ‘we are all entrepreneurs now’, and members of this increasingly entrepreneurialised society have become ‘entrepreneurs of themselves’ (Rose 1996). But this is a discourse fundamentally predicated on a cognitive bias, captured in the ‘law of the instrument’ variously attributed to Abraham Kaplan or Abraham Maslow, who observed in The Psychology of Science (1996, 15) that ‘I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail’. Whatever the problem – post-disaster reconstruction, peacebuilding in conflict and post-conflict societies, social exclusion by gender, race, social status, the digital divide, labour market exclusion, economic marginalisation (e.g. of refugee and forced migrant communities) and so on – ‘entrepreneurship’ appears to be the answer.
There is, however, another, emerging, discourse that challenges this entrepreneur-hype bubble. This is reflected in growing awareness of and interest in the dark side of entrepreneurship and its harmful effects on individuals, organisations and communities (Baumol (1990), and in critiques of the pursuit of theoretical casuistry at the expense of practical relevance and impact, a concern with the ‘what’ rather than the ‘why’ of entrepreneurship (Landström and Harirchi 2019). More generally, this has been extended in an emerging critical perspective on entrepreneurship which takes a poststructural and postmodern perspective to question the regimes of domination constructed and perpetuated in the name of the entrepreneur (Jones and Spicer 2009), challenges the glorification of entrepreneurship in the prevailing overwhelmingly pro-entrepreneurship narrative and its associated exaggerated enthusiasm (Örtenblad 2020), and critiques the neoliberal essence of the contemporary celebration of the entrepreneurial subject discourse (Marttila 2013).
These critiques have been matched by, admittedly limited, calls for a new type of entrepreneurship more attuned to the changing economic and social reconfigurations of the early 21st century, such as Cohen’s (2018) call for a post-capitalist entrepreneurship founded on the commons, new organizational forms (e.g. B-Corps), technology enabled platforms, cryptocurrencies and place-based entrepreneurship and distributed autonomous organizations as the basis for the democratization of entrepreneurship for the ‘99%’. This is far removed from critical entrepreneurship. But it does pose one fundamental question: ‘What is the right unit of analysis for the future economy?’
The basis for answering that question is set out in Martin Kornberger’s new book. Entrepreneurship, in common with other modes of collective action, has drawn on and been shaped by four metanarratives or organizational architectures: hierarchies, where the visible hand of the manager coordinates activities through command and control; markets, where prices take on the function of communication and integration; institutions, in which social action is patterned by conventions, norms and logics; and movements, grassroots collective action based on shared identity, scripts and props. Kornberger claims that these organizational architectures are no longer the right unit of analysis for the future economy, and are no longer the answer to the correlate question ‘how do we organize ourselves to accomplish shared goals?’
Given the emergence of new forms of collective action, he explores the shared defining characteristics of these new and emerging phenomena – such as the shared economy, the circular economy, peer-to-peer networks, open source, distributed innovation systems, platform capitalism and so on – and considers their implications for the organization of the future. He finds Simon’s (1991, 27–28) thought experiment instructive here: this envisages a Martian visitor to Earth equipped with a telescope that revealed social structures. Organizations, the dominant feature of the landscape, were revealed as, say, green structures connected by the red lines of market transactions: Simon speculates that his Martian visitor might be puzzled to learn that this structure is called a ‘market economy’ rather than an ‘organizational economy’ and suggests ‘the choice of name may matter a great deal. The name can affect the order in which we describe its institutions, and the order of description can affect the theory’. Kornberger continues the thought experiment (p.93): the returning Martian, 30 years on, still sees the red and green colours depicting markets and hierarchies, but also significant amounts of blue, which ‘shows platforms, peer-to-peer networks, open source, distributed innovation systems … the Martian is puzzled by the fact that … the biggest retailer is no longer Walmart but Alibaba (carrying no stock), the biggest accommodation provider is not the Hilton Group but Airbnb (owning no property) and the biggest mobility provider is not some airline or train company but Uber (owning no cars).
What these phenomena have in common, according to Kornberger, is their openness, polycentricity and plurality. They are open, in that they invite external contributors to engage; polycentric in that they have multiple decision centres, no single one of which exercises control over the others; plural in that they comprise heterogeneous actors who do not necessarily share the same interests, values or norms. Notwithstanding this, they are goal-oriented and act strategically, but they do so in a way that is neither hierarchy or market, institution or movement. As such they are, in Kornberger’s phrase, ‘theoretical puzzles and organizational mysteries’.
This provides entrepreneurship with both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is to unpack the organizational mysteries of this changing landscape, to develop and adopt new approaches, methodologies and conceptual frameworks suitable for the analysis of these phenomena. Conventionally, entrepreneurship looks at new products and services, and occasionally but increasingly at new business models and organisational forms (such as hybrid organisations and social enterprises), but beyond that, and somehow powering them, is an organizational infrastructure: what Kornberger’s book tries to do is to challenge and change the way we see this organizational infrastructure (conventionally thought of in terms of markets, hierarchies, institutions and movements) and introduce a different vocabulary to make sense of how we collaborate. In this sense, it is about organizational innovation in the networked world of the 21st century.
The opportunity is to make a contribution to solving these theoretical puzzles. Entrepreneurship has long been criticised for its reliance on theories and concepts developed in other disciplines: it is a syncretistic borrower rather than a generator of theory, and its self-claimed distinctiveness in terms of, for example, a focus on effectuation, opportunity identification or organisational emergence, seems to fall short of addressing this new emerging world of distributed and collective action. However, entrepreneurship has also, in the words of Bill Bygrave, been aspirationally characterised as the liberal arts of the business school, a holistic, integrative perspective that cuts across disciplinary boundaries. While this may be more demonstrably so in terms of pedagogy and the curriculum, Kornberger provides a language and framework for bringing entrepreneurship research into centre stage in this new landscape. Cohen (2018) has already made a start on this, but while he recognises the potentially transformative potential of these trends he does so to suggest the democratisation of entrepreneurship, construed as new venture creation, as barriers to entry (such as access to capital and technology) reduce. The lean start-up movement (Reis 2011), for example, exemplifies this application of old solutions (rewrite the new venture creation process) to new problems in a way that is ultimately confirmative rather than transformative (Felin et al. 2020).
Kornberger goes beyond this, in identifying and articulating a number of figures of thought for distributed and collective action. Having developed a critique of the existing organisational architecture in Part One of the book he sets himself the task of addressing the core challenges of the 21st century by ‘investing in organisational innovation, that is, defining intelligent ways to combine markets and hierarchies, movements and institutions, crowd and core, minds and machines … [and] … developing a conceptual apparatus, a vocabulary to think through organization, strategy, and leadership in an open, plural, and polycentric world’ (p.111). The argument is not, it is important to note, that these new forms of distributed and collective action will replace other forms of collective action (such as hierarchies and markets), but that ‘private firms, public administrations and third sector organizations will form puzzle pieces within larger networks of distributed and collective action’ (p.203).
Part Two articulates the central features of distributed and collective action in four steps. First, it is based on shared concerns, the ‘glue’ that holds it together and turns individuals and objects into collectives, and their manifestation in symbols that can motivate people. For entrepreneurship, the ‘we’ raises questions over the permeability, even existence, of boundaries between the venture and its wider stakeholders as communities of interest replace transactional actors. To some extent, this communities of interest orientation is emerging in the social enterprise literature; the challenge is to migrate it across entrepreneurship more generally. Second, and by extension, distributed and collective action requires the structural organisation of communication, collaboration and control in a shift from internal organisational structure (archetypically Fordism) towards an organizing infrastructure (archetypically Wikipedia’s network architecture) based on interface design for communication, architectures of participation for (self-organising) collaboration and, in a phrasing unconsciously echoing Spinoza et al.’s (1997) definition of entrepreneurship, evaluative infrastructures as forms of control that ‘invite disclosing new worlds’ (p.112). At the very least, this would provide the basis for re-examining the now almost ubiquitous metaphor of the ‘entrepreneurial ecosystem’ as more than just a diverse gazetteer of actors and activities. Third, thinking and acting strategically by network actors is based on shared tools for collective reasoning and action which emphasises the intentionality of influencing, in contrast to the execution of command and control management, the imperatives of institutional norms or identity claims. This represents a challenge for entrepreneurship, which is still to a large extent predicated on the archetype of the heroic entrepreneurial individual and their search for identity and legitimacy. Fourth, distributed and collective action has implications for leadership based on diplomacy, translation and tact, embodied in the notion of the leader as diplomat, acknowledging differences while creating the possibility of collaboration and conflict resolution. This draws on March’s (1994) distinction between the ‘logic of consequences’ based on economic rationality (which resonates with markets and hierarchies) and a ‘logic of appropriateness’ based on identity cues, norms, standards and other social markers (which resonates with institutions and grassroots movements), and suggests instead a ‘logic of tact’ as a more appropriate form of reasoning that approaches a situation from multiple perspectives and arrives at a correct assessment. For entrepreneurship, struggling to articulate a coherent perspective on ‘entrepreneurial leadership’ that goes beyond 1960s-style transactional and transformational leadership debates, this discussion represents a fruitful basis for reflection and reconsideration.
This is not an entrepreneurship book, but it is an important book that articulates the conditions in which contemporary entrepreneurship takes place. As such, entrepreneurship scholars cannot afford to ignore it if their scholarship is to make a significant contribution to unravelling the theoretical puzzles and organizational mysteries of the changing landscape of twenty-first economy and society in a way that exemplifies both rigour and relevance.