Abstract
Zundel and Johnsen add Entrepreneurship to the Sage series entitled ‘A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap book about. . .’ (VSFIRC). With a warm conversational tone and unhurried prose, the authors respond to the title’s aim of providing a critical overview that turns key issues and debates on their head. As they reveal in the ‘Final thoughts’ (pp. 87–90), the text is not an attempt at a balanced review of entrepreneurship. Instead, their aim is to further ‘phenomenological interest’ about ‘how entrepreneurs come to notice possibilities for change in the world and how this change is created’ (p. 87). This explains why the introduction begins with Grayson Perry, the ‘outsider artist’ who transformed expectations about ceramics. Perry’s journey from naughty schoolboy with a working-class background to commercially successful transvestite artist is used to introduce the reader to core concepts from phenomenology, while also conveying the authors’ enthusiasm for entrepreneurship as an ‘open and exciting topic’.
From the introduction, the text follows a relatively conventional overview of the field of entrepreneurship, thereby responding to the ‘short’ element of the VSFIRC title. Chapter 1 begins with economic theories of entrepreneurship, before tracing more expansive definitions emphasising how entrepreneurship creates multiple forms of value (social, environmental, cultural). The use of urban theorists to contextualise entrepreneurship in mundane and everyday activities (Jacobs, Lefevbre, de Certeau), along with literature exploring how entrepreneurial creativity is central to contemporary capitalism (Reckwitz, Florida, Fisher), keeps the overview engaging. Chapter 3 brings the overview together by considering how the experiment-driven strain of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship became the driving force of hyper capitalism. The authors situated such entrepreneurship in the emergence of novel business models harnessing network and platform effects; the material affordances of digital technologies and a ‘California ideology’ blending spiritual practices for self-empowerment with socio-technical imaginaries and venture capital. This heady mix is summarised as creating a ‘winner takes it all’ reality that is underpinned by widely adopted practices such as pitching, lean start-up, hypotheses testing and MVPs. While these provide efficiency gains for investors searching for the next rapidly scalable venture, the authors carefully note how they carry detrimental effects for individual wellbeing (long hours, high levels of stress) and collectively when communities get left behind or excluded. Zundel and Johnsen pack a lot into Chapters 1–3 but the constraints of the VSFIRC may explain why the overview does not dive deeper into literature exploring entrepreneurship in relation to social inequalities (intersectionality), conflict and displacement (refugee entrepreneurship), efforts to decolonise entrepreneurship and gender-based critiques exposing, for instance, masculinised bias in entrepreneurship. Criticising the text for ‘missing’ important research is rendered somewhat redundant given the authors aim is not to attempt a balanced overview. Instead, responding to the ‘interesting’ aspect of the VSFIRC title, Chapter 4 develops an alternative, phenomenologically informed, alternative to mainstream views of entrepreneurship.
Rather than seeing entrepreneurship as the pursuit of well-demarcated opportunities through clear visions and detailed plans, Zundel and Johnsen define entrepreneurship as a sensitivity towards ‘different, strange, or new needs’. The entrepreneur is no longer cast as a heroic change maker but as a ‘thinking, affective, perceiving being who has feelings and bodily sensations’. It is in noticing and holding on to such feelings, for instance, when experiencing anomalies and dissonance, that entrepreneurs create new ways of being which (may) unsettle familiar and seemingly stable appearances. While this use of concepts from phenomenology (Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty) echoes earlier literature (Spinosa et al., 1999), Zundel and Johnsen provide a timely reminder as to why such philosophy is valuable for understanding entrepreneurship in relation to contemporary challenges. This is apparent when the authors critique Spinosa et al’s (1999) discussion of disposable razor blades as an example of successful entrepreneurship. By contrast, Chapter 4 introduces examples from literature, art and philosophy to show how entrepreneurship involves seeing through new eyes. This aligns the authors with scholars that have long explored connections between art, philosophy and entrepreneurship (Steyaert, Hjorth, Holt, Chia). What marks Zundel and Johnsen out is the breadth of examples. For instance, the reader encounters Achilles Mbebe’s Afropolitanism, which proposes an organic future in opposition to the trajectories of Western capitalism. Next up, the authors ask the reader to see blandness not as undesirable and unremarkable, but as a murky state from which new possibilities emerge. The work of artist Ni Zhan, who spent a lifetime painting similar landscapes is used to illustrate how new ways of seeing emerge from noticing differences within familiar appearances. The metamorphosis undertaken by Proteus in Homer’s Odyssey, the cunning strategizing of Lao Tzu and playful inventiveness of Paul Klee further extend the idea that entrepreneurship is akin to how artists ‘marvel at things in a state of wonder about what there actually is’ (p. 80).
In the Final Thoughts chapter, the relevance of adopting a phenomenological approach to entrepreneurship is expanded. Hannah Arendt’s concept of ‘natality’, or the ‘capacity of beginning something anew’ (p. 88), is used to contrast a phenomenologically inspired view of entrepreneurship with Schumpeter’s notion of creative destruction. While the latter represents entrepreneurship as an evolutionary struggle between the new and old, Arendt’s work is drawn upon to see entrepreneurship as a conjoining of the new and old that injects plurality, plasticity and multiplicity into familiar appearances. From this perspective, entrepreneurship involves birthing new possibilities rather than the shadowy violence that is embedded in Schumpeter’s notion that entrepreneurs shock markets into disequilibrium and destroy the old. This switch is an invitation to cultivate a view of entrepreneurship as noticing and holding on to the ‘frailty of human creation, to wondrous surprises, beguiling oddities as well as arbitrary, imbalances and exclusions, to grim injustices and barbaric violence against other humans, animals and the natural world (p. 89). This poses a question as to how entrepreneurship education might cultivate such sensitivities. The authors offer guidance when suggesting instructors should prepare students for the ‘hard slog’ of translating strangeness into familiarity via the creation of proto-organisations. However, it is less clear which learning spaces will help students to notice anomalies and dissonance? This challenge is even more complex given how such noticing occurs in relation to the ‘calculative immensity offered by connected computing systems’ (p. 90). Cracking this could provide a route out of the numbing repetition, for both student and instructor, of pitches for ‘novel’ app-based ventures.
Summarising, Zundel and Johnsen meet the ‘short’ and ‘interesting’ requirements of the VSFIRC title with aplomb. The constraints of the title make it unfair to be overly critical of literature that is missing or theoretical debates that are underdeveloped. For instance, the discussion of virtual philosophy (Massumi, Deleuze) in Chapter 4 may prove challenging for readers less familiar with entrepreneurship research informed by processual metaphysics (Whitehead, Bergson) (see Hjorth et al., 2015). A more appropriate evaluation is whether the text encourages the reader to see entrepreneurship through new eyes. The answer for this reader is an unreserved yes! Zundel and Johnsen contribute to critical entrepreneurship research, which unsettles normative views of entrepreneurship as a super(hu)man endeavour. They also avoid overly abstract academic discussions, as illustrated in their critique of literature focussing on opportunities. Instead, their phenomenological interest encourages readers to think of entrepreneurship as a field concerned with flexible and nimble counter-movements that re-mould familiar appearances and contribute to birthing new ways of being. The idea that entrepreneurship research should focus on the creation of new ways of organising life provides a hopeful alternative to the ecological destruction, authoritarian politics, algorithmic automation and social inequity that contemporary entrepreneurship seemingly contributes towards. Perhaps then, a phenomenological interest can provide a timely correction when thinking of entrepreneurs not as hellbent on ‘extracting and violating their surroundings for temporary gain’ but whose ‘flourishing (is) dependent on the wellbeing of all our environment.’ (p. 90).
