The Other Organization: Heterotopia,Management,and Entrepreneurship

Abstract

Organizations are viewed as ordered places that legitimate the hand that holds back and that formalize structured, institutionalized ways of saying and doing. Against this backdrop, we want to see the more recent attention to the entrepreneurial as a reason to conceptualize the new organization that emerges from within the existing organization as the “other organization,” accomplished through heterotopia. We propose that such creation of organization, the process of entrepreneurial emergence, can be thought of as part of organizations: organization entails both the already organized and the emergent; and organization-creation efforts are tactically exploring the cracks, the interstices, of the already organized. The “other organization” is actualized within the heterotopic and ephemeral space opened by such efforts. Bringing heterotopic/heterochronic space-time back into the study of organizations requires that we immerse ourselves in the spaces of resistance, emergence and play. This essay—hopefully, also playfully—does that.

Introduction and Framing

Posthumanist and new materialist research has enhanced our capacity to grasp how life multiplies itself through polymorphous heterogeneities of forces, places, practices, affects, materiality and bodies (Barad, 2003; Bennett, 2010; Braidotti, 2019). Amongst these multiplications of life, new organizational forms are conceived, gestated, emerged, and are born. Under the floorboards, between the cracks, and along the edges, the disruption of creative destruction finds special purpose as it sparks into life. These other(ed) places—these heterotopia—have long been seen as privileged contexts for the emergence of radically novel forms of organization and for social experimentation (Bazin & Naccache, 2016; Edwards & Bulkeley, 2018; Gümüsay & Reinecke, 2022). In this essay, we weave theory, critical reflection, and illustrative exemplar vignettes into a focused exploration of heterotopia as entrepreneurial places, analyzing their significance for understanding the coming, the other, organization.

Why is it timely, important, and relevant to consider the significance of heterotopia for the coming organization, as we do here? We see a sharp and perilous divide between life's potential for richness, interconnectivity, and variability—on the one hand—and the controlling, homogenizing, ossifying of the institutionalized organization. We argue that openings to the heterotopic edges offer new places and spaces for the co-creation of disruptive novelty, in organizational response to contemporary grand challenges, and in resonance with more vitalist ontologies. Endless evolutionary movements spiral complex and vital meshworks through the emergent enactment of life's imaginative becomings. Yet the organizational form contrasts sharply with life-as-lived, setting itself apart in its ambitions to control, manage, standardize, codify, enforce, and set in structure; to make an unchanging, spatialized “here” of time, and unalterable “position” of process, practice, matter and people, and how sterile and sedated managed organizations can appear, from this perspective of vitalist, new materialist and processual philosophy. Neatly structured and ordered, organizations, from the said process perspective, seem to “other” the emergent and processually ambiguous, to make it fit with the dominant order or cast it out. Where the dominant order cracks, where “other spaces” make themselves potentially present, the already organized re-establishes its “here,” and holds its “position” with liminality as a result. Kristeva (1996/2000) describes the result of such othering as an abject, neither subject nor object, and characterized not by the lack of order, but “…by what disturbs identity, system, and order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (p. 4).

Similarly, Foucault, when he first mentions the concept of heterotopia (in the Preface to his The Order of Things—An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, Foucault, 1966/1970, p. xviii) uses resonant wording:

Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, …heterotopias …desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source; they dissolve our myths, contest and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences.

These are strong words, and albeit somewhat marked by his time's fixation with language, telling as a description of a concept—heterotopia—we believe can help us see, study, and analyze the budding organization-to-come that peaks through in the cracks of everyday organizing in the context of the already organized (Hjorth & Holt, 2022). The strength of these words reminds us too that heterotopia is inherently disruptive; their very power and purpose lie in this capacity for contesting, inverting, and subverting the organized habitual. It is this time and place (heterochronic and heterotopic) where the smoothness of the ongoing is potentially disturbed that we are after to include in management-, organization-, and entrepreneurship studies. We build from a most influential philosopher for our disciplines and beyond, Michel Foucault, who invented the modern use of the concept of heterotopia in social science discourse (Foucault, 1966/1970). His work from 1967 also shows much interest in the “age of space” (as he liked to characterize the 1900s), and he seems to have developed a greater interest in the level of practices that form, defend, resist, use and imagine heterotopia in various parts of society. He posited six principles of heterotopia (Foucault 1967/1986, pp. 24–27), which, as his own later work shows, are proposed rather in the French spirit of “principles,” inspirations to act as a rough travel guide for future journeys in these strange spaces and places. We have used the principles here in just this fashion, weaving our way along, through, and around them, sometimes traveling in new directions from their starting points, heterotopically. Their traces are sometimes more evident than others, however, there is wisdom and benefit in sharing these here, as our own starting point, theoretically: (a) “there is probably not a single culture in the world that fails to constitute heterotopias”; (b) “a society, as its history unfolds, can make an existing heterotopia function in a very different fashion”; (c) “the heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible”; (d) “heterotopias are most often linked to slices in time-which is to say that they open onto what might be termed, for the sake of symmetry, heterochronies”; (e) “heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable”; and (f) “they have a function in relation to all the space that remains.”

Heterotopias are described as present in all cultures, especially, we suggest, where order is at stake, and they can help us conceptualize how the “other organization” can emerge from within the already organized. They are also often linked to heterochronies: different, compressed, intensified times, such as that of the festival or grief. Foucault pointed to real spaces like ships and cemeteries as having heterotopic functions, but also to heterotopias of illusion that reveal the constructed quality of real spaces, which opens up to destabilizing their “normality” and social status. His own imagination of heterotopias then lands the metaphor in the image of the ship as “the heterotopia par excellence,” “a floating piece of space” (Foucault, 1967/1986). The heterotopia/ship, ambiguously referred to here as both real and illusory, is described as “the greatest reserve of imagination” (1986, p. 27) and it is perhaps not too farfetched that we, in the endless sea of the entrepreneurial “entre-” (in-between), locate the heterotopic entrepreneur-ship.

We propose that the entrepreneurial event in the context of the already organized, is a paradigmatic example of heterotopia. As such, this is what is “other” to the existing organization, and it sits in the post-instrumental and pre-operative: it is not serving the present order well instrumentally, (rather, disturbs it) but is not yet operative in the sense that its organization has not yet come. We need a concept for this, we further propose, in order to deter premature managerial action from being taken against the heterotopic, potentially inhibiting entrepreneurial value-creation from taking form and shape. We say “managerial action” as we see management as the primary guardian of the existing, dominant order in organizations.

Heterotopias are not simply liminal, for this requires that we are left “naked” at the end of a well-established protocol supporting ceremonial behavior (Turner, 1967; Van gennep, 1969). They are not temporary or project organizations, because they are the opening in which the organization-creation process can start (Turner & Müller, 2003). Nor, finally, are they emerging organizations in Katz and Gartner's (1988) sense of this concept, since they approach mainly startups and define them as emergent primarily from a population-ecology theory, that aims to taxonomically classify organizations (Katz & Gartner, 1988, p. 430). We still find “emerging organizations” to describe the heterotopically “other organization” we are conceptualizing here well, but the difference to Katz and Gartner's concept is that we study the “other” as emergent from within the established, or, what we describe as the “already organized” condition. As such, the emerging organization “sneaks out” through a “crack” in the dominant normality of running things, guarded and maintained by management. The dominant normality of the already organized is therefore much more of a concern to us (than to Katz & Gartner, 1988). The “crack” is accomplished by the heterotopia—a space and time that disturbs or questions the dominant normality of the already organized by suspending its “reign” and by adding play (as free movement) potentializes the “other” organization-to-come.

Organizations are dominated by the already organized, as places that resist the evolutionary movement and imaginative becomings of life, spaces for play, the from-within-the-potentially-emergent-organization. A process perspective, we argue, sees organizations as a mix of the already organized and the emergent (Hjorth & Reay, 2022), but with a historical tendency to prioritize and normalize the former and often at the cost of making the emergent into “the other” in the negative sense, as an abject to be cast off. Management control persists as the ruling spirit of the organization, its hands ever holding back and countering more vital movements and becomings. There is a profound and consequential anti-vitality to this idea that a hand—Latin manus—needs to be working as a counter-force (Latin contra-) against what is moving (Latin rotulus): cont-rol. In a slightly romanticized description of the life of children, this is what the adult world and life would look like, the world of those that unlearned how to be a child. Tied to a routinized and ritualized time and place of order that is instigated and controlled by management, withdrawn from the vitality of life's unfolding emergence, this is the managerial organization of the already organized.

Historically, organizations are this: ordered places and times that have legitimated the hand that holds back, that pulls into line, that formalizes structured, institutionalized ways of being-without-becoming (Leone, 2023). Against this backdrop, we want to see the more recent attention to the entrepreneurial as a reason to conceptualize the other organization that emerges from within the existing organization, and to think of organization-creation efforts in the cracks of the already organized, as the “other organization” being accomplished through heterotopia. With this, we want to invert the established normality of structured and managed control. Rather than seeing life's vital evolutionary imaginings and becomings appearing as other and abject, falling off the table of organization studies because of being the not-yet-organized, we propose that such creation of organization, the entrepreneurially emergent, can be thought as part of organizations: organization is the already organized + the emergent, the organization-creation process. In-between them sits the heterotopic, the ephemeral space opened by the crack, through which the “other organization” can achieve being. Like a honeymoon was traditionally meant to work, heterotopias sit in-between the previously ordered life of singles, and, as a temporary space for play, help another life as a couple achieve being. Bringing such heterotopic/heterochronic space-time back into the study of organizations requires that we immerse ourselves in the spaces of resistance, emergence and evolution.

Our essay addresses recent calls that were made to reform and reimagine entrepreneurship research by bringing in the Humanities, as a way to broaden our understanding of what entrepreneurship is and what it does to the organization, and how it can be more humane and inclusive of the margins (Weiss et al., 2023). We are interested in the other, entrepreneurially coming organization not as a quantitatively more but a qualitatively different organization. Hetero- (different, other) -topia (place, region, space, landscape) is neither new as a concept in general nor is it new to management and organization studies.

This essay wants to develop how the concepts of heterotopia and the entrepreneurially emergent organization might help us imagine, describe, and analyze the presence of vital counter-spaces and counter-histories in the context of the already organized. In that sense, it contributes to offering, within and for business schools, a “politics of hope” (Mikes & New, 2023, p. 228) that stands right between utopia and dystopia (Ibid., p. 229), and blurs traditional disciplinary boundaries of organizational sciences, entrepreneurship, sociology, and philosophy (Ibid., p. 230). Within the already organized, such living heterotopias function as ways of subverting the dominant discourses, as they, in turn, order space and time towards the maintenance of those hegemonic forces and structures keeping their own present order in place. Martí and Fernández (2015) show, for example, how the squatter occupations of Spain's PAH (mortgage victim associations) “produce heterotopic instantiations that allow for different forms of organizing” (p. 425). We concur that “the study of such kind of processes offers the opportunity to understand how individuals and collectives can envision and create new practices and spaces for creativity and innovation” (Martí & Fernández, 2015, p. 425).

The aim here is to tackle the question: how can the concept of heterotopia help us to understand the opening of a possibility for the emergence of the “other” coming organization from within the midst of the already organized? In other words, how might the notion of “other spaces” help us appreciate how to renew and how to challenge the dominant normality of the already organized, and the assumed unproblematic status of “today” as a model for tomorrow? Through this aim, this essay makes a contribution to the theory of organizational dynamics and entrepreneurship as organization-creation (Hjorth & Holt, 2022) with a particular focus on space (Leone, 2023).

As an entre-practice, we propose that entrepreneurship is an idea that opens us to “other” spaces and times, to the emergence of the organization that is not yet here, that has not yet arrived, and whose time has not yet come. Process thinking-wise, its time has not come, actually, but its time virtually is very much real and present, always latently here and now in its potentialities and freedoms. Process thinking would stress that the existing organization is but one of the possible actualizations of the virtual idea of the organization. The virtual organization is an idea and image that attracts us in our imagination and exists as a multiplicity with differential relationships to the actual, the lived world, all potentially actualized in some form (Deleuze, 1994). A process perspective on organizations is interested in what the organization could become, how we can imagine moving it beyond the limits of the present, and how the practiced organization could overcome its rhetorically convincing actuality in favor of its drafty and incomplete organization-to-come that peaks through in its cracks. Entrepreneurship as an idea affirms the potential space for play that could result from expanding these cracks. Entrepreneuring, as organization-creation, makes use of such heterotopic space to make the “other organization” experimentally achieve being.

Some mythic exemplars of innovation, corporate venturing and intrapreneurship appear to have heterotopic settings. Silicon Valley, now that the most institutionalized of iconic organizational contexts, still relates to foundational heterotopic legends like garage start-ups, “home brew computing clubs,” and impromptu café coding marathons. Kelly Johnson's Lockheed “skunkworks” was a long-standing model for the offsite, scavenging, norm-shattering heterotopic ideas studio, lab or workshop. Corporate venturing hubs and accelerators also often strive to enact this cultural, material and geographic separation, to manifest heterotopia. Whilst organizational, strategic, managerial, practiced, processual, and entrepreneurial insights analysis of these related phenomena are of enormous influence and interest, here our focus is on a specific form of organizational space which appears to be vital to their collective performance, rather than on contributing to any one of these specific streams of work.

A Note on Our Method and Form of Writing This Essay

It is an essay form that stylistically guides us on our way. Essay as form would itself be resonant with heterotopic time and space. The essay proposes to its readers that they give the author(s) some space and time to try out, as with a thought that is drawn towards its end more by imagination than by what is already known. The essayist asks for generosity and promises to “pay back” by showing courage. Montaigne's inauguration of the essay form bears witness to the specific relationship to the reader it seeks: “Had my intention been to forestall and purchase the world's opinion and favour, I would surely have adorned myself more quaintly, or kept more grave and solemn march” (1580; in Greenblatt & Platt, 2014, p. 9). The essay has since emerged and morphed into many shapes but still represents—also in the context of research and academic journals like this one—the form of the early ideas, the invitation to think differently, the novel use of a clearing and, dare we suggest, allowing such space for movement to draw play from us. Michel de Certeau (1997) would say this is a space where “history is absent” (Ricoeur, 2004, p. 39). In and from such play may the hitherto absent other organization emerge?

We see Montaigne's essay form as a playful conversation, and we have taken this as our starting point, trying out with each other's insights and ideas, offering our own to share. Our conversations on heterotopia have become their own journey to a time and space of inviting difference, of inclusive other and othering, of openings, emergence and becoming. We were inspired, enlightened and engaged by an invited and eclectic expert workshop in the summer of 2022, at which we four came together as hosts and speakers. In the months that followed, we read, reflected, imagined, shaped ideas, noted, suggested, and shared insights and wonderings about heterotopia. We have written, both together, and apart, shared dialogues by group correspondence, during video-link reflections, and through drafting scholarly text that encapsulated our journey. We now belong to each other in new ways; in belonging is becoming, and in becoming is belonging (Massumi, 2002). Tending towards coming-together enacts an ethic of care, collectivity, and connection which resonates strongly with heterotopic other-ness, authenticity, vitality and creativity (Massumi, 2002).

We asked ourselves, how might heterotopia be a concept that helps us conceptualize how the “other organization” can playfully emerge from within the already organized? How could we more precisely describe, analyze and understand the emergence of the not-yet-organized, as entrepreneurial organization-creation in heterotopic space? How might our intuitions play out, about the tractability of entrepreneurship scholarship in opening up new passageways to understanding heterotopia, as place, space, process and movement? How might this help challenge the rigidities of the already-organized, particularly in times when organizations struggle to adapt to contexts of constant crisis, iterative, escalating and intertwined disruptions and dislocations?

Our authorial collective shares theoretical and empirical interests in the edges of entrepreneurship, sites of social change, and locally regenerative and emancipatory communities of creative organization. However, we each also bring our own embodied and embedded ways of participating in discourses on heterotopia. We are brought together by the joint interest in developing the concept and are convinced that we get further by allowing the authorial in-betweens to be part of the writing. The in-betweens make us all attend to the others as we write. It becomes a way to perform writing in a heterotopic style—sensitizing everyone to their thinking as a product of an already organized state. The essay strives to balance the intimate expertise of each of our four voices, whilst also providing a text that as a whole is shaped by this attentiveness to the other—also the reader outside our authorial team—in writing.

Our aim was to first open some passages into the counter-site of organizational entrepreneurship scholarship's manifestations of heterotopia. We have attempted this both in our introduction and within this review of our own practices here. Next, we each take a turn in sharing a multivocal journey, moving via separate voices still addressing the other co-authors as well as the reader. In this way, we have sought to show how different path-dependent critical reflections on heterotopia can provide robust and relevant insights into how the other organization emerges.

We might have smoothed this act in diverse scenes into a single collective playwright's voice throughout, as in the polyvocal harmonization of our essay's exit and entrance. Instead, we have chosen to retain a more performative style in that we worked with four voices in conscious tension with an emerging whole, itself demonstrating conditions of emergence in the context of an already organized or agreed-upon vision for the essay's overall point: making the concept of heterotopia more widely connectable to management and organization research's on the conditions for the emergence of “the other” organization’s in the context of the already organized.

Voice 1: Place, Entrepreneurship, and Heterotopia

When I worked with Sarah Dodd (Dodd et al., 2021) and Claire Champenois (Champenois & Jack, 2022) , I noticed the illusionary nature of heterotopia since each time I thought I understood what it really meant, it was gone. I came to think of it as being like the green gungy slime we played with as children; each time you thought you had it captured, it started slithering away, fluid, and dynamic by nature, constantly moving, changing, and reforming. Eventually, I realized this is heterotopia and that the problem is that I have been trying to box it in instead of thinking about it in terms of movement, place and space.

Upon becoming more familiar with the concept, I realized I was not alone in my confusion. According to Johnson (2006), Foucault’s heterotopia is shortly sketched and somewhat confusing, but it has provoked a wide range of interpretations and applications. Scholarly conversations soon turn to utopias and heterotopias. According to Foucault, utopias are places without a place. With the use of a mirror, Foucault argues the difference between utopia and heterotopia by showing that a mirror is a utopia because the reflected image is an unreal virtual space that allows one to encounter oneself. The mirror, however, is also a heterotopia since it is a real object. In this heterotopia, the mirror is both real and unreal at the same time, creating a virtual image. Foucault distinguishes heterotopias from utopias by arguing that utopias only reside in a spatial and temporal “no-place” (or fictional somewhere). Heterotopias, on the other hand, are situated in reality (Foucault, 1967/1986). Saldanha (2008) tries to help the reader out here by arguing that “unlike utopias, heterotopias are locatable in physical space-time; but like utopias, heterotopias also exist “outside” society insofar as they work differently from the way that society is used to” (p. 2081). It was through a desire to talk about real spaces that Foucault brought us to heterotopia in the first place. Heterotopia is, according to Saldanha (2008), the difference between one real place and all the other places in a culture. As Hetherington (1997, p. 7) says:

Heterotopias do exist, but they only exist in this space-between, in this relationship between spaces […]. Heterotopias are not quite spaces of transition—the chasm they represent can never be closed up but they are spaces of deferral […]. Heterotopias, therefore, reveal the process of social ordering to be just that, a process rather than a thing.

Foucault uses heterotopia to demonstrate that there are real spaces that exist within the real world, but are separate from the wider society (Blair, 2009). A heterotopia is an “other space” with its own rules, culture, and context (Blair, 2009). Foucault distinguishes two types of heterotopias which are especially interesting: (1) crisis heterotopias, which he describes as a state of crisis in society and the human environment where people live: adolescents, women who are menstruating, pregnant women, the elderly, etc.; and (2) heterotopias of deviation as places where individuals behave differently from the norm or the majority (Foucault, 1967/1986).

In entrepreneurship studies, Hjorth (2005), Dodd et al. (2021), and Champenois and Saurier (2022) have addressed entrepreneurship and heterotopia. It is easy to see why entrepreneurship is calling on us to rethink our research and education practices as heterotopic in light of the crises and challenges we face today: entrepreneurship must be repositioned as a connective, heterotopic, engaged, and transdisciplinary ecotone (Dodd et al., 2021). I wonder if entrepreneurship as heterotopia provides another way to view the world, yet one that also provides hope for a better tomorrow? The work on deprived communities and entrepreneurship is interesting to draw on here. McKeever et al. (2015) showed how entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship can bring hope and real change to disadvantaged communities in Ireland. In contrast, Parkinson et al. (2016) looked at entrepreneurship in a deprived part of the Northwest of England, UK and saw little in the way of hope. Like with entrepreneurship, heterotopia should not be a “prefix” for the necessarily positive, romantic, or good. Still, in the wake of rising inequality, climate change, refugee crisis, earthquakes, extremism, and war—can the concept of heterotopia help us address these challenges and bring about social change? Heterotopia is tied to hope (Greenaway et al., 2016; Huang et al., 2019), but hope tied to action rather than pacifying illusions.

This brings me to my next question; how might entrepreneurship emerge or resurface during or after a crisis? According to Kuckertz et al. (2023), hope is not only an emotion but also a catalyst for entrepreneurship (p. 5). Social entrepreneurs, for example, contribute significantly to societal hope. Entrepreneurship can foster resilience and support the hope process (Kuckertz et al., 2023), which begs the question: do individuals seek heterotopia to relieve their sense of hopelessness? Is hope what makes action fall through the cracks? Or is it a bridge to heterotopia?

Heterotopias are places where people can escape to “real places…” which are something like “counter-sites” (Foucaulte, 1967/1986). A heterotopia can help construct places and contexts by being an image of what a local place might become. Heterotopias can be used to identify what works in other places and suggest it might work in your place. So, what might your place become? Entrepreneurship brings about change, providing the mechanism to unlock what is there and lift individuals and places to what they can become. Heterotopia for Foucault, idealized as a ship, represents “a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea” (Foucault, 1967/1986, p. 27).

In McKeever et al.’s (2015) work with deprived and marginalized communities and places, we see how some individuals through their belonging to a place can share a view of the potential value of a place and what it might become. In the cases reported by McKeever et al. (2015), we see entrepreneurs help lift a small and tired place and its community out of deprivation through new entrepreneurial combinations and working together to improve the locality and the conditions for the community in its time of need. For example, “Paddy worked in England for 10 years but made the decision to return “home.” Having established his own building company, he was concerned about the high levels of youth unemployment in Blighsland.” Paddy created 150 jobs for young people. What Paddy also did was engage with others who lived outside the place to invest in his vision of what the place could be (McKeever et al., 2015, p. 58). Paddy went on to develop a hotel, shopping arcade and sheltered housing complex for the community, which benefitted from his vision of what the place could be. Another respondent, Brian, recognized that there was potential for unused land to be converted for golf, thereby bringing more visitors and tourism to the local area. Once he had finished the golf course using local labor, Brian then looked to improve the “physical infrastructure of the community including painting the houses of elderly residents and supporting them to stay in their homes”(McKeever et al., 2015, p. 58). Through their work, the respondents in McKeever et al.’s (2015, p. 58) study were “inspiring and assisting individuals and communities to start their own businesses and take control of their own destiny,” thus building a better place.

What these examples also show is that entrepreneurship is often grounded in and has obligations to place (Jack & Anderson, 2002; McKeever et al., 2015; Ryan et al., 2023). According to Ryan et al. (2023), “places are where life unfolds, where values are created, possibilities are processed, and responsibilities generated.” It is possible for ventures to emerge to serve the future needs of communities (Jack & Anderson, 2002; McKeever et al., 2015) or transition to serve particular crises, such as the Ukraine war or the COVID-19 pandemic (Kuckertz et al., 2023). Entrepreneurship happens in places through a sense of belonging. This carries with it responsibilities to a place. In addition to influencing entrepreneurial action, this embeddedness in place also explains how entrepreneurs interact with it (Jack & Anderson, 2002; McKeever et al., 2015). So, in using the concept of heterotopia to study entrepreneurship, do entrepreneurial ventures emerge and co-evolve by creating space in place? What does this mean for marginalized, peripheral and/or rural communities? Entrepreneurship as heterotopic offers a way to see how other and sometimes better societies are created (Champenois & Jack, 2022). When there is a crisis, a crack, entrepreneurship of course operates on both sides—it can add to the topos, the “normal place” and its reigning order, but more often is the more vital provider of a way to an “other” way. Linking the concept of heterotopia to entrepreneurship might offer a renewed way of thinking, sensitizing us to the conditions for entrepreneurship in the context of the already organized organizations (Dodd et al., 2022). From the edges of the already organized (Hjorth & Reay, 2022), expanding the crack, adding space to move more freely, marginalized communities as studied in, for example, social entrepreneurship, have shown how “other organization” can be achieved.

Voice 2: On the Edges of Emergence

Voice 1 has laid down many of the foundational openings into heterotopia which we believe entrepreneurship scholarship might offer, particularly around movement, space, and embedded place. Voice 1 pulls our attention to the dual nature of heterotopic space-time, as simultaneously real places—opening, closing and having functions to/for a wider society—but also always set apart. Voice 1 draws on entrepreneurship theory to argue that such alternative places and times might become spaces for reimagining future worlds, in more hopeful and communitarian responses to crisis. Of special relevance to denuded communities and contexts, heterotopia functions, in part, then, as counter-spaces, where better places might be co-created through shared and enacted de-ordering. Picking up on key openings from Voice 1 above, I ask: How is entrepreneurship enacted to move communities, soaked in the dislocating (crisis) experiences of the disenfranchised margins, away from “hopelessness, shame, rage, or indignation” (Martí & Fernández, 2015, p. 426)?

Martí and Fernández (2015) explore Spain's PAHs, a nationally connected but locally emergent movement, which responded to a huge surge in mortgage-holder evictions. The PAHs, as they explain, met in local assemblies and shared out tasks including working with the dispossessed in their interactions with banks, courts, and other institutional structures. Importantly for us, though, the PAHs also made real heterotopic space, enacting their protests through squatting, for example, and by diverting utilities to occupied residences. Subverting institutional resource flows, appropriating unutilized property and changing its function with regard to the surrounding context, and collaborating across class, race, and gender to build a new community, heterotopia here is a joyful but highly challenging community practice. All of this, and more, resonates with the story of France's ZAD, as analyzed by Voice 3, below. And again, as in Voice 1's essay, there is much that is hopeful here, in the “happiness, joy, people having fun, and celebrating small (and not that small) victories” of emergent co-created spaces and ways of being (Martí & Fernández, 2015, p. 426).

Such entrepreneurial movement needs to resist the siren calls of the already-ordered, its comforts, constraints and controls. Not-yet-managed, heterotopia holds out against the structuring of organizations, fields, institutions, social sites of ontology, of ecosystems. Yet they are open to diverse other sites, and, as Foucault reminds us, “heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable” (Foucault, 1967/1986, p. 26). At the edge of the already organized, heterotopias are expanding the crack, moving more freely (and vulnerably) towards “the other” organization.

As openings toward the other organization, heterotopias add connective capacity, offering un-programmed movement through the not-yet-organized. Such movement adds potential or futureness, clearing the space from the remains of the already organized. Heterotopias are spaces and times of emergent process. They are in-between spaces, reaching onwards, by expanding cracks and creating open space. They do so from an ordered place, in which a crack has appeared, under the pressure of sensing an incipient other way, which disorders, disturbs, and provokes. Heterochronies are the eternally in-between moments which join our pasts and our futures. Processually conceptualized, might heterotopia then be the space and time where organizational-entrepreneurial becoming is inaugurated?

The passages of heterotopia are thus in-betweens, defined by the tension between the already organized, and the particular yet-to-be-organized that entrepreneurial organization-creation seeks to actualize. Heterotopias are the clearing between where and when we are now, and a particular elsewhere, the idea yet-to-be-actualized, saturated with potential, with the already-more of creation-process. What a gloriously hopeful richness of imaginative possibilities for play these heterotopias of vital virtuality offer, for those with the desire, vision and will to sail in-between the established order, rigorously managed, through “gates, access codes, language, hierarchies, hinterlands, no-go zones…” (Beyes & Holt, 2020, p. 2).

We can think of heterotopias as edgy passages between field margins, and therefore a human social space which does not come to us laden with (yet, from) layers of socio-cultural norms. Escaping the norms of the organization, they are without an established, unified, habitus, and we cannot ascribe pre-existing being, values, structure, or order to heterotopia; instead, we are freed to playfully move together in their passages; passages not only to new possibilities of the “other organization,” but also from some well-supported existing orders. Such moves are therefore political. Certainly, there is a homo ludens (playing human) resonance here (Huizinga, 1949). Yet this is a serious play essential to movements that would challenge the stultifying and repressive organization, suggesting moving into and in heterotopias is a political act:

Space, place, and time are not just incidental to contextual political analysis. Rather, they are central moments in the process by which the political is formed and reckoned and the practices of politics are able to roam and multiply. (Thrift, 2006, p. 561)

Beset by adventure and misadventure, always becoming, heterotopic movements through the in-between are eternally between the having left, and the not-yet-arrived. We are pulled by imagination from our here, and our now into a space where our pasts easily catch us as comfort zones we can return to. In French, “entre,” is also an intermediate point, a way station on a journey, a connecting node, the in-between link. We move across the in-betweens of heterotopia from the edge of the known towards the never-fully known, imagined and emergent. The concept of heterotopia enables analysis of how space for organization-creation is made through space-ing (Beyes & Steyaert, 2012; Hjorth, 2005) an opening which Voice 3 will shortly explore further.

Simultaneously replete with potential, yet empty of the rigidities of structure, the entrances and exits of heterotopic in-betweens draw matter and meaning together into new constellations of patterns, through the new relationships that a virtuality, an idea of the potentially new, makes sense. Drakopoulou Dodd et al.'s (2018) study into the (then) nascent Irish craft beer community, enacted in the heterotopic setting of a national beer festival, unpicked the threads of the global craft beer sector—emerging disruptively from between the institutional cracks of world-wide oligopolies—the hyper-local geo-cultural embeddedness; and the idiosyncratic personal and professional life journeys of brewer-entrepreneurs. Not fully driven by any one logic, a novel habitus was emerging from heterotopia, through:

hybridisation of diverse global and local habitus logics, via adoption, development and extension of logics drawn from other fields, and path-dependent on the life and career histories of a critical mass of habitus members, previously exposed to these fields. (Drakopoulou Dodd et al., 2018, p. 656)

Exploring these important overlaps between space, place, and habitual ways of being, doing, becoming, form the heart of Voice 3's movement.

Voice 3: Experimentation, Heterotopia and the Right to Play

Voice 2 has encouraged us to reflect on how heterotopias open in-between spaces, creating the possibility for not yet organized spaces to emerge at the edges of the already organized and assumed normality. Pointing to the political dimension of actualizing or joining heterotopias, Voice 2 hinted that the process of “other” organization emergence is one of giving voice and agency to the “Other”: an other social order—in that heterotopias are not governed by existing prevailing norms, rules, or “principles,” but by other emerging logics. These co-created emergent patterns of practice challenge the normality of the already organized; a process in which the margins, the acting forces on the edges, dissolve the margin/center dichotomy and might even become their own centers, with their own habitual ways of being, doing and becoming.

Using my voice, I now look to deepen the political dimension of heterotopia, which was briefly touched upon by Voice 2 and lies in the potential of these not-yet-organizations, challenging the dominant social order. The question I ask is: how can the concept of heterotopia help us conceive the dynamics and relation between the existing social order (the already organized) and emerging “other” spaces that precisely challenge them and their normality? More precisely, how do resistance, experimentation and play act as energy streams, as forces that open and widen cracks in the already organized and normative order?

Foucault emphasized heterotopias as spaces of contestation of the established order, of subversion of dominant organized practices. In the context of established organizations, heterotopias are thus political spaces of experimentation of new practices, of invention of another common good. As such, it allows us to think of entrepreneurship—i.e., the creation of a new, qualitatively different, organization—as a path for renewing the dominant normality, for challenging the assumed unproblematic status of “today” as a model for tomorrow, by creating a social space that acts as a renewed reserve of collective imagination.

Heterotopia can be thought of as a process of creation of a differently organized social space, which challenges or deconstructs the established order. As such they are found between order and disorder. For Foucault, heterotopias are also “counter-sites,” “effectively enacted utopia” (Foucault, 1967/1986, p. 25), which represent, contest and invert all other actual sites within our culture (Champenois & Saurier, 2022). In doing so, they challenge the dominating social norms, the habitual, incorporated ways of doing things (habitus); they are spaces of subversion. However, contrary to the idea of utopia (More, 1516), which is without place (a-topos) or an ideal place (eu-topos), the heterotopia is real and spatially situated. It is a space of practical exploration, an in-between space where tactics can be deployed (de Certeau, 1984), repeated and can reinforce each other in a collective space. In doing so, it keeps the field of possibilities open, points the way to another sociality and proves the existence of alternative organized orders.

For example, the occupants of French ZADs (initially “Deferred Development Zones”/“Zone d'Aménagement Différé”) have created space-events that are ephemeral but relatively durable in that they are occupied for several years. In Notre-Dame des Landes near the city of Nantes, a space of refusal first emerged (“ZAD” for “Zone to be defended”), a space of protest against what people perceived as an authoritarian capitalist state that wanted to implant a large airport, destroy a bocage and its biodiversity, and then expel its occupants. Spatially, a number of inhabitants had extracted themselves from the center (the city) to be located at the periphery, in a deviant space, that, as Foucault proposed, is at once open (anyone could enter) and closed (there were barricades, and other barriers that complicated access for any outsider). Over time, the ZAD of Notre Dame des Landes had been transformed into a “Definitive Autonomous Zone,” which explored new practices and a new relationship to life. Its inhabitants contested the industrial capitalist values and norms of the modern Western world, in particular the distinction between “nature” and “culture” highlighted by anthropologists (Descola, 2015). The modern value system views “nature” (plants, animals) as a separate reality external to human beings and, therefore, as a set of resources to be either protected or exploited. The ZADists, according to a process of socialization within the ZAD, experimented with new ways of doing things, and of “making the world,” that challenged the “naturalistic” value system. In this event-space, they developed a new sensitivity to nonhumans and showed towards them “a regime of attention rarely encountered, except among certain peasants or among professional ecologists” (Descola & Pignocchi, 2022, p. 70). They reversed the relationship between hosts and hosted: rather than the humans hosting a flora and fauna, caring for it and arranging it according to their needs, it was the bocage—the natural site—that hosted humans.

These new “arts of doing” (“arts de faire”), like entrepreneurial tactics, became perpetuated and collectivized over time by their inclusion in a geographical place and by processes of socialization that operate within the collective. This is a process of new organization emergence.

What is original about the ZAD, thanks in particular to its size, is that these deviations from naturalism are stabilized and institutionalized on the scale of a relatively large collective of humans and non-humans, within common uses, practices, representations and values. (Descola & Pignocchi, 2022, p. 70)

The ZAD, like any other heterotopia, offers to see a new social organization, a “hybrid political project which sees the cohabitation and interaction of state-type structures and autonomous territories” (Descola & Pignocchi, 2022, p. 125), inventing new ways of doing. As a result, the heterotopia, as the ship for Foucault, recreates a “reserve of the imagination” (Foucault, 1967/1986, p. 27), of other possible confiscated by capitalism, neo-liberal logic and naturalist ontology.

The way in which a heterotopia contests the organized, established social order is peculiar. Resistance does not come through violence or conflict but through laughter, play, and experimentation. Contestation and inversion of the dominant norms do not take place in a space that would be cut off from the rest of society and its organizations, but rather in relation to them. Heterotopias, indeed, “have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites” that they reflect and contradict (Foucault, 1967/1986, p. 26), while these sites are “formed in the very founding of society” (Foucault, 1967/1986, p. 24), that is, within established organized orders. Those orders are relativized by laughter and play. They are brought to questionability and this way the seemingly fixed is made loose, open to new connections.

Heterotopias describe forms, spaces of “soft,” pacified contestation, which are embedded (Champenois & Jack, 2022; Jack & Anderson, 2002; Polanyi, 1944) in the rest of society. This softness, even this aestheticism of heterotopias, makes them strong—guaranteeing them a certain social acceptability, a certain durability and a capacity to act as a reserve of collective imagination. It also makes them weak. Through them, the dominated groups (the margins) denounce the organized order, and the dominant ideology, but their actions and their projects are often denounced as utopian by dominant groups, and the status quo is maintained. One can indeed wonder about the political effectiveness, the performative, real transformative capacity of these other spaces, which exist only in “juxtaposition” with other sites and organized orders that they neutralize, suspend, contest, but do not intend to overthrow nor replace, and which overlook the tensions and conflicts inherent to social contestation. As such, the Foucauldian heterotopia may be confined to an aesthetic dimension and not possess the political dimension of Ricoeur's (1997) practical utopia, which thinks about power relations, violence and conflict. The question would then arise of the political efficacy of heterotopia:

is it enough? Why, strangely, does Foucault not mention any heterotopia that engages in a genuine power relation with the instituted social order, to contest it, and overthrow it, really, if it has the power to do so? (Roman, 2015, p. 79)

In spite of this, we propose that heterotopia help us imagine and realize the entrepreneurial process of “other” organizations emerging from within a dominant and already organized normality.

Entrepreneurship has long been seen as a force for social change or emancipation (Alkhaled, 2021; Rindova et al., 2009; Jack & Anderson, 2002), especially in research on social entrepreneurship (Montgomery et al., 2012; Steyaert & Hjorth, 2006) and community-based entrepreneurship (Bacq et al., 2022; Peredo & Chrisman, 2006). Considering it as a process of heterotopic organization-creation, that is, of situated, localized, real place, in connection with the other places of the society and organization that it challenges, offers a synthetic and transversal theoretical perspective. Thinking about entrepreneurial dynamics in general—and not only about social entrepreneurship or serving communities—through the prism of heterotopia allows us to study the practices, places, and devices that together make entrepreneurship and change emerge. It also sheds light on the power relations (margins-center) and the contested organized orders, opening a political perspective. Heterotopia allows us to think of social change and emancipation through entrepreneurship as a dynamic that is both individual (construction of new emancipated individual subjectivities) and collective (creation of other social spaces, by and for individuals, communities, in a larger social order).

The Foucauldian perspective thus makes it possible to disclose entrepreneurship's political and social dimensions. Political in the sense of recognizing that social spaces entail power relations and struggles or resistance (Bourdieu, 2013; Fleming, 2016). Social in the sense of leaving a dominant heroic individual vision (Eberhart et al., 2022; Ogbor, 2000), to instead adopt a socially “embedded” (Polanyi, 1944), collective and multi-level (individual, community, and society) approach that has been developing for several years, especially in Europe, but lacks theoretical frameworks and concepts of mixing practices, spaces and devices (e.g., Wigren-Kristoferson et al., 2022). This perspective renews the collective “reserve of imagination,” both for practitioners who create an “other” social space and for researchers who conceptualize it as heterotopic.

Voices 1, 2, and 3 have explored the various facets, concepts and potential of heterotopia, in relation to ambiguity, places, edges, habitus, experimentation, resistance, and play. Notably, they have stressed the slipperiness of the heterotopia notion, that it addresses the “having-left” and “not-yet-arrived” and that it brings precision to studies of the political dimensions of challenging established orders with what is not-yet a formed alternative. Whilst offering various empirical examples of heterotopia from different contexts, voices above have highlighted how heterotopia might help us think of the “other” organization as emerging from the interstices of the already organized, as an entrepreneurial process in which the new organization is not absent but is not there yet.

It is timely to take some perspective on these previous developments and to come back to the initial question guiding our essay: how can heterotopia enrich our understanding of the entrepreneurial phenomenon that is the emergence of new, “other,” organization within the already organized? In that spirit, Voice 4 will play with and articulate several of the concepts that we previously mentioned. Its goal will be to wrap them up and to ground the main claim of our essay: we theorize the process of organization creation through heterotopia as one of the entrepreneurial emergence; more precisely, we conceive the “other organization” as taking shape within the already organized, in the heterotopic and ephemeral space opened by its cracks.

Voice 4: Heterotopia and the Processes of Actualizing the Coming Organization

To develop the above claim, I will start by asking: what can the concept of heterotopia add to theorizing entrepreneuring as a process of actualizing the coming of other organization? In Entrepreneurship and the Creation of Organization, Hjorth and Holt (2022) provided a model for the entrepreneurial process, for entrepreneuring as organization-creation, that has four phases: seduction, play, common sense, and commerce. The idea is that a processual theorization of entrepreneuring must include the embodied, affect-based, and embedded nature of such processes on the level of everyday practices, according to process philosophy and posthuman or more-than-human thinking (Braidotti, 2019). In this case, this means reading Gilles Deleuze's philosophy as an inspiration, alongside the vitalist philosophers Spinoza and Nietzsche that inspired Deleuze. This means upgrading of the importance of affect and imagination for understanding how the “already more” of life rolls its “nextness” into the world (Massumi, 2002), meaning it will also make cracks in the surface of the already organized. Such cracks are exposure of the limits of what the already organized can handle, and heterotopias are inaugurated there, and create space for free movement or play through widening the cracks.

Attention to affect alerts us to the role of desire and its productive role in explaining how what becomes created achieves being. Hjorth and Holt (2022) suggest that images, narratively shared often in rather fantastic and fabulous stories, make bodies (bodies of thought as well as human and nonhuman bodies) powered up, and increase their power to be affected. Desire gets productive of subjects that invest in the images/stories and intensify their relationship to ideas, suggesting the virtual—images of what could become, as communicated in the stories—should be actualized. Bodies are seduced, and the way to convince them is to invite them to play. Play is the free movement made possible in the “absence of history,” as de Certeau (1997) suggested (Ricoeur, 2004), and is what expands the crack, and creates more open space. This is followed by the battle with institutionalized realities (common sense), the victory over which opens up the possibility of commerce in entrepreneurship (Hjorth & Holt, 2022). We focus now on seduction and play that we suggest are intimately related to the concept of heterotopia.

The concept of heterotopia alerts us to the “other space” or “space for play” as an illusion that reveals that all real spaces are illusory. The point of this is to see how images of “other spaces” not only can have the power to ignite desire but that they also make the seemingly fixed “ripe for improvisational entry” (Greenblatt, 1983). That heterotopias have a system of opening and closing, of entering and exiting them—is also the case here. The system for opening and closing heterotopias in the context of the business organization would now be the entrepreneurial vision to the extent that it can make credible a link to new value, promised on the other side of innovation. This is the Schumpeterian imaginary that has become the slogan of the dominant meta-discourse on the economy-society relationship since the 1980s. This is indeed the time of imagination, heterochrony (Foucault, 1967/1986) that is powerful enough to make hordes of investors throw what they have after blood-analyzing machines that will change everything. In these times, the space of theatre and the space of business are juxtaposed and it is hard to tell who merely acts for show and who really acts. There is, of course, no such hard distinction to make, as Burke's (1969) powerful model of the pentad has shown, as well as Goffman's (1959, 1967) theory of symbolic interaction.

In Western history and culture, we have numerous heterotopias where the space and times are equally “other” and as such part of our understanding of them: a honeymoon, military service, entrepreneurial start-ups, festivals, carnivals. Then we have heterotopias that are mainly space-based but that compress time and intensify your relationship to it by holding archives, such as museums, libraries, and cemeteries. In the latter, history would be overwhelmingly present, almost exhausting the space by strategically inscribing a function for it that prevents anything else from happening—it would then be more a place than a space in de Certeau’s (1984) sense. The place-dimension of a heterotopia would dominate when a strategic purpose is defining it as a place proper for a particular function, whereas the space-dimension is characterized by being dependent on time, on timing, movement, and hence the ephemeral, in the tactical making-use of an opening when it presents itself (de Certeau, 1984, p. 38). We thus find that heterotopias are interesting to an inquiry into the becoming of the other organization, the resistance and experimentation that opens a clearing in and from which a different organization might emerge, when they are linked to heterochronies, to the time of tactical interventions, movements, events.

Process-theoretically, heterotopias can be related to the time of the event, in which nothing is prefigured, as Massumi (2002, p. 27) puts it, hence more resonant with de Certeau's absence of history and the temporal opening of space. Ordered, configured, and structured distinctions collapse in the event, and what remains are intensities. Embodied affects are registered as intensities, and this is when we are brought to the end of the narrative and functional templates or protocols guiding action. When we find ourselves at that end, we experience something similar to the liminal, that is, where the ceremonial protocols are done and withdraw from the situation, what is left is the event, an intensity that is our sensing that free movement is incipient—time of vertigo, the sublime, or play.

Heterotopias as events where “nothing is prefigured” would be spaces for free movement, space-events where play is incipient or potentialized. The potential is this co-presence of multiple “could-happen” scenarios that resonate and intensify our relationship to specific options for how to actualize this or that future. The potential is registered in our body as a “felt moreness to ongoing experience” (Massumi, 2002, p. 141), which is to say that it invites us into the passage, into the play-space when we have ideas that resist or question the protocols that order the topia (the ordered place) of our organizations. The field of play can be thought of as an in-between of charged movements (Massumi, 2002, p. 72) where every move changes how the in-between is charged. Like in the football field: if the ball drops down at your feet when you stand closer to the opponent's goal, it will make you into the subject of a potential scorer, or, better put, will intensify your relationship to the scenario where you score a goal. This makes the situation into an event, and you register this intensity as an expectation that you should go for the striker kick, adrenalin pumps, and you get stressed.

The event-dimension of this potential that you might score, along with the shared desire for scoring, assembles others into a proto-organizational form, a kind of organization for the flux, the temporary. In organizational contexts, the idea for something new, the resistance against the dominant normalities (unquestioned norms for interaction, roles, templates for decision and action—the stuff institutions are made of) can—to the extent others sense the potential for free movement or play—similarly assemble people in proto-organizational forms (Hjorth & Holt, 2022). “Assemblages are passional, they are compositions of desire” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 399). People, ideas, and resources assembled in turn intensifies the relationship to the story or image of what “could become,” which means actualization of that virtuality is more likely to happen. Heterotopias as heterochronies—other space-times—would loosen the seemingly fixed and postpone the continuity of dominant normalities otherwise invading every organizational space (and defining it as a place for this or that) and this way make novelty incipient when there is an idea/image/virtuality of the coming, missing, and other organization.

The point is that from a philosophical process perspective, we give no ontological priority to an organization (and thus organizations) as something that exists beyond it being performed and made in everyday practices. Therefore, heterotopias are made by resisting the ongoingness of the “normal” organization, the organization assumed to be the one that exists. This is how we have used the metaphor of clearing above. There are institutionalized ways of doing this too, by establishing labs, incubators, or the Google 20%-time (one day of the week is “yours”). The problem with such examples is that to the extent they too are part of the dominant normality of how to create such spaces, they are from birth infested by templates, roles, and norms for interaction that have exhausted most possible free movement space there could have been. Heterotopias seem rather to be what de Certeau describes as tactical in the sense that they need to be mobilized when the time is right (Kairos time), and preferably as a surprise, and they cannot capitalize on what they win, they have to be temporary and move on “to the next.”

It must vigilantly make use of the cracks that particular conjunctions open up in the surveillance of the proprietary powers. It poaches in them. It creates surprises in them. It can be where it is least expected. It is a guileful ruse. In short, a tactic is an art of the weak. (de Certeau, 1984, p. 37)

We suggest thinking of the virtually new as actualized in a heterotopic space for play, where the differentiation happening as part of the actualization is an action without a model. Heterotopias are thus conceptualized as spaces for novelty to emerge, rather than a concept for thinking change as such. Change, as we have emphasized above, is sensed. Change is grasped as affect, as the intensity and joy of sensing I can make something new by moving in a space that is not yet invaded by templates for how to move. Change is already in organizations, but an organization is made to work as an idea of order through the declarative powers (Katz & Gartner, 1988; Taylor & Van Every, 2000) that the subject-position of the manager is endowed with in modern business discourse. Organizational becoming is thus constantly arrested to instigate the control, but also constantly happening since the tactical moment is constantly present in slips, cracks, and pauses caused by the practices attempting to enact space as places for a specific purpose aligned with the strategy (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002).

Thinking of heterotopias as always related to heterochronies makes us see them in process-theoretical terms as passages. The passage-character of organizational heterotopias is at the same time why they are difficult to battle—they do not have an identity or history but are leading from one place to another. This would also be why imagination is important for understanding how they achieve being: nothing except a crisis or an experience of liminality prefigures them as event-spaces. Imagination is arguably more likely to be nurtured in more heterogenous organizational contexts, where in-betweens are more often present and novel combinations challenges us to leave templates and routines and move beyond. Organizations that have cultivated an entrepreneurial identity have perhaps made more people open to the possibility of new solutions being required and called upon. Openness means that your potential for interaction has increased and this in turn means more relations-in-the-making are helped on their way (Massumi, 2002). The result would be that more in-betweens or unusual crossings are made incipient.

Heterotopias as spaces where novelty emergences are politically challenging in organizations. In Jacques Rancière's (2004) understanding, the political comes before politics. The latter being the guard of positions and structures, measuring quantitative change. Instead, the political is more about qualitative transformation, about opening up by de-classifying and undoing the established or the naturalness of the dominant order. There is no possibility of protecting these spaces from politics that will devour them and give them a place proper in the greater order (to then be measured and structured). Elsewhere we have proposed the concept of “comfort zone” to explain why opening up to being affected by images of a coming organization is not always a process people want to embark on. Organizations are battlegrounds in this sense, and the concept of heterotopia can add nuance and precision to the study and analysis of this tension.

Closings and Openings

This essay has considered the concept of heterotopia and how it might be applied to entrepreneurship as organization-(re)creation. We posed the question; how can the heterotopia concept help us to understand the “other” coming organization in the midst of the already organized? In other words, how might the notion of “other” spaces help us appreciate how to renew and how to challenge the dominant normality of the already organized, and the assumed unproblematic status of “today” as a model for tomorrow? We are convinced there are implications for both organization and entrepreneurship studies from this conceptualization. However, it is also the intertwinement of these fields of scholarship that our attempted renewal of the notion of heterotopia addresses. Allow us to draw some lines along which scholarship can move ahead.

Returning to our initial questions, throughout this essay we have been linking experimenting, process, place, play, passages, (in-between), space, and resistance. We have proposed heterotopia as a useful concept to conceive or analyze the not-yet organized that emerges as a response to imagining a better future. We believe that our essay—as an inquiry—serves research and practice on the organizational conditions for tolerating the emergence of the “other organization” as a source of differentiation and creativity. It shows how tolerance for the “other organization” sustains an organization's “health,” which lies in its capacity for renewing itself. We also stressed that the concept of heterotopia is an important and useful way of thinking about how the emergence of difference (“other”) can come from within the organization. This, in turn, resonates with process research's emphasis on becoming as always potential and incipient, and suggests viewing the order as an accomplishment, temporarily held in place by management. Thus, there are implications for corporate entrepreneurship, institutional entrepreneurship, as well as for organizational innovation and creativity research. Whenever the emergence of the new in the context of the already organized is sensed, responding to it can be affirmative or negative. The former is affected by the seduction of what becoming-different may hold in terms of a better organization. The latter is affected by the seduction of the existing as a comfort zone that operates on the assumption that “today” is the best template for “tomorrow.” That assumption is of course correct if control reigns and “cracks” are always plastered over as threats rather than explored as potential lines of becoming-new. To manage less, as Tsoukas and Chia (2002) once pointed out, is one way to make room for heterotopic cracks to widen and the space for play to be “playable.” This would rely on an increased sensibility before where and when heterotopias can appear, and there and then avoid the “normal” response—plaster over the crack. Management operates in a context of structure, whereas heterotopias are contexts of situations or events. The latter interrupts, disturbs or collapses the structure and this is sensed as intensity. Hence, both perceiving early signs of heterotopic cracks, and sensing that the intensity that comes from a disturbed structure point to the need to understand affect and imagination better in management and organization studies (Fotaki et al., 2017).

We show that heterotopia offers a conceptual heuristic which is also of practical interest. We highlight the richness and fragility of an elusive concept. If you stick to the heterotopia concept and try to apply it as a fixed category to describe reality, you will go round in circles as the concept itself does not bring you to a conclusion. Instead, what we demonstrate is that heterotopia is a performative concept rather than a metaphor and is to be used as a tool to open novel investigations. It, therefore, offers a way to investigate the emergence of new organizations in an increasingly complex and challenging world and to do so in ways that we have not necessarily done before. As pointed out above, it offers a tool to practitioners (managers, entrepreneurs, employees, policy-makers) to perceive the “crack” and to sense the potential heterotopic organizational space between the no longer and the not yet, a space of ambiguity, uncertainty and open-endedness, as an emerging “other” organization that is conducive to creativity and innovation. Again, envisioning this passage invites them to refrain from too rapidly dismissing such spaces, and from implementing rationalized and formalized control over such spaces, in that they recognize their potential. Understanding the concept of heterotopia seems to be related to understanding management's limits in the creative organization (cf. Amabile, 1998).

In process-theoretical terms, heterotopia gives us a flight-line for grasping emerging organizations, a challenge presented to us already by Katz and Gartner (1988). Heterotopia, therefore, extends our thinking about how organizations emerge. It also explains why it is so difficult for incubators, accelerators, or corporate entrepreneurship initiatives, which are usually organized according to predefined formal processes and standardized recipes for success, to actually foster creativity and innovation (Cohen et al., 2019; Nair et al., 2022). Such places for entrepreneurship seem ideal for the intersection of organization and entrepreneurship studies. The concept of heterotopia would here urge us to ask “when is the context organized too much to allow space for play to open?” But also: “if incubators are contexts of the already organized, and entrepreneurship is understood as organization-creation, where and when is control (more structure) needed and where and when is prorol (more free movement) (Hjorth, 2012) needed?” The concept of heterotopia, as renewed here, thus places the intertwinement of organization and entrepreneurship studies at the center. If managers are in charge of con-trol in organizations—who is in charge of pro-rol?

We also pursue the work of Weiss et al. (2023) and their calls for being more humane and inclusive of those at the margins. As a heuristic interest, the heterotopia concept invites us to make a heterotopology: it encourages scholars to identify and qualify the established social spaces (places, values, orders) that the entrepreneurial heterotopia suspends, challenges or reverses. Since a heterotopia only exists in relation to the other social places it challenges, it offers the researcher a framework to “see” and rethink these contested and questionable social places, previously taken for granted because they are established. As mentioned in our introduction, the concept of heterotopia helps us identify and question organizational normality. It sensitizes us to the potential space of the other. Hence the concept of “the missing people” is intimately related to heterotopia. They both support an analysis of the political side of an organization, since “the missing people” are those who presently lack agency and subjectivity that includes them fully in society or community (Lambert, 2021). In this sense, the concept of heterotopia can also renew research on resistance and organization (Courpasson & Vallas, 2016) as well as the study of organizations as places where the event of heterotopia might open the question of the political (Badiou, 2006; Rancière, 2004).

Further avenues to explore for research include the portfolio of processes and practices enacted in heterotopia emergence, including the embedding of these not-yet-organized spaces into already-organized contexts. How, for example, are dislocating cracks formed within the already-organized, and under which forms of pressure? What kind of societal and organizational margins are under such pressures, and what practices do the “others” situated there enact to force the cracks open wider, and to slip through into spaces and places of new possibilities? How do heterotopic communities manifest the connectivity and potentiality we have found to be so vital; what diverse forms of play, seduction, and discourse do heterotopia comprise? How can managerial and entrepreneurial practices enhance and sustain the emergence of these emerging “other” spaces that are conducive to creativity and innovation? How can and should these not-yet-organized spaces become aligned or in constructive relation with the already-organized orders they challenge? What are the differences between heterotopia emergence within existing companies or administrations and newly created organized collectives starting de novo?

We have also been taken aback, a little, by the positivity, hope and joy which seem to characterize the empirical contexts that illustrate this essay. At times, the divide between heterotopia and utopia (or, perhaps, eutopia), seems slight. We interpret this as likely self-selection survivors’ bias, with inspiring heterotopia becoming visible to scholars, and the media, thus rendering themselves candidates for study. However, it seems improbable that all heterotopia tend to beneficence, happiness, and inclusion. Open to all possibilities, the logic of hybridized habitus might just as well lead to dystopian organizational emergence, as so vividly depicted in Orwell's Animal Farm, or Golding's Lord of the Flies. This latent dark side of heterotopia also sets us interesting puzzles to wrestle with, empirically and theoretically, going forward (Kets de Vries, 1985). This brings us to questions such as how might this darker side of heterotopia play out in practice? What might this mean for entrepreneurship? And, how could this impact their activities (Linstead et al., 2014)?

Another set of questions that the concept of heterotopia poses, and that are relevant for management, organization and entrepreneurship scholars, pertains to its effects and performativity (what the emergence of other spaces performs). To what extent and under what conditions do they change the way organizations operate, and ideas of how they should operate? Under what conditions has heterotopic space the potential to change existing orders, and how can it be used to create new practices? Can we develop a better understanding of organized resistance, and how is it formed and played out in the contexts of the event, the opening towards the heterotopic? Is whistle-blowing (Kenny et al., 2020) better understood as a crack that opens the heterotopic space? Might heterotopia perhaps also have relevance in studying processes of organizational change, to understand what is “borrowed,” but also what gets left behind through emergence and change, and why? In tackling these types of questions, we encourage the use of qualitative work, especially ethnography for unpacking the practices and processes that the ideas brought about by heterotopia offer.

Given the potential of heteropia to move communities, we also see the enhanced relevance of exploring questions of despair, crisis, dislocation, resource-paucity, and precarity (Soundararajan et al., 2023). Our contemporary crises ask of organizational and entrepreneurship scholars alike to consider how we can support the development of better organizations, that tackle inequalities and power relations linked to gender, race, class and other more marginalized communities. Embracing “other” spaces that are created by, with or for the margins and are in relation with them makes it possible to imagine a world where these contemporary challenges are addressed as local experiments that can cohabit in their diversity. Perhaps we, too, can then hope for a society where creativity and life are not subjugated under surveillance, and stand more firmly with Foucault, when he argues:

In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates. (Foucaulte, 1967/1986, p. 27)