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Abstract

In recent years, entrepreneurship has been reconceptualised as social change. Understood as such, entrepreneurship can be viewed to disrupt and disturb the social order. We argue in this article that Foucault’s notion of heterotopia and Lacan’s concepts of the real and anxiety help us to conceptualise the disturbing aspect of entrepreneurship as social change and understand why the latter may encounter social resistance. Our contribution to critical entrepreneurship literature is to, first, emphasise that entrepreneurship instigates social change by introducing incongruence and, second, to highlight that this process can be affective: it can create anxiety. This article uses an illustrative historical case example of a Swedish anti-racist commercial magazine (Gringo) to elucidate these points. We conclude by pointing out that anxiety may be necessary for the provocation of social transformation.

Keywords

Affect anxiety critical entrepreneurship studies heterotopias social change the real

Introduction

‘Critical entrepreneurship studies’ (Calás et al., 2009: 566; Tedmanson et al., 2012: 531; Verduijn et al., 2014: 106) has made significant inroads in problematising dominant managerialist discourses that largely present an economic or individualist description of entrepreneurship (Da Costa and Saraiva, 2012; Jones and Spicer, 2005; Kenny and Scriver, 2012). Instead, entrepreneurship has been redefined as being ‘driven by the desire for social change’ (Hjorth, 2013: 36; see also Calás et al., 2009; Steyaert and Hjorth, 2006a).¹ Perceived as such, entrepreneurship can constitute a ‘disruptive event’ (Hjorth and Steyaert, 2009: 1). In other words, it can cause disorder within existing social orders, which can lead to disturbance through generating anxiety. However, understanding these effects of entrepreneurship as a form of social change has not been fully explored within critical entrepreneurship studies. As such, this article seeks to address two questions: How can we conceptualise the disturbing aspect of entrepreneurship as social change? Why is it that some entrepreneurial processes which introduce newness (e.g. new ideas and frames of understanding) encounter social resistance? In responding to these questions, we make the following contributions to the critical entrepreneurship literature. First, we show that Foucault’s (1984 [1967], 2002 [1966]) notion of heterotopia can allow us to conceptualise and examine how entrepreneurship as social change can generate organisations that disrupt social norms and thus disturb the social order. Importantly, heterotopias can expose how entrepreneurship is permeated by incongruence in how they not only introduce new ideas but also reinforce existing norms. Thus, entrepreneurship is understood in this article as a site in which convention and invention can collide with disturbing effects. Second, we deploy Lacan (2014 [2004]) to claim that because entrepreneurship can challenge the presumed coherence of social orders, such entrepreneurial processes produce an encounter with the real and are, therefore, affective; namely, they create anxiety, which can help us to examine how entrepreneurial interventions can be resisted. While we show how resistance can bring one Swedish organisation (Gringo) to a point of collapse, we maintain in the conclusion that entrepreneurship can engender a heterotopia which, by disclosing the limits of the symbolic and creating anxiety, may inspire other entrepreneurial organisations to challenge the social order.

Pursuing the above, we begin by reviewing the literature on entrepreneurship as social change, focusing on the use of heterotopia in this field. We then explore heterotopia as incongruous and disturbing while drawing on Foucault (1984 [1967], 2002 [1966]) and Foucauldian scholarship (e.g. Genocchio, 1995; Johnson, 2006, 2013), as well as the literature in organisation studies. Although not mentioned by Foucault, some scholars have pointed out that heterotopias are affective (Beyes and Michels, 2011). To account for this, we then draw from Lacan’s psychoanalytic concept of anxiety to emphasise the affective constitution of heterotopia, and consequently to complement existing conceptualisations of affect in critical entrepreneurship studies. Indeed, an increasing number of publications in organisation studies draw on Lacanian theory (Contu and Willmott, 2006; Driver, 2009; Hoedemaekers, 2010; Kenny, 2012), but this approach is still relatively underutilised in entrepreneurship studies, although there are some notable exceptions (Dey et al., 2016; Jones and Spicer, 2005). In this article, we show that the real underlines some of the affective consequences of entrepreneurship. Our notion of affect thus refers to the anxiety produced when entrepreneurship introduces incongruence and newness and thus ruptures established norms, familiarity and coherence. We explore a historical case example (Gringo, a Swedish anti-racist magazine) to illustrate these aspects of entrepreneurship. In our conclusion, we suggest that encountering the real may be the precondition for the formation of future entrepreneurial interventions that contest social orders.

Entrepreneurship as social change: the creation of heterotopia

To emphasise its inherently social nature, some scholars have reconceptualised entrepreneurship as social change (Steyaert and Hjorth, 2006a). Hjorth et al. (2015), for instance, claim that entrepreneurship is the creation and introduction of the new into the world. Similarly, the emphasis on social change exposes entrepreneurship as ‘driven by the desire to become other, to move beyond the limits of the present’ (Hjorth, 2011: 52). Dey and Steyaert (2016) illustrate this viewpoint. They show how the routine ways in which social entrepreneurs engage with power – as it is enmeshed within hegemonic entrepreneurship discourse – can enable them to free themselves from constraining discourses about appropriate entrepreneurial behaviour and identity. For example, they describe how a social entrepreneur, running a small development organisation, problematises the discourse of Western development aid and thus opens up a space where they can view themselves differently, as an ethical subject (see also Parkinson and Howorth, 2008).

The above body of research calls attention to entrepreneurship as the (re)creation of a heterotopia because it points out how ‘micro-manifestations of emancipation [are] epitomized by entrepreneurship’s engagement in localized, everyday struggles and practices of freedom’ (Verduijn et al., 2014: 101). Hjorth (2004, 2005) further expands the relevance of the notion of heterotopia to entrepreneurship, defining heterotopia as

an event that creates and expands the cracks in the official version (a discursive formation, e.g. an administrative pattern and style of a company’s management thinking and practice) through actualizing subversive-transformative ideas for how to make use of the strategic. (Hjorth, 2005: 392)

Heterotopia is thus used to ‘conceptualize entrepreneurship as a tactical art of creating spaces for play’ (Hjorth, 2005: 388). Hjorth’s (2005) case study – an organisation which collaborated with artists to promote creativity through the development of internal communications – shows the discursive effects of forming a heterotopia: ‘a different space within a prescribed place – in this case, a space for comfort, rest, silence and pleasure on the premises of [the company], a space for play within the place prescribed for production’ (p. 394). The concept of heterotopia helps to theorise entrepreneurship as the production of practices and spaces that disrupt normalising discourses because entrepreneurial activities ‘are played out at the margins of [managerially defined] projects, in an “other” space’ (Hjorth, 2004: 415). Entrepreneurship is not perceived as a means to the ‘removal of constraints’ (Rindova et al., 2009) but as a localised event which invents new practices of organising through the creation of space for play. Hjorth (2004, 2005: 396) provides a useful foundation for drawing on heterotopia to understand entrepreneurship as ‘the desire to create, to invent, or to transform’. However, he does not elaborate the ways in which entrepreneurship (as social change) can produce disturbing incongruence. Furthermore, Hjorth (2004, 2005) explores heterotopia mainly as a physical space. Foucault, however, as we discuss next, provides an ambiguous understanding of heterotopia, which allows for a conceptualisation of the latter as both a physical and a discursive space.

Heterotopia as disturbing

Foucault referred to the notion of heterotopia three times. He first discussed it briefly in 1966 (Foucault, 2002 [1966]). Here, he comments on Borges who quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopedia’ in which it is written that

animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies. (Foucault, 2002 [1966]: xvi)

For Foucault (2002 [1966]: xvi), the ‘wonderment’ of this classification is ‘the exotic charm of another system’ and the fact that it shows the ‘limitation of our own’. He calls this discursive space a heterotopia: a paradoxical space that destroys the logic of categorisation and division. Foucault’s second reference to heterotopia is a documented radio broadcast on the topic of utopia and literature (Johnson, 2006). His last and, arguably, more substantial elaboration of heterotopia is in a lecture given in 1967 to a group of architects, which was published in 1984 under the title Des Espace Autres (Of Other Spaces). In this text, Foucault (1984 [1967]) defines heterotopia as spaces ‘in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted’ (p. 3). While this account of heterotopia is longer than his first, it is by no means complete and includes a series of sketchy ideas.

There are clear differences in Foucault’s three accounts of heterotopia. In the first, heterotopia is conceptualised as a discursive space, while in the other two Foucault seems to be more concerned with the analysis of specific ‘physical’ socio-geographical spaces. Following the latter, Foucault cites the zoo as an example of a heterotopia because it assembles within a single space a variety of things (e.g. myriad species of animals and people) that are not usually found together. As such, scholars have deployed the notion of heterotopia to study geographical/physical places such as public nude beaches (Andriotis, 2010), public libraries (Lees, 1997), civic centres (Soja, 1995) and museums (Kahn, 1995). It has, however, also been used in the study of discursive spaces such as novels (Everson, 1992), research writing (Gonick and Hladki, 2005) and social media sites (Rymarczuk and Derksen, 2014).

We follow theorists in the social sciences, who suggest that heterotopia can be viewed as both a discursive and a physical space (Hetherington, 1997; Hook and Vrdoljak, 2002; Palladino and Miller, 2015; Voela, 2011). Johnson (2013), for example, states that ‘Foucault’s outlines of heterotopia attempt to explain principles and features of a range of cultural, institutional and discursive spaces that are somehow “different”: disturbing, intense, incompatible, contradictory and transforming’ (p. 790). Indeed, heterotopias are geographical or discursive spaces that only exist in relation to other spaces (Johnson, 2013: 794). However, given Foucault’s incomplete thoughts on heterotopia, it is no surprise that the term has generated confusion and sometimes contradictory accounts (Johnson, 2013). Some scholars, such as Saldanha (2008), have therefore doubted the concept, arguing that Foucault describes heterotopias as against a static totality of society and thus repeats certain fallacies of structuralism.

Nevertheless, in an influential publication, Genocchio (1995: 36) problematises the ‘myopic sociological functionalism’ of many applications of heterotopia and aims to ‘restore a complexity and profundity’ to Foucault’s work, challenging ‘literal’ readings of the text Of Other Spaces. He suggests that given the incomplete ideas in the latter, it is incorrect to use it ‘to provide the basis for some “alternative” strategy of spatial interpretation which might be applied to any “real” place’ (Genocchio, 1995: 39). Despite such reservations, Genocchio nevertheless sees value in the notion of heterotopia. Indeed, we draw on Genocchio’s (1995) work not only because it is regarded as seminal (Johnson, 2013: 800) but also because it provides useful points which help to address some of the confusion surrounding Foucault’s thoughts on heterotopia. We therefore outline some distinguishing features of heterotopia, making use of both Foucault’s writings and Genocchio’s (1995) reflections.

First, ‘heterotopia is more of an idea about space than any actual place’ (Genocchio, 1995: 43). Heterotopias reveal that the ordering of spatial systems is arbitrary and disputable. In some sense, this suggestion reflects (Foucault, 1984 [1967]: 3) conceptualisation of heterotopias cited earlier.

Second, despite bearing a ‘strange inconsistency’ in Foucault’s different accounts of heterotopia (variously defined as a discursive space and as physical places), Genocchio (1995) tells us that ‘in each case the distinguishing feature of the heterotopia is its purported status as a form of spatially discontinuous ground’ (p. 37); heterotopia could then be defined as giving rise to tensions (Voela, 2011: 173). Indeed, the discontinuity or incongruousness of heterotopia is emphasised by Foucault (2002 [1966]), in both his first and third accounts, which this quote illustrates: incongruousness is defined as ‘the linking together of things that are inappropriate’ (p. xix).

While Foucault does not explicitly propose heterotopia as a site of political emancipation (Reis, 2006), Genocchio (1995) has seen in the concept a third distinguishing feature: its potential ‘ability to transgress, undermine and question the alleged coherence or totality of self-contained orders and systems’ (p. 37). For Foucault (2002 [1966]), order and normalisation are closely associated with relations of power. If normality is an effect of power and discourse, that is, discursive regimes of power shaping what a society considers as normal (Foucault, 1977, 1994), heterotopias can be viewed as forms of experimentation with cultural and spatial norms (Steyaert, 2010). In this way, ‘they inject alterity into the sameness, the commonplace, the topicality of everyday society’ (Dehaene and De Cauter, 2008: 4) and may hence condition the possibilities for social transformation, although this is not guaranteed.

A fourth feature is that ‘heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language’ (Foucault, 2002 [1966]: xix; emphasis in original). They have a disconcerting characteristic and are capable of creating distress as they deconstruct normative practices and relations of power (Reis, 2006). Similarly, Beyes and Michels (2011) point out the disturbing potentialities of heterotopia, stating that the latter includes ‘disquieting spaces that violate coherence’ (p. 523). They discuss an experimental teaching project within a business school that unsettled usual university practices because what occurred in the project transgressed conventions in management education. Elsewhere, Steyaert (2010), in his analysis of Derek Jarman’s garden as a heterotopic space and practice, brings the disconcerting aspect of heterotopia into sharper focus: ‘Gardens are enacted as […] disturbing and disordered spaces that are used to resist normalized activity through often forbidden, secretly coded and dangerous practices’ (p. 46). In this article, we mobilise this conceptualisation of heterotopia to explore the incongruent and disturbing aspect of entrepreneurship as social change. By ‘disturbing’, we imply that which is disconcerting, shocking and strange. It is in this sense that we argue that heterotopias are affective as they create anxiety. Before we expand on this, we first briefly explore the literature on entrepreneurship and affect.

Entrepreneurship and affect: insights from Lacan

While entrepreneurship has been described as a ‘passionate act’ (Hjorth and Steyaert, 2009: 10), there is limited research on affect in critical entrepreneurship studies, even though emotion has been explored (see, for example, Simpson et al., 2015). However, Hjorth (2013) provides useful ideas on how to conceptualise affect in entrepreneurship. Social entrepreneurship, redefined in terms of public entrepreneurship, becomes more related to a social body (rather than the economy); a movement or a project; and to creation, experimentation and play (Hjorth, 2013: 44). Affect is viewed, following Deleuzian thinking, as ‘potentializing a body’s capacity for action/creation’ (Hjorth, 2013: 35). The power to affect thus means the potential for action, which is linked to the power to be affected. Affect is bound up with relationality and with the stimulation of passion for social change in others (Hjorth and Holt, 2016: 53). As such, entrepreneurship is understood as ‘an opening movement that increases people’s capacity for interaction and thus to create, to actualize new practices of living in concrete experiences and situations’ (Hjorth, 2013: 35). Opposed to the mainstream view, entrepreneurship is the capacity to ‘accomplish interventions in the distribution of what is normal/rational and change what is within the capacity of the subject’ (Hjorth, 2013: 44). Hjorth gives the example of peepoo, an organisation that produced an innovative solution to the problem of sanitation around the world and thus an entrepreneurial story which generated affect: ‘we are pulled out of our conventional thinking and need to start figuring out anew how things could be imagined, told, lived and practiced’ (Hjorth, 2013: 46). Entrepreneurship is thus affective to the extent that it enables movement and action: ‘An entrepreneurial intervention creates affect that takes us back from composites of experience and habituated ways of living’ (p. 47).

This is a valuable conceptualisation because it emphasises the importance of affect in making others move beyond current ways of living, altering habits and norms, introducing new ways of doing things and highlighting the role of entrepreneurship in this process. We suggest that drawing from Lacan’s notion of the real complements this perspective because the real describes how the demolition of ‘a sense of homeliness’ (Hjorth, 2013: 47) or the disturbance of norms and habits (Hjorth and Holt, 2016: 53) can evoke anxiety and, therefore, may generate resistance to change.

The meaning of the real altered throughout Lacan’s career, and while the different conceptualisations are not necessarily incompatible, in this article, we pursue the notion of the real as that which is beyond the symbolic order (Lacan, 1988). The latter refers to the socio-discursive order – the historical and trans-subjective province of language, culture and dominant values (Lacan, 1977). The symbolic defines normality and our view of ‘reality’ and establishes what can and cannot be said. The real shows the limitation of the symbolic and meaning and points towards something unrecognisable and difficult to integrate into our existing frame of understanding. The real is, therefore,

a shock of a contingent encounter which disrupts the automatic circulation of the symbolic mechanism; a grain of sand preventing its smooth functioning; a traumatic encounter which ruins the balance of the symbolic universe of the subject. (Miller, in Zizek, 1989: 171)

We observe affinities with Foucault’s notion of heterotopia and Lacan’s concept of the real (cf. Voela, 2011). Heterotopia is hence disturbing because, returning to Hjorth (2005), ‘it creates and expands the cracks in the official version’ (p. 392). Like the real, it fragments and reveals the limits, gaps and inconsistencies in the symbolic order. However, while some scholars aver that heterotopias are affective (Beyes and Michels, 2011: 533; Zembylas and Ferreira, 2009), studies on heterotopia tend to overlook affect (Beyes and Steyaert, 2013: 1458). The notion of the real extends the concept of heterotopia by linking disturbance with anxiety. While there is no space in this article to outline in detail Lacan’s (2014 [2004]) complex theory of anxiety, we highlight anxiety in this article as the proximity of the real (p. 160). Lacan (2014 [2004]) states that while other affects can be deceptive, anxiety is the only affect that does not deceive because it signals the real. Therefore, anxiety is the affect that emerges from the encounter with the uncanny or unheimliche in Freud’s (2003 [1919]) terminology; it arises when something familiar or ‘homely’ becomes unfamiliar and threatens the existence of the subject (Lacan, 2014 [2004]).

In summary, conceptual insights from Foucault on heterotopia and Lacan on the real and anxiety help to advance understandings of entrepreneurship, as they enable the exploration of the incongruous and anxiety-provoking aspects of entrepreneurship as social change. In the remainder of this article, we use a historical case example to illustrate this potential of entrepreneurship.

Gringo, normalisation and the Swedish media

Our case example is Gringo, a former Swedish anti-racist magazine, distributed as a monthly supplement in the Swedish Metro between 2004 and 2007, founded by Zanyar Adami, a young man from the suburbs of immigrant settlement. Gringo is a valuable illustration of entrepreneurship within the media landscape – which Ferrier (2013) argues is a ‘new’ field of study – where enterprises typically combine commercial, creative and social change aspirations (Achtenhagen, 2008). Apart from profitability, Gringo’s explicit aim was to change the media image of the ‘immigrant’ suburbs – geographically positioned on the outskirts of Sweden’s inner cities – because, as stated in the first editorial, ‘no one from the suburb recognizes themselves in the images given in the media’² (Gringo 1).³

Academics argue that the Swedish media is often underpinned by a normalising discourse that represents the suburb and its people as deviant, criminal and uncivilised (Schierup and Ålund, 2011). As Foucault (1977) claims, normalisation homogenises groups and creates divisions according to a principle of the normal and the deviant. Stereotyping in media representations is related to power/knowledge as it entails categorising individuals in relation to a norm and defining the ‘deviant’ as the ‘other’ (Hall, 1997).

In the inaugural edition of Gringo magazine, it is stated that

the politics of integration has been discussed on the editorial boards of a Per or an Anna.⁴ When did Abdul or Manuela […] have an opportunity to speak? […] There is a need for an insider’s perspective, a voice […] that speaks with an accent, yao! (Gringo 1, editorial)

The content of Gringo was humorous, colourful and, as shown below, often obscene from the perspective of the ‘average’ Swedish reader. Gringo frequently used words that would conventionally be considered as offensive such as svenne (denotes ‘native Swede’) and blatte (denotes minorities often living in the suburbs). Gringo was frequently written in the language used by youth in the suburbs, referred to as blatte-Swedish, which is a hybrid, idiomatic slang, characterised by words borrowed from other languages (Ålund and Schierup, 1991).

During the publication of the magazine, Metro had over 1.5 million readers, mainly located in the three largest cities (Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö) and was the most read newspaper in Sweden (Christensen, 2008). Within a short period of time, Gringo managed to ‘establish itself as a credible actor in the Swedish media landscape’ (Achtenhagen, 2008: 138). Due to Metro, Gringo became well-known and eventually diversified into other areas, including events, public lectures and publishing, until in August 2007 it went into bankruptcy.

The above editorial statements could be understood as ‘entrepreneurial visions, narratives of what could become’ (Hjorth, 2013: 46). Gringo explicitly sought emancipation from normalising forces of power ‘that outline how one is supposed to live and who one is supposed to be’ (Dey and Steyaert, 2016: 630). If ‘entrepreneurship interrupts and postpones the continuity of the normal, clearing space for the new to emerge’ (Hjorth, 2013: 46), then Gringo is an apt case for the investigation of entrepreneurship as social change.

Methodological context

Our choice of methods are in line with scholars who have applied discursive approaches within the field of entrepreneurship (Da Costa and Saraiva, 2012; Dey and Steyaert, 2016; Hjorth and Steyaert, 2004; Simpson et al., 2015). While acknowledging that heterotopia is also understood as physical space (Hjorth, 2004, 2005), by using textual data in this article, we pursue the interpretation of heterotopia as a discursive space, in accordance with Foucault (2002 [1966]) and the above-mentioned social science literature. As such, we adopt a discursive analytical approach that is premised on the understanding that discourse constitutes a discursive field or context for language to be used to construct meanings and subjectivities, which are often competing and contested (Howarth, 2000). As with Simpson et al.’s (2015: 106–107) study on entrepreneurship, we paid attention to not only how text is discursively constructed through language and what it seeks to achieve (e.g. the textual effects of the language used by Gringo) but also the context of the text production and its consumption (e.g. the circumstances under which Gringo created text and how it can be variously interpreted by readers). As a methodology of inquiry, discourse analysis allowed us to document how Gringo adopted competing, contestable and changing discourses that both formed and resisted dominant social norms. Applying the analytical method promoted by discourse analysis along these lines enabled us to address our first research question, which seeks to conceptualise the disturbing effects of entrepreneurship in terms of disrupting social norms.

Important also was how our methodological approach attended to elements of the real, enabling us to address our second research question. On this issue, Parker (2005) recommends how to pinpoint the real in discourse:

The Real is not a realm ‘outside’ of discourse that can be identified and described, but it is something that operates at a point of ‘breakdown’ of representation, at a point of trauma or shock that is then rapidly covered over in order that it can be spoken of. (p. 176)

The real can therefore be identified in language which includes or creates ambiguity and tension (Böhm and De Cock, 2005) or contradictions, inconsistencies and incoherence (Driver, 2009; Hoedemaekers, 2010), which yet again explains why we find resemblances between the real and heterotopia. Indeed, Borges’ bizarre classificatory system – the first heterotopia cited by Foucault (2002 [1966]) – can be analysed in terms of the real. The real is the ‘incomprehensible’ mode of ordering animals, the ‘gaps’ between and within the categories and the anxiety that this classification creates in the reader. Therefore, to study anxiety, we explore instances of the eruption of the real in the symbolic. This implies paying attention to the ways in which a discourse affects readers, which we do in our case example.

Method

The data used for this study comprise Gringo’s published editions, public reactions to Gringo and two semi-structured interviews with the founder Zanyar Adami and the co-founder Carlos Rojas. The content of the magazine was analysed to explore how Gringo engaged with and enacted discourses of social change. The purpose of the interviews was to gain a deeper insight into the way in which the founders discursively construct Gringo. While the interviews were conducted in 2014, and hence retrospective, both the interview text and the text of Gringo magazine are viewed as forms of organisational discourse: they are part of the wide range of texts, visual representations and cultural artefacts produced by members of an organisation (Grant et al., 2004).

We deployed the qualitative data analysis software package NVivo 7 to organise and code the content of the interview transcripts and the 32 editions of the magazine. The latter were published as a supplement in Metro between 2004 and 2007 (between 3 and 8 pages per edition). These were downloaded in 2007 from the now-defunct Gringo website. After organising the data using NVivo 7, we embarked on identifying themes which Potter and Wetherell (1987) maintain is a useful starting point for discourse analysis. Summaries were made of the regularly occurring sections in all editions. The data were grouped into different categories depending on the main discussion topic: the suburbs, immigration, multiculture, racism and Swedishness. The categories produced at this initial stage were then incorporated into three overarching themes: ‘Suburb identity’, ‘Swedish identity’ and ‘resistance to racism’. Data organised into different themes were then analysed discursively, whereby we examined how the language was used and the discourses drawn on, noting how discourses overlapped with each other (Wetherell et al., 2001).

To obtain an understanding of the way in which Gringo was received by the public, the comments made by readers on Gringo’s website between 2004 and 2007, along with 15 newspaper articles and two blogs, were also analysed. This body of text was divided into ‘positive comments’ and ‘negative comments’. The interview schedule for the interviews with the founders included questions focused on generating discursive insights into the emergence of Gringo and its organisational aspects (how its activities, roles and goals were arranged). Interviews were recorded and then transcribed verbatim. The transcriptions were initially analysed by coding the data for large themes. The key themes emerging from the interviews were labelled ‘the unusual nature of Gringo’ and ‘public reactions’. The themes were then studied in relation to themes found in the magazine and in the public’s comments to Gringo. To explore how the founders make sense of organisational realities (Mumby, 2011: 1150), we then used discourse analysis techniques to examine how Gringo was constituted in the discourses mobilised by the founders.

As there was a continuous back-and-forth movement from data to theory (Wodak, 2004) and after repeated readings of Gringo magazine, we realised that the discourse is different, rich and disjointed, and – as the public responses testify – it has a ‘subversive’, disturbing and destabilising impact on the reader. We decided that affect is a valuable concept to explore these aspects of Gringo and considered the mobilisation of heterotopia, the real and anxiety provided an original means to do so. In other words, we did not set out to undertake a study of heterotopia (heterotopology; Foucault, 1984 [1967]) or the real; rather, we found through the data analysis process that these notions could be mobilised as productive theoretical lenses through which we could make sense of the incongruent and affective nature of entrepreneurship as social change. As such, our research is exploratory in that respect, and in our analysis, we hold in mind the notion of heterotopia presented by Steyaert (2010) because we believe it correlates with our conception of the real: ‘Heterotopia is a discursive modality that contradicts or contests ordinary experience and how we frame it, by unfolding a non-place within language. It points at the unthinkable “other” of our own familiar discourses and the discursive order of things’ (p. 52). This definition also resonates with Genocchio’s (1995: 37) correlation of heterotopia and discontinuity.

In light of the above, we selected articles and text for further in-depth readings and discourse analysis in line with descriptions outlined above. The articles selected for illustrative purposes in the analysis below are derived from the two key themes (suburb identity and Swedish identity) and hence reflect wider trends in Gringo. The sections below thus exemplify these themes, except for the first, which discusses the main theme from the interviews, and the last, which analyses public reactions to Gringo. As the analysis process was iterative, producing highly nuanced insights into the discourses identified, the illustrative articles/texts presented below were chosen because they best draw out the nuances in the incongruous, disturbing and affective aspects of Gringo.

Analysis

An unusual organisation

In 2004, when Gringo was founded, organisations that combine social change and commercial aspirations were still unusual in Sweden:

There was a great confusion around the fact that we were a business enterprise. […] the right thought we were financed by the trade-unions, because the trade unions advertised in the first editions of the magazine. And the left winged about us being too commercial. (Carlos)

We understand this statement as a manifestation of entrepreneurship as organisation creation, an active process of the production of a new and different form of organisation (Hjorth et al., 2015). Gringo is here discursively constructed as a strange form of organisation. Specifically, the combination of social value generation and commercialisation is unfamiliar. This heterotopic, incongruous discourse on Gringo as an organisation was also reflected in the magazine itself. For example, it was written in both standard, ‘proper’ Swedish, as well as ‘improper’ blatte-Swedish. It included news or reports on ‘serious’ matters, such as inequality, the holocaust and rape, as well as ‘light’ content, entertainment and satire. We return to this aspect of the magazine in the sections to come.

Challenging representations of the suburb

Gringo entailed many different images of geographical neighbourhoods of immigrant settlement in Sweden. Clearly, the aim of most articles was to redefine the mainstream view of the suburbs. This was done, for example, by depicting the suburb and its people as ‘normal’ and ‘ordinary’ (not different to any other Swede). Incongruously, however, the stereotypes and the image of the suburb as different were also reproduced throughout the magazine. There existed furthermore those portrayals that were ambivalent, as shown in this analysis of an extract from a fictional ‘survival guide’:

Survival guide for the suburb.

Gringo has created a survival guide for all who dare to go to the deadly suburb.

Before you go […]:

-Take a course in first aid to learn how to stitch gunshot wounds and knife-stabs on yourself.

-Find out which gang-colours you need […].

-Write your will.

How to behave:

-Try not to go alone. Bring a sidekick or a bodyguard […]

-Don’t show your bling-bling. Hide the mobile phone and everything valuable […]

-If a car slows down with its windows down, you can be sure that it is a drive-by. Lie on the ground and play dead […].⁵ (Gringo 2)

This text demonstrates a key characteristic of heterotopias and entrepreneurship: playfulness and imagination (Hjorth, 2004, 2005). However, this quote is also incongruous: it links together the contestation and confirmation of stereotypes of a certain space. While such distorted depictions mock the belief that the suburb is ‘dangerous’, they also reproduce images of the suburb as delinquent places. Through this discursive field, the reader can in some ways experience the suburb as an anomalous space. Although the text is enthralling – which reflects a wider trend in Gringo to use the blatte identity to appeal and to attract attention – it is also in some sense disturbing. It creates an encounter with an aspect of Swedish identity or society, which is different, deplorable and rejected from the symbolic order. We hence understand the above as an instance of the eruption of the real in the symbolic. Indeed, heterotopias ‘are set up to fascinate and to horrify’ (Hetherington, 1997: 40). This text does both – reflecting both the captivating and the horrific aspects of the object of anxiety (Lacan, 2014 [2004]) – and is hence one manifestation of the affective aspect of Gringo.

Bearing in mind that Gringo was a commercial magazine, the promotion of the suburb identity is also a commodification of the same. This should be understood within a broader context of increased worldwide marketisation of ethnic identities and cultures (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2009). This illustrates another incongruous aspect of heterotopia. There is a commodification of the suburb lifestyle in Gringo, which contradicts its social change ambitions, as it relies on the reproduction of already existing stereotypes.

Redefining Swedish identity

Gringo experimented with coherent social categories of identity and questioned normalised notions of Swedishness. Consider this article about the Swedish names-day calendar:

Are you tired of your svenne name? […] You can just change it. You can now blatte-fy your name without betraying your origins […] If your name is something incredibly common such as Rebecka, you can change it to a luxurious Asian name such as Ping […]. The Swedish calendar, just as the rest of the country, does not follow the new Swedishness. It is about time that, for example, the 190 Ringvalds⁶ disappear and leave space for the over 5700 Alis […]. (Gringo 12)

Adding a Muslim name, such as Ali, to the names-day calendar – a symbol of Christianity – and thus linking it together with Swedish names are ‘inappropriate’ from the perspective of homogeneous and traditional notions of Swedishness. Like Borges’ absurd classification of animals referred to by Foucault (2002 [1966]), it is difficult (or impossible) to imagine a historically Swedish classificatory scheme of names, which includes the name ‘Ali’. This is a typical example of how Gringo reordered customary symbols of Swedishness. Discourses, such as the one above, are heterotopic because they rupture the logics of categorisations and divisions and ‘transgress, undermine and question the alleged coherence or totality of self-contained orders and systems’ (Genocchio, 1995: 37). The extract puts two signifiers together which do not belong: ‘Ali’ and the ‘Swedish names-day calendar’. This creates an encounter with the real as it confronts readers with something that is alien to ordinary sense. It ruptures and reveals the ‘cracks’ in the symbolic order (the names-day calendar) and hence produces an affective sense of anxiety in the reader.

One of the main ways in which Gringo questioned everyday understandings of Swedishness was through the numerous ways the Swedish language – a symbol in the normalisation of Swedish identity – was improvised in Gringo. The controversial use of blatte-Swedish throughout the magazine, for instance, was seen as a challenge to ‘proper’ Swedish (see next section).

In a number of editions, there is a fictional ‘refugee diary’. These are ‘stories’ told by a male ‘refugee’, in broken Swedish language, about his experiences. In this example, a hypothesised encounter is presented with the then Swedish Prime Minister:

Dear diary⁷

[…] I work as dishwasher very good salary 25 Kronas every hour and free food. I bloody hapy. I work decent hours 15 hours everyday and of Monday morning […].

I work in very nice restaurant in Östermalm.⁸ There comes big and celebrity people […]. Today I feel very important. Primeminister Göran Person here eating. […] I was fucking close to Sweden’s first man first woman […] I herd their talk their laughs. But they not here my pain and tired. I wanted to go and say hi. But he might be not hapy. […] He maybe want me away, but I’m here!! So close that he can here me whisper: Hi Göran hear I am, not far from you, open your eyes. I actually more near than you think […]. (Gringo 26)

Apart from deploying a series of juxtapositions that are typical of heterotopias and of the magazine more generally (e.g. contrasting the ‘harsh’ life of the refugee with the more ‘comfortable’ life of the prime minister, simultaneously revealing and mocking stereotypes of refugees, combining playfulness and seriousness), this extract also ‘destroys syntax in advance’ (Foucault, 2002 [1966]: xix). Discursive heterotopias rupture ordinary syntax and semantics and are thus the place in which something unheard of can be voiced. This text is written in a language that refugees are imagined to speak, disregarding rules of grammar. Insofar as the above ruptures ‘standard’ Swedish language, it could be viewed as an example of the ‘breakdown of representation’ (Parker, 2005: 176). This incorrect use of the Swedish language – as well as the uncomfortable proximity created to the life of the refugee – can be read as Gringo engendering an encounter with the real: that which is beyond the symbolic and which creates anxiety as shown below.

Public reactions and resistance to Gringo

Some members of the public understood Gringo’s irony and praised it for paying tribute to the suburbs and for its alternative journalism. Despite this, as Gringo grew, so did the criticism. Those critical of Gringo – who were much more vocal and numerous than fans – found Gringo’s reproduction of stereotypes as offensive. A number of bloggers used their blog space to condemn the magazine, and there was even an anti-racist ‘Gringo hate blog’ called Adios Gringo, dedicated to criticising the magazine for fuelling racism rather than eliminating it. Many of its critics claimed that Gringo helped to maintain an ‘us’ and ‘them’ divide; for example, in its frequent use of words such as blatte and svenne. It was, however, the reinvention of Swedishness and the experimentation of the Swedish language that was viewed as particularly repellent. Here, it is useful to refer to Foucault (2002 [1966]) as heterotopias ‘undermine language’ (p. xix). The use of blatte-Swedish in Metro, a widely distributed media source, was perceived as undermining the Swedish language. In a controversial article in Dagens Nyheter, Ebba Witt-Brattström (2006), a professor in Swedish literature, criticised Gringo’s use of blatte-Swedish. Similar criticisms against Gringo were made by many readers who accused Gringo of – as one of the commentators puts it – ‘the destruction of the Swedish language’. These are some examples:

You’re part of the aim by the Swedish left to weaken Swedish culture and the Swedish language. You’re a big bluff by claiming that a million immigrants want to talk your bluff language. You’re simply bluff-blattes. Everybody apart from media has already seen through you. How long do you think that you can go on before people get tired of you? (Dated 29 May 2006)

I become dead-anxious when I see that you’re raping the Swedish language. You don’t seem to want to be here in Sweden and adapt to our culture, but you should not think that you can rule however you want and moan about the Swedes being racists. Shut down the bullshit and grow up. (Dated 20 February 2007)

These statements suggest that Gringo ruptured the symbolic order (mainly, the Swedish language), generating anxiety. Such sentiments were also reflected in the founders’ discourse. Zanyar stated that while financial difficulties had a role to play, the daily death threats he and his staff received reduced his desire to continue with Gringo. Nevertheless, the main factor that led to Gringo’s bankruptcy, according to Zanyar, was when Metro terminated its cooperation with the magazine. The new chief editor of Metro did not believe that Metro’s readers were interested in Gringo. Zanyar implies that the editor, who was from an inner-city, upper-class and ‘white’ Stockholm neighbourhood, had no interest in the suburbs:

It was first the media-blattes [who were against us], then it was the women⁹ […] you know if you think of the hierarchy of … in the end the white men started to appear. And that’s when you know ‘shit’ (laughter), now we’ve entered [the system] for real, because [the white men] begin to feel ‘shit now I must attack’ (laughter) […]. Yeah when you transcend these social categories before coming to the core [of the system]. That’s why Metro suddenly gave us up. (Zanyar)

In this excerpt, Gringo is discursively constituted as a threat to the established system of power. Because heterotopias have a ‘disconcerting effect’ (Foucault, 2002 [1966]: xvii) – because they create anxiety – they tend to generate a great deal of antagonism (Rymarczuk and Derksen, 2014). The responses to Gringo suggest also that this organisation disturbed – even if temporarily – the usual order of things: it created a traumatic encounter with the real and, therefore, had to be resisted and rejected.

Discussion

Returning to our primary research questions, we have sought in this article to conceptualise the disturbing effects of entrepreneurship as social change and explore why processes of entrepreneurship can lead to resistance when introducing new ideas and discursive frames of understanding. The concepts of heterotopia, the real and anxiety have been central to our endeavours in that regard: heterotopia highlights how entrepreneurship establishes a disturbing incongruence – an encounter with the real – which is anxiety-provoking and may therefore engender resistance. In the capacity that we have mobilised the notion of heterotopia, it can be used to examine how entrepreneurship incites social transformation (Beyes, 2006; Hjorth, 2004, 2005). However, in contrast to prior studies (Dey and Steyaert, 2016; Hjorth, 2004, 2005; Steyaert and Hjorth, 2006a; Tedmanson et al., 2015), linking heterotopia with the real can, we hope, advance the conceptualisation of entrepreneurship as social change in the following ways.

Entrepreneurship as creating incongruence

Through entrepreneurial activities, heterotopic sites and spaces can establish social change (Steyaert and Hjorth, 2006b: 18) via the constitution of incongruence. Heterotopia thus reveals how entrepreneurship is permeated by incongruence because it is situated between existing orders and potentially new ones, giving rise to tension.¹⁰ Extant literature also acknowledges the tension inherent in entrepreneurship (Tedmanson et al., 2015), as well as the tension between the social and economic mission in social enterprises (Smith et al., 2012), which was reflected in the discourse of Gringo founders. Tension was also evident in the text of Gringo magazine where stereotypes were not only questioned but also reproduced to attract readers and hence create more advertising space. The concept of heterotopia brings to light such incongruence in entrepreneurship as not simply practices that lead to new products or ideas but also reproduce existing norms, ideas and ways of conducting the economy. Entrepreneurship as social change is enmeshed within the relations of power it aims to transform. Gringo demonstrates that entrepreneurship ambiguously experiments with boundaries with unpredictable results. Another example of the establishment of incongruousness is the case presented by Lindgren and Packendorff (2006) on RockParty, a voluntary association behind the Hultsfred rock festival in Sweden. Among the members of RockParty, there was persistent conflict between the commercial and voluntary or cultural aspirations of the organisation, which created considerable discomfort for the members. Like Gringo, RockParty displays ‘the contradictions, paradoxes, ambiguities and tensions at the heart of “entrepreneurship”’ (Tedmanson et al., 2012: 532).

Entrepreneurship and affect

That which is incongruent is also disturbing because it takes us beyond the normatively familiar and coherent, and it destroys a ‘sense of homeliness’ (Hjorth, 2013: 47). Gringo as an entrepreneurial intervention produced an encounter with the real that transgressed ‘habituated ways of living’ (Hjorth, 2013: 47) through, for example, the undermining of the Swedish language. Hjorth (2013) has drawn attention to the way entrepreneurship as social change can create affect that take us beyond existing modes of viewing the world and evoke action. Our approach adds to this by pointing out that this affect may be anxiety. To be specific, while Hjorth (2013) highlights affect in terms of the capacity for action and change, our perspective on affect underlines how change and incongruence may create anxiety. In other words, Hjorth’s notion emphasises that affect is needed for change to be brought about, while our approach on affect focus on change as anxiety-ridden. Heterotopic organisations engendered by the entrepreneurial process may become, like Gringo, associated with that which breaches the familiar and the acceptable and create an affective disturbance. Anxiety therefore explains why entrepreneurship as social change can stimulate social resistance and rejection. Hence, our approach, which highlights Lacan’s connection between anxiety and the unheimliche, has some resonance with Beyes and Steyaert’s (2013) use of the uncanny, which ‘involves feelings of uncertainty and apprehension and a critical disturbance or crisis of the proper, of the boundaries of inside and outside – an unsettling of time and space’ (p. 1448). Understood as such, we submit that like the uncanny, entrepreneurship as social change may be expelled by the public.

Researchers in organisation studies are increasingly interested in affect (see, for example, the special edition on affect in Organization [Fotaki et al., 2017]). Affect is understood in various ways, but one perspective draws from Deleuzian thinking (e.g. Massumi, 1996) to emphasise affect as the capacity to unsettle and bring into existence new states of becoming (Fotaki et al., 2017). A Lacanian perspective adds to this by specifying the ‘unsettling’ as anxiety. It also points out the indeterminacy of anxiety. Anxiety can form the condition for new orders and transformation, but it can also result in resistance and thus thwart social change. The Gringo case revealed that one unexpected consequence of entrepreneurial activity is that it can produce organisations which are perceived as a threat to society, which is striking given that entrepreneurship, in its normative forms, is often encouraged and stated to be ‘a good thing’ (Rehn and Taalas, 2004: 249; Tedmanson et al., 2012). The analysis showed how anxiety resulted in the reluctance to integrate Gringo into the symbolic order, repressing change. This adds weight to a Schumpeterian understanding that people resist and feel threatened by the new when it is introduced by entrepreneurship (Swedberg, 2006). Entrepreneurship may bring a sense of trauma that needs to be repressed so that things can go on as normal.

Indeed, the Gringo case is read as an organisation operating in a space for innovation that is then denied by the powerful who prioritise the continuity of the normal. Further examples can be used to illustrate this point. Lindgren and Packendorff’s (2006) above-mentioned study of RockParty could be interpreted as the emergence of a heterotopia via the entrepreneurial process. Like a heterotopia, RockParty members created incongruence by making use of existing values and practices to introduce a new rock culture in Hultsfred. This culture, the music and the punk appearance of members and festival goers, nevertheless, deviated from local norms and was, therefore, rejected by the population in Hultsfred. Lindgren and Packendorff (2006) conclude that entrepreneurship as social change is thus an ongoing process of constructing deviation and belonging. While we agree with this, we wish to highlight that the resistance of the local community indicates that RockParty may have introduced an encounter with the real, a traumatic confrontation with something that was not part of the symbolic framework of Hultsfred and the ways in which local people understood themselves.

‘Occupy Wall Street’ provides an even more striking example of this process. The demonstrations and sit-ins consisted of obscene and disturbing displays of masks, trash, gluttony, parades of hierarchy reversals and ‘offensive’ signs such as ‘naughty bankers need a spanking jail time’ – spectacles which both appeal and shock (Szolucha, 2017). ‘Occupy’ is an apt example of entrepreneurship as social change which created a heterotopia enabling an encounter with the real. The anxiety provoked by ‘Occupy’ is testified in protests it induced by some members of the public and in the eventual (and in some cases, forced) police crackdown of the movement.

Conclusion

This article has used the case example of Gringo to develop the literature on entrepreneurship as social change (Calás et al., 2009; Hjorth, 2013; Steyaert and Hjorth, 2006a; Steyaert and Katz, 2004), to underline that entrepreneurship can create a heterotopia that enables an encounter with the real. Our article sheds new light on entrepreneurship as the ‘power to be affected and our power to affect’ (Hjorth, 2013: 209), by emphasising that power to affect and be affected can mean creating anxiety, that may result in opposition to the entrepreneurial effort. This adds further support to the contention that entrepreneurship as social change is not harmonious, it is not without struggle, tension and resistance (Dey and Steyaert, 2010). The traumatic anxiety produced by the real implies that ‘entrepreneurship’s emancipatory quest will constantly be challenged, contained and co-opted by different obstacles and forces’ (Verduijn et al., 2014: 106). We envision future organisational research that explores further cases where entrepreneurial attempts have been shut down by existing relations of power, as such cases can indicate the anxiety produced by entrepreneurial practice.

While we agree with Hjorth (2004, 2005) that there is an important spatial/physical/material aspect to heterotopia, we pursued heterotopia as a discursive space. Something of the ‘lived’ feature of heterotopia can be lost when doing so. We suggest, therefore, that future research explores the ways entrepreneurship engenders unsettling lived spaces. Drawing from heterotopia, the real and anxiety provide promising avenues for studying the constitution and impact of such spaces.

While the aim of this article has been to point out the ways anxiety may lead to resistance to change, we wish to end this article by acknowledging that affect can indeed be the prerequisite for social change. Anxiety may take us ‘out of our conventional thinking and [we] need to start figuring out anew how things could be imagined, told, lived and practiced’ (Hjorth, 2013: 46). Social transformation involves the traumatic confrontation with the incompleteness of the symbolic order (Szolucha, 2017). The real, while unbearable, is an encounter with the inadequacy of the status quo.

Entrepreneurship engenders a heterotopia which, by creating anxiety and destabilisation, may form the impetus for larger movements unleashing further actions against the social order. Traumatic anxiety may thus form the preconditions for the realisation of a utopia (Kraftl, 2007). Indeed, utopias are beyond the scope of this article, but their links with anxiety warrant further scholarly investigation. Consequently, we argue that heterotopia and the real are fruitful ways to think of the emancipatory politics of entrepreneurship (Rindova et al., 2009), which requires accepting that change and emancipation may involve the creation of social anxiety. We thus call for future research in critical entrepreneurship studies to consider our conceptualisation of heterotopia and to explore affect as the anxiety engendered by the eruption of the real.

Footnotes

Notes

Author biographies

Parisa Dashtipour is a senior lecturer in Organizational Psychology at Middlesex University, London, UK. She holds an MSc in Organizational Social psychology and a PhD in Social Psychology from London School of Economics. Her book Social Identity in Question: Construction, Subjectivity and Critique is published by Routledge. She has previously worked for and studied non-profit organizations. Her current research interests include work and health, alternative organizations, and psychoanalytic perspectives on organizations.

Nick Rumens is a professor of Human Resource Management at University of Portsmouth, UK. His main research interests are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) sexualities and genders in organisations, workplace friendships and queer theory. He has published on these topics in journals including Human Relations, Organization Studies, British Journal of Management, Organization, Sociological Review and Gender, Work & Organization. He has also (co)authored and (co)edited books including Sexual Orientation at Work: International issues and perspectives (Routledge, 2014); Queer Company: Friendship in the work lives of gay men (Ashgate, 2011). His latest single authored monograph is Queer Business: Queering organisation sexualities (Routledge, 2017).

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Entrepreneurship,incongruence and affect: Drawing insights from a Swedish anti-racist organisation

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Entrepreneurship as social change: the creation of heterotopia

Heterotopia as disturbing

Entrepreneurship and affect: insights from Lacan

Gringo, normalisation and the Swedish media

Methodological context

Method

Analysis

An unusual organisation

Challenging representations of the suburb

Redefining Swedish identity

Public reactions and resistance to Gringo

Discussion

Entrepreneurship as creating incongruence

Entrepreneurship and affect

Conclusion

Footnotes

Notes

Author biographies

References