The protean entrepreneur: the entrepreneurial process as fitting self and circumstance.

This paper is an ethnographic study of rural entrepreneurship. It explores the relationship between small business and the rural environment and is intended to contribute to the development of entrepreneurial theory. The major findings are that the entrepreneurial process is the creation and extraction of value from the environment, but that the background of the entrepreneur configures the idiosyncratic entrepreneurial process. The key to understanding this is argued to be the entrepreneurs perception of value, so that entrepreneurship is argued to be protean in that it takes its shape from the dynamics of the individual fitting themselves into their perception of the socio-economic context. Thus the entrepreneurs approach to business can be understood in terms of their values and in this study, the entrepreneurial business is shaped and formed from these same values

Enacted metaphor: the theatricality of the entrepreneurial process.

The article proposes the value of theatricality as an additional conceptual tool to aid analysis and understanding of the entrepreneurial process. It explores the application of dramatism and dramaturgy and argues that such application is a useful addition to our repertoire. In particular, the ideas of spanning the boundaries of space and time and of truth and fiction, and the liminality of entrepreneurship lend themselves to such theatrical analysis. This allows a fuller appreciation of the entrepreneurial act in the duality of the concepts of the world as stage and the world as staged. The metaphors of theatricality offer an alternative medium for understanding

Conceptualising entrepreneurship as economic 'explanation' and the consequent loss of 'understanding'.

This paper examines how entrepreneurship has become conceptualised as an economic phenomenon. We explain how the outcomes, the admirable results of entrepreneurship, have led to this position. An understandable concern for the economic benefits from enterprise, and the appeal of measurability, has led to a focus on explaining entrepreneurship. This has been matched by a relative neglect of examining the processes that would help us to understand entrepreneurship. Explanations of entrepreneurship best fit a systems view, where entrepreneurship is a mechanism for adjustment to change, as for example in Kirznerian alertness. But such a view cannot take full account of how entrepreneurship produces change. In homogenising entrepreneurship's idiosyncratic nature, we miss the nuanced understanding of how the entrepreneurial self fits into context to create, as well as employ, change. The instrumentality of explanation obscures the subjectivity of entrepreneurial practices

The Arcadian Enterprise : an enquiry into the nature and conditions of rural small business

This thesis is a study of rural entrepreneurship which attempts to understand what it is that rural entrepreneurs do within the rural context. Our understanding of entrepreneurship is fragmentary, often narrowly focused and discipline bound. Entrepreneurial theory lacks even a limiting definition of the phenomenon. As Bartlett 1988 claims, it is an intellectual onion; if you keep peeling off the layers you are left with nothing and come away in tears. This seems to suggest that entrepreneurship is a process rather than an entity. Furthermore, a major focus of entrepreneurial research has been the entrepreneur as an individual, yet paradoxically, entrepreneurship is essentially a social act. Accordingly the central argument of this thesis is that in order to understand the entrepreneur we must place entrepreneurial action in its social context, we must study the process of entrepreneurship. This study therefore endeavours to investigate the actions of the entrepreneur in one context, rurality. Consequently this study is a detailed examination of a rural environment and the interrelationships of this environment and entrepreneurs. Its purpose is to try to establish the nature of the relationships between rurality and to specify the conditions of the entrepreneurial process

The economic reification of entrepreneurship: re-engaging with the social.

Growth and development at personal, firm and national levels are all, quite properly, attributed to entrepreneurship. However, the importance of these entrepreneurial outcomes has shaped how we perceive entrepreneurs and the entrepreneurial concept. The significance of these positive outcomes seems to imply that entrepreneurship is primarily an economic function. In consequence throughout history, the words 'entrepreneur', 'entrepreneurial' and 'entrepreneurship' have been associated with specific economic roles and phenomena (Hebert and Link 1982). Van Praag and Versloot (2007) go so far as to claim that almost without exception, academic studies on entrepreneurship are motivated by the economic benefits of entrepreneurship. In short, our perceptions of entrepreneurship have become functionalist. Economics has won the battle for theoretical hegemony in academia and society as a whole and such dominance becomes stronger every year (Ferraro et al, 2005). At the very least, as Minniti and L{acute}evesque (2008) claim, many aspects of entrepreneurship and its implications have been studied taking the lens of neoclassical economics. The problem is that this functionalist lens is narrow. Its necessary reductionism doesn't permit us to see enough of, or to take into account, the fine grain of context and circumstance, nor of the non-mechanistic behaviour, the sentient and the emotional entrepreneurial practices that characterise entrepreneurship. This is surprising, because entrepreneurship is always about novelty and newness, doing things differently and creating change. The qualities of context and idiosyncratic human behaviour are the very qualities that may provide this very novelty that makes things entrepreneurial. By confining entrepreneurship in an economic paradigm, our understanding is at risk of a procrustean trimming, a reductionism that offers poor explanatory justice. It also fails to give due explanatory weight to how entrepreneurship emerges from social and economic interactions (Anderson et al, 2012). Consequently, I want to argue that the economists focus on outcomes means that economic 'explanation' has overwhelmed 'understanding' (Anderson, 2014). The economistic dominance of enquiries about what causes entrepreneurship are explanations of enterprise that have served us well in explaining aspects such as innovation. But they serve us poorly in understanding how such processes emerge

Patterns and trends in entrepreneurial network literature: 1993-2003

This paper reflects the increasing interest in entrepreneurial networking. Indeed Monsted (1995) suggests that networking is now a vogue concept in the entrepreneurship field. The popularity of the network theme has resulted in an increasing number of publications. Our study is an attempt to first quantify the growth in network research, as indicated by published papers. It then attempts to provide a guide to developments in network publications

Branding, legitimation and the power of museums:The case of the Louvre Abu Dhabi

Museums and cultural developments are on the rise in the Gulf region. The United Arab Emirates is home to some of the most ambitious and extravagant museum projects in the world. In this article, I consider the example of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, exploring some of its underlying dynamics and context. I focus mainly on the relationship between branding and legitimation while placing my analysis within a wider critical debate, which includes discussions on the link between museums and identity, the legitimizing role of architecture, and the various contentious concerns and controversies surrounding the Louvre Abu Dhabi project. I conclude that the United Arab Emirates and other neighbouring countries have an excellent opportunity for innovation in the cultural field if they are willing to critically and ethically found their cultural developments on an ethos of inclusivity, openness, experimentation, non-exploitation and curatorial courage

News and nuances of the entrepreneurial myth and metaphor: linguistic games in entrepreneurial sense-making and sense-giving.

This article describes a social construction of entrepreneurship by exploring the constructionalist building blocks of communication, myth, and metaphor presented in a major British middle range broadsheet newspaper with no particular party political allegiance. We argue that the sense-making role of figurative language is important because of the inherent problems in defining and describing the entrepreneurial phenomena. Myth and metaphor in newspapers create an entrepreneurial appreciation that helps define our understanding of the world around us. The content analysis of articles published in this newspaper revealed images of male entrepreneurs as dynamic wolfish charmers, supernatural gurus, successful skyrockets or community saviors and corrupters. Finally, this article relates the temporal construction of myth and metaphor to the dynamics of enterprise culture

Theoretical reflections on narrative in action research.

Narrative is an important tool for developing and writing up action research experiences. Its power lies in the fact that narrative construction and narrative recounting are fundamental human communication practices. Narratives are also knowledge producing devices, since they make sense of personal experiences and share that sense-giving with others. However, the twinned duality of narrative knowing (sense-making) and narrative telling (communicating that sense) has often caused narrative as a methodological approach to be disregarded or misunderstood. Our objective is to reflect on how we can best use the narrative method in action research by paying due attention to these issues. In doing so, we consider ontologies, epistemologies and key characteristics. We argue that what has been seen as a weakness in the narrative method, its deep subjectivity, can actually be employed as an analytical strength in action research. We show how examining explanations of context, inherent in narrative processes, can provide rich insights into the meanings of phenomena

Understanding the entrepreneurial learning process and its impact on students' personal development: a European perspective.

Based on what we know about the multiplex nature of entrepreneurship, we argue that entrepreneurship is a difficult topic to teach. One response has been a shift to constructionist perspectives where learning is seen as an active process of constructing rather than merely acquiring knowledge. We wonder how is it possible for students, lacking much professional experience, to 'construct useful entrepreneurial knowledge? We address this question by analysing the learning experiences of 54 students and 19 lecturers in different European Entrepreneurship education programs. The study explores the nature and processes of entrepreneurial learning in the university context. It provides understanding of how learners “ across cultures and educational backgrounds “ engage in the learning process. We identify three personal qualities, which constitute this process: a multi-dimensional sense of responsibility, independent ways of thinking, and the ability to connect to ones own and other peoples needs. We identified the particular dynamics in which these qualities interact and develop and conclude with suggestions on how education may stimulate this process