15 research outputs found
Entrepreneurship at the limits
This PhD dissertation is based on four published articles. It operates within the
processual view of entrepreneurship studies (Steyaert, 1997), which draws on process
philosophy to develop research strategies (SĂžrensen, 2005). The research has been
guided by two strategies for understanding entrepreneurship: âmovingâ (e.g. Steyaert
and Hjorth, 2003) and âunveilingâ (e.g. Jones and Spicer, 2009). These strategies have
so far been pursued largely in the conceptual domain, and this doctoral dissertation is
an effort to take them a step further by combining empirical investigation and
philosophical reflection. The aim is to investigate how a processual study of
entrepreneurship âshould be worked outâ in practice (Kristensen, Lopdrup-Hjorth and
SĂžrensen, 2014).
The first two studies contribute an empirically informed conceptualisation of
entrepreneurship, the first focused on how organisations are created, the second
providing stories of emerging practices of female entrepreneurs. Though they aim to
provide alternative conceptualisations, they remain firmly rooted in âtraditionalâ social
science, offering alternative approaches to the dominant understandings of
entrepreneurship, and utilizing accepted and traditional methodologies and theories.
The last two papers are more experimental in their design. The aim is still to
problematize discursive or practical aspects of entrepreneurship and processes around
entrepreneurship, but also to investigate alternative methods for creating knowledge.
The third study explores the somewhat paradoxical results of SME support schemes
and develops a role-play-enhanced focus group technique. The fourth study is based on
an organisational ethnography in antiquarian bookshops and experiments with fictional
accounts and literary techniques as methods to generate knowledge.
The contribution of this dissertation to processual studies in entrepreneurship research
is twofold. The first two papers are illustrations of an application of process concepts,
while the last two papers illustrate the attempt to create process concepts. Taken
together, the studies demonstrate how a processual study of entrepreneurship might be
worked out in practice
The moment of truthâReconstructing entrepreneurship and social capital in the eye of the storm
There are many images of entrepreneurship which all pay attention to the importance of social capital. Nevertheless, these understandings of entrepreneurship do not tell us about the capabilities and social ingenuity that people hit by a natural or man-made catastrophe may evoke. We have studied how the effects of the hurricane Gudrun, which hit southern Sweden in January 2005, were dealt with by civic and formal, private as well as public, organizations. The lessons from our rich case accounts are reflected upon in the perspective of ephemeral organizing and used to craft our notion of 'emergency entrepreneurship'. Its proposed features include coping with rupture in everyday life by the acknowledgement of local knowledge and leadership and the use of bridging as well as bonding social capital facilitating immediate (inter)action and swift trust. This appears as a spontaneous collective effort, 'social bricolage', which means combining and locallyâin time as well as in spaceâintegrating chunks of everyday routines according to the events and associated needs that the drama produces.emergency entrepreneurship, social capital, natural catastrophe, ephemeral organization, Sweden,