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Entrepreneurship is generally reduced to the economic logic, wherein entrepreneurs are mainly venerated as protagonists of the national economy. Entrepreneurship is equated to job creation, enhanced competitiveness, and wealth creation. This persistent conception neglects other aspects of entrepreneurship, including its broader implications for society and its members. Reflecting on these considerations, this dissertation builds upon the critical entrepreneurship research tradition that has aimed to uncouple entrepreneurship from the dominant (economic) logic, to pave the way for a more comprehensive and nuanced view of entrepreneurship (e.g., Calás et al., 2009; Weiskopf and Steyaert, 2009; Verduijn and Essers, 2013). It adopts a critical stance to effectively generate yet more space for social and societal considerations of entrepreneurship and hereby puts entrepreneurship at work for generating new possibilities of living. The chapters are not crafted to discredit entrepreneurship from its economic gravity but are critical to reducing entrepreneurship when various alternative perspectives are relevant as well. As such, this dissertation contributes to a more nuanced portrayal of entrepreneurship, which acknowledges the phenomenon’s multifacetedness and serves as a foundation for new insights in entrepreneurship. The chapters in this dissertation thus take a critical stance to explore entrepreneurship alternatives, particularly related to social change. Chapter 1 establishes the critical approach of this dissertation and offers an introduction to affirmative critique. Critical work is deemed necessary to challenge common assumptions of entrepreneurship and open up to new perspectives of the phenomenon. However, critique is commonly enacted as a gesture of negativity and a position ‘against’ entrepreneurship (Dey and Steyaert, 2018). This limits the ability of current critical research to fully understand entrepreneurship against the established literature that equates the phenomenon to economic logic. The chapter adopts and builds on a different way of doing critique, emphasizing what alternatives of entrepreneurship can be enacted when departing from an affirmatively critical stance. This step is deemed necessary towards moving away from the hegemonic allure given to entrepreneurship such that it becomes possible to see how alternatives of entrepreneurship may be enacted. Chapters 2 and 3 offer reflections and insights about discursive patterns and their ideological workings. The critical discursive studies reveal how dominant entrepreneurship discourses, mainly produced and reflected by media and policy texts, lessen the space for alternatives by reducing the phenomenon to a (too) limited account. The findings show that entrepreneurship is mainly reduced to economic considerations, whereas social issues are hardly associated with the entrepreneurship discourse. A limited reflection of entrepreneurship’s multiple perspectives in media and policy texts may signal and result in a limited and distorted understanding of the phenomenon. Relatedly, instead of simply uncovering (and critiquing) discourses that manifest entrepreneurship’s liaison with the economic logic, chapter 4 further explores what is meant by entrepreneurship’s capacity to produce new possibilities of living. It offers insights into one possible alternative that may emerge when rethinking entrepreneurship beyond the dominant narratives that mainly reduce the phenomenon to economic logic, namely: how we can leverage entrepreneurship to put craft at work for the emancipation of marginalized communities so that actual social change can be enacted and sustained. |
