Critical Entrepreneurship Studies: A Manifesto

In light of the ongoing dominance of functionalist approaches as well as recent signs of change towards more critical and nuanced perspectives, we offer this book as a collection of critical narratives which render visible diverse examples of non-traditional entrepreneurship as well as usually overshadowed aspects of ‘traditional’ entrepreneurship. The chapters in this book interrogate entrepreneurship from a range of differing perspectives. They each reveal how extant research has tended to privilege entrepreneurship as a distinct field of economic action and an exclusive activity for distinct groups of people, while at the same time illustrating examples of other, more collective and value-based forms of entrepreneurial organising and exchange. Accordingly, the book takes issue with and exposes some of the dominant ideologies, intellectual traditions and prevailing assumptions which bind entrepreneurship within the dictum of profit maximisation and wealth creation (Görling and Rehn 2008; Rindova et al. 2009). At the same time, the book assumes a pro-active stance in seeking to position entrepreneurship as an activity, behaviour or process which can be linked to new ethical and political possibilities. Together, the chapters give voice to unheard stories, places and potentialities of entrepreneurship which are usually left out of existing research (Steyaert and Katz 2004). In this book, entrepreneurship is reconceptualised as a social change activity that moves against the grain of orthodoxy in order to realise spaces of freedom and otherness (Dey and Steyaert 2016; Hjorth 2004; Verduyn et al. 2014; Essers and Tedmanson 2014).