Organizational Entrepreneurship, Politics and the Political

Entrepreneurship, as the creation of new organizations, has globally become an appealing call for individuals and governments alike. Too often still, it is simply associated with the idea of ‘enterprise’, thus sustaining a pervasive politics of homo economicus agents living a ‘measured life’ in competition-based individuality.

Organizational Entrepreneurship, Politics and the Political disconnects entrepreneurship from the politics of enterprise to more fully explore its potential to resist the economic and ethical demand of the enterprise to be instrumentally innovative and instead to disrupt and disturb the established order. As such, entrepreneurship is seen as inevitably political - it is a constant attempt at declassifying existing structures and institutions, de-normalizing practices and sensemaking to make room for and initiate the new. The chapters invite the readers to revisit key concepts in entrepreneurship studies - opportunity, motivation, identity, experimentation, creative destruction and experimentation - by approaching them through a political process lens. This book offers a new conceptual repertoire and vocabulary that reconnects entrepreneurship studies with the socio-political dimensions of organization-creation, opening up multiple possibilities for understanding and questioning the meanings and effects of entrepreneurship in society.

Combining philosophical reflections with organizational and processual perspectives, this book will be of interest to academics, students and researchers in the areas of business, social and political entrepreneurship, organization studies and management.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Entrepreneurship and Regional Development.