Critical Perspectives On Entrepreneurship: Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship as a field of study has been dominated by research focusing on it as a purely market-based phenomenon, a ‘special’ trait or set of behaviours which drive venture creation and further economic growth, perceived unquestioningly as positive. Entrepreneurship is above all ‘a good thing’.

Critical Perspectives on Entrepreneurship questions the accepted norms and dominant assumptions of entrepreneurship scholarship and reveal how it obscures important questions of identity, ideology, inequality and power. It explores how entrepreneurship study tends to privilege certain forms of economic action, while implying other, more collective forms of organization and exchange are somehow problematic. It de-mystifies the archetypal vision of ‘the entrepreneur’ as the ‘white’ male, gives voice to other entrepreneurial subjectivities and engages openly with the contradictions, paradoxes, ambiguities and tensions at the heart of ‘entrepreneurship’.

Deconstructing assumptions and providing space for alternative visions, this challenging collection highlights new critiques and contexts that challenge neo-liberal orthodoxies. It seeks to further the momentum for alternate analyses of entrepreneurship and promote the growing voice of critical entrepreneurship studies. It will be of interest to entrepreneurship researchers, advanced students and policy-makers in entrepreneurship as well as scholars of critical management studies.

Caroline Essers is an Associate Professor Entrepreneurship at VU University Amsterdam and an Assistant Professor Strategic Human Resource Management at the Radboud University Nijmegen, Faculty of Management. Her work has been published in the Organization Studies, Organization, Human Relations, Gender, Work and Organization, British Journal of Management, Entrepreneurship and Regional Development, and International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour & Research. She is a board member of the Entrepreneurship Studies Network (special interest group of the Institute for Small Business and Entrepreneurship), and an Associate Editor for Gender, Work and Organization.

Pascal Dey is a senior lecturer at the Unversity of St. Gallen (Institute for Business Ethics). His most recent research project investigates emancipatory forms of organizing via the twin prism of dialectic and actor network theory. Apart from his academic work, he has gained extensive experience as a strategy consultant and business founder while operating at the intersection of sustainability, organic food production and development aid. Pascal has published in various journals, such as Organization, Social Enterprise Journal, International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour & Research, and Journal of Social Entrepreneurship.

Deirdre Tedmanson is an associate researcher for the Hawke Research Institute for Sustanaible Societies and actively involved with both its Social Policy Research Group and Centre for Postcolonial and Globalization Studies. In addition to her lecturing and research interests with UniSA and the DKCRC, she is a Research Scholar with the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research at the Australian National University where she is completing a PhD in political science and public policy. Deirdre has published in Organization, Gender, Work and Organization, the Management Learning Journal, International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour & Research and Organization Studies.

Karen Verduyn is a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration of VU University Amsterdam, and programme director of the Amsterdam (joint) MSc in Entrepreneurship. She has published in such journals as the International Review of Entrepreneurship, the Journal of Enterprising Communities, Entrepreneurship and Regional Development, International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour & Research and Organization. She is a board member of the Entrepreneurship Studies Network (special interest group of the Institute for Small Business and Entrepreneurship), and the International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business.