Marketing Heidegger: Entrepreneurship and corporate practices

Abstract

Spinosa, Flores, and Dreyfus have made some valuable suggestions about the important but (in philosophy) much neglected concept of entrepreneurship. An entrepreneur, in the classical economists’ lexicon, is a person who founds, organizes, and manages a business. In more modern conversation, he or she is a business hero or heroine. Nowhere is the new emphasis on entrepreneurship more evident than in our largest corporations. The authors analyse the entrepreneur not as an eccentric or a maverick but in terms a specific way of operating within existing social practices. They reject the still prevalent caricature of the avaricious entrepreneur in the grip of greed as well as the too ‘genius'‐oriented conception of the inventor who cannot manage his own affairs, much less a corporation. An entrepreneur, on their account, is someone who knows how to notice and ‘hold on to’ an anomaly and creates a market, sometimes where there was no market at all. They argue that entrepreneurship essentially involves conversation. It is not mere inventiveness. This ‘reconfiguration’ of entrepreneurship explains a great deal about what many corporations ‐ at considerable expense ‐ are learning about their own activities and operations, and many established and successful companies are struggling to transform themselves in just the direction that Spinosa, Flores, and Dreyfus have outlined.