Creating space for play/invention – concepts of space and organizational entrepreneurship

Abstract

This paper focuses on how one can relate management thinking/practices to entrepreneurial processes in the context of formal organization. In order to do this we develop a number of related ‘spatial concepts’ providing us with the possibility of describing entrepreneurship as a ‘creation and use of space for play/innovation’. Using concepts of space, the managerial and the entrepreneurial dimensions and perspectives on organizing creativity become highly visible in the case studied. This is a field study (within the ethnographic tradition) focusing on an organizational transformation of a former public authority into a competitive limited company. A distinction between managerialism and ‘entrepreneurship as event’ is proposed as conceptually fruitful as well as useful for discussing recommendations to managers for how to handle entrepreneurial processes. A minimal and contextual role for management is suggested when aspiring to support the creations of space for play/invention, for example, for entrepreneurship as forms of organizational creativity.

Keywords:

• entrepreneurship
• organization
• space
• strategy/tactics
• invention
• de Certeau

Notes

 It seems necessary to say, though, that even if Taylor indeed was concerned with the relation: manager–employee (Taylor 1916), he spent more effort in developing a system for matching bodies and tasks rather than focusing on the employee as a person.

 ‘Approximately’, as this group changed during the study: some left, others were temporary and new ones came in.

 ‘The 19th century seems to leave little room for play. Tendencies running directly counter to all that we mean by play have become increasingly dominant. Even in the 18th century utilitarianism, prosaic efficiency and the bourgeois ideal of social welfare – all fatal to the Baroque – had bitten deep into society. These tendencies were exacerbated by the Industrial Revolution and its conquests in the field of technology. Work and production became the ideal, and then the idol, of the age. All Europe donned the boiler suit. Henceforth the dominants of civilization were to be social consciousness, educational aspirations, and scientific judgement. … This grotesque over-estimation of the economic factor was conditioned by our worship of technological progress, which was itself the fruit of rationalism and utilitarianism after they had killed the mysteries and acquitted man of guilt and sin’ (Huizinga 1950: 191–192).