“Let them not make me a stone”—repositioning entrepreneurship

ABSTRACT

Entrepreneurs create our tomorrows and we have a responsibility to comprehend as well as appreciate what they do. A repositioning of entrepreneurship scholarship is essential, if we are to fulfill our purpose, enact our principles, and engage fully with the peoples, places, and processes of entrepreneuring’s edgy ecotones. We argue for embracing the biosphere and exploring the in-between. We confirm the need for research that champions everyday entrepreneurs and challenges dominant ideal types. We propose and support an ethics of creative and circular frugality. To achieve these consistent and coherent aims, it is time for entrepreneurship to reposition as a connective, heterotopic, engaged, and transdisciplinary ecotone—rich, diverse, and embedded in the in-between.

KEYWORDS:

• Entrepreneurship
• entrepreneuring
• place
• everyday entrepreneurship
• marginality
• theory

Notes

¹ We do not provide here a definition or discussion of the wider critical chorus in entrepreneurship or its overlap with qualitative scholarship (McDonald et al., 2015; Drakopoulou-Dodd et al., 2014, p. 637; Leitch et al., 2010, p. 70). Rather, we take heterogenous entrepreneurship as a broad, inclusive, and flexible umbrella for the purposes of this essay. Erecting new boundaries is not our aim here. However, our community of practice does indeed resonate with qualitative entrepreneurship research’s “openness with regard to methodology and epistemology, insistence on grounded interaction with people and text, an explicit rejection of positivism and a passion for the philosophy and practice of engagement” (Drakopoulou-Dodd et al., 2014).

² “I am not yet born; O hear me, Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God come near me” (MacNeice, 1964, ed. Auden, pp. 74–75).

³ MacNeice speaks, perhaps, for many of us too in seeking “strength against those who would freeze my humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton, would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with one face, a thing” (164, pp. 74–75).

⁴ This excellent line has been scavenged from the wit of Alexis Komselis, former student, friend, colleague, coauthor, and now director of AHEAD at Alba Graduate Business School. It has been much borrowed and always credited, with thanks.

⁵ We thank the SI Editors and two anonymous reviewers for the invitation to showcase some examples of research that already enacts this proposed repositioning.