Imagined futures of sail and steam – The role of community in envisioning entrepreneurial ventures

Abstract

Entrepreneurship is often understood as an individualistic endeavour. This article investigates how cultural communities shape entrepreneurial activity through the process of envisioning competing imagined futures. By deploying a microhistorical approach, it explores a public debate about the transition from sail to steam in a late nineteenth-century Danish maritime community. In the debate, local actors evaluated and negotiated future entrepreneurial actions as embedded in existing norms, interpretations of the past, and socio-technical systems rather than independent, non-conformist ventures. The article demonstrates the potential role of community when we attempt to understand better how entrepreneurs construct and dispute over imagined futures.

Keywords:

• Entrepreneurship
• community
• imagined futures
• socio-technical systems
• maritime industry
• transition from sail to steam

Acknowledgements

I want to extend my gratitude to the editors of the Business History special issue on Entrepreneurship and Transformations. In particular, Dan Wadhwani and Christina Lubinski provided invaluable support, comments, and suggestions along the way. I also wish to thank my colleagues at The Centre for Business History at Copenhagen Business School, namely Per Hansen, Robin Holt, Mads Mordhorst, Andrew Popp, and Anders Ravn Sørensen, for providing essential insights on the potential of the material. Furthermore, I want to thank inhouse historians Henning Morgen and Charlotte Andersen at A.P. Moller Holding and A.P. Moller - Maersk for their assistance and comments. Last but not least, praise should be extended to my two anonymous reviewers. Their knowledgeable and constructive reviews were crucial in developing, focussing, and improving this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 All quotes are from the original sources. The translation from Danish into English is by the author. I have sought to preserve the original flavour and somewhat archaic language in the translation for reasons of accuracy and because the sentences (and insults) in the sources provide a window into the historical actors’ experiences. For easy reference a collective transcribed version of the original texts is available and published in Jansen (1992).

2 The article follows Trish and Bamforth’s original work (Trist & Bamforth, 1951) where ‘technical’ refers to the ancient Greek term techne that includes knowledge and procedures and not exclusively implying material technology.

Additional information

Funding

The work on this article was supported by a donation from Aktieselskabet Dampskibsselskabet Orient’s Fond (DK).

Notes on contributors

Morten Tinning

Morten Tinning is a PhD fellow at Copenhagen Business School (CBS), Department of Management, Philosophy and Politics, and a curator at the Maritime Museum of Denmark. Previous work includes articles and editorial work on military and maritime history publications. Current research interests include entrepreneurship, the transition from sail to steam, maritime business history, maritime ethnology, and the history of technology.