Provoking identities: entrepreneurship and emerging identity positions in rural development

Abstract

This article discusses entrepreneurship in a depleted community in transition. The purpose is to develop knowledge about how discourses are used in the positioning of identity in regional development. The concept positioning illustrates how identities are provoked, challenged, negotiated and moved into identity positions that break away from the idea of imitating successful and wealthy regions; instead, locality, place and history emerge as important resources from where local actors obtain agency and recognize new opportunities. Ethnographic data of a single case were collected over a six-year period between 2005 and 2010. The longitudinal nature of the study made it possible to incorporate how local stakeholders took on new identity positions, while handling their inspiration as well as their frustration. Results show how rural change was conditioned by discourses and how entrepreneurship challenged and reframed dominating structures through interaction between entrepreneurship and community. Four discourses, expressed as dichotomies available to people in this depleted community, illustrate the interactive process of positioning: change vs. traditions, rational vs. irrational, spectacular vs. mundane and individual vs. collective. The results support research emphasizing perspectives that acknowledge interaction between entrepreneurship and context as well as discursive aspects of regional development.

Keywords:

• Context
• positioning
• place
• rural development
• discourse

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In this article, we analyse discourses that are drawn upon with dichotomous reasoning. We use categories to understand the world: we construct meaning by separating and comparing. However, hierarchization is often an unintended effect of dichotomization, as has been emphasized in earlier deconstruction research (Cooper 1989; Derrida 1981; Kilduff 1993; Knights 1997). According to Silverman (1998), creating dichotomies can be seen as highly dangerous, as they may end up as excuses for not thinking. It is common for dichotomous thinking to obscure one of the two extremes; actors, for example, are made invisible in institutional theory, whereas actor-based theories tend to render institutions invisible. What is made invisible is frequently the non-privileged terminal point in the hierarchy created by the dichotomization, as in the case of ‘female’, which is often defined as missing from the term ‘male’ (Billing and Alvesson 2000; Devor 1989). These tendencies make it difficult to see both sides of a dichotomy at the same time. Therefore, both a positive and a negative charge are part of concepts that are dichotomized, creating hierarchies where one concept has power over another. By extension, this concerns people. Simultaneously, we should remember that dichotomies permeate our language (Lakoff and Johnson 1980), and that dichotomization is part of organizational theorizing. In our research, the idea is to capture the dynamics between the two extremes of the dichotomy and to emphasize play, battle and dialogue in unfolding how identity positions are negotiated in social settings.