Narrative and Discursive Approaches in Entrepreneurship

Description
Narrative and Discursive Approaches in Entrepreneurship is a second book in a miniseries of four publications called Movements in Entrepreneurship.

Narrative and Discursive Approaches in
Entrepreneurship
Narrative and
Discursive Approaches
in Entrepreneurship
A Second Movements in Entrepreneurship
Book
Edited by
Daniel Hjorth
Entrepreneurship and Small Business Research Institute
(ESBRI), and Malmö University, Sweden
and
Chris Steyaert
University of St Gallen, Switzerland and ESBRI, Sweden
In association with ESBRI
Edward Elgar
Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA
© Daniel Hjorth, Chris Steyaert 2004
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior
permission of the publisher.
Published by
Edward Elgar Publishing Limited
Glensanda House
Montpellier Parade
Cheltenham
Glos GL50 lUA
UK
Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc.
136 West Street
Suite 202
Northampton
Massachusetts 01060
USA
A catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library
ISBN 1 84376 589 6 (cased)
Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall
Contents
List of contributors vii
Foreword and acknowledgements viii
Introduction 1
Daniel Hjorth and Chris Steyaert
1 The prosaics of entrepreneurship 8
Chris Steyaert
2 A moment in time 22
Sami Boutaiba
3 Driven entrepreneurs: a case study of taxi owners in Caracas 57
Monica Lindh de Montoya
4 ‘Going against the grain . . .’ Construction of entrepreneurial
identity through narratives 80
Lene Foss
5 Storytelling to be real: narrative, legitimacy building and
venturing 105
Ellen O’Connor
6 The devil is in the e-tale: forms and structures in the
entrepreneurial narratives 125
Robert Smith and Alistair R. Anderson
7 Crime and assumptions in entrepreneurship 144
Alf Rehn and Saara Taalas
8 The dramas of consulting and counselling the entrepreneur 160
Torben Damgaard, Jesper Piihl and Kim Klyver
9 Masculine entrepreneurship – the Gnosjö discourse in a
feminist perspective 177
Katarina Pettersson
v
10 Quilting a feminist map to guide the study of women
entrepreneurs 194
Kathryn Campbell
11 Towards genealogic storytelling in entrepreneurship 210
Daniel Hjorth
READINGS
12. Reading the storybook of life: telling the right story versus
telling the story rightly 233
Jerome Katz
13 The edge de?nes the (w)hole: saying what entrepreneurship
is (not) 245
William B. Gartner
14 Relational constructionism and entrepreneurship: some key
notes 255
Dian-Marie Hosking in dialogue with Daniel Hjorth
Notes 269
References 274
Index 305
vi Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
Contributors
Alistair R. Anderson, Robert Gordon University, [email protected]
Sami Boutaiba, Copenhagen Business School, [email protected]
Kathryn Campbell, Trent University, [email protected]
Torben Damgaard, University of Southern Denmark, [email protected]
Lene Foss, University of Tromsø, [email protected]
William B. Gartner, Clemson University, South Carolina,
[email protected]
Daniel Hjorth, ESBRI and Malmö University, [email protected]
Dian-Marie Hosking, University of Utrecht, [email protected]
Jerome Katz, Saint Louis University, [email protected]
Kim Klyver, University of Southern Denmark, [email protected]
Monica Lindh de Montoya, Stockholm University, Sweden,
[email protected]
Ellen O’Connor, Los Altos, California, [email protected]
Katarina Pettersson, Uppsala University, Katarina.Pettersson@kultgeog.
uu.se
Jesper Piihl, University of Southern Denmark, [email protected]
Alf Rehn, KTH, Sweden, [email protected]
Robert Smith, Robert Gordon University, [email protected]
Chris Steyaert, St Gallen University, [email protected]
Saara Taalas, Turku School of Economics and Business Administration,
Saara.Taalas@tukkk.?
vii
Foreword and acknowledgements
Narrative and Discursive Approaches in Entrepreneurship is a second book
in a miniseries of four publications called Movements in Entrepreneurship
which originate from so-called writers’ workshops where authors ?rst meet
to discuss their possible contributions based on ?rst drafts responding to a
thematic call for chapters. The aim of this series is to move the ?eld of
entrepreneurship by stimulating and exploring new ideas and research
practices in entrepreneurship in relation to new themes, theories, methods,
paradigmatic stances and contexts. While the ?rst book, entitled New
Movements in Entrepreneurship and symbolized by the element of water,
follows the streams of research we as scholars take part in, focuses on the
ebb and ?ow of entrepreneurial life and was carried through following
actual emerging movements in entrepreneurship research, this second book
is edited with the symbol of ‘air’ in mind, taking in fresh air from and fol-
lowing new winds from neighbouring disciplines such as anthropology and
literary studies, from new paradigmatic stances such as poststructuralism
and feminism and their recent explorations of the linguistic turn through
narrative, dramaturgical, ?ctive, conversational and discursive projects.
Also this book has found its momentum as a text through the ideas
and e?orts of many. We thank Leif Lundblad, as founder of ESBRI
(Entrepreneurship and Small Business Research Institute), for his generous
support andMagnus Aronssonfor his visionary, warmandpractical support
in organizing the writers’ workshop in Sandhamn and bringing together the
virtual community of writers this book forms. Tobias Dalhammar has been
invaluable in the arrangement of the workshop and in the editorial support
of this book. Ellen O’Connor, Dian-M. Hosking and Bengt Johannisson
through their inspirational ‘keynotes’ were excellent in warming up the
authors for more intensive and critical discussions of the drafts. This was
complemented by Jerry Katz and Howard Aldrich who shared their enor-
mous experience with the authors coming to terms with their writing
attempts. We thank the many anonymous reviewers who helped the authors
to revise their chapters substantially after the workshop. Our publisher,
Edward Elgar – especially Francine O’Sullivan – shared their trust and their
fullest professionalismtoaccomplishthis secondbookinthe series theyhost.
Keep looking at the ‘Movements’, Daniel and Chris
viii
Introduction
Daniel Hjorth and Chris Steyaert
Following our ?rst publication workshop challenging contributors to think
and write the New Movements in Entrepreneurship (see Steyaert and Hjorth,
2003), this second workshop took on the challenge of gathering around the
theme of ‘Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship’. This
is now a book that you hold in your hands. It is again a result of a collec-
tive and international work and represents, as such, a much suggested e?ort
in entrepreneurship research to establish new dialogues between cultures. If
the ?rst workshop invitation was more broad and general, this second one
speci?ed a more narrow focus at the same time as it opened towards neigh-
bouring disciplines where narrative and discursive approaches have been
explored for some time now. The idea is that a simultaneous combination
of a stringent focus and new stimulations can create an intensi?cation in
how we study entrepreneurship, resulting in new movements.
As we start to introduce you to this book, we prefer to skip the usual rhet-
oric of why these approaches are important, much needed, etc and point
immediately to a central tension in this book, that one can ‘read’ in the title
Narrative and Discursive Approaches. All chapters in this book, whether
they start with a narrative emphasis or a discursive persuasion, have sooner
or later to address the connection between narration and discourse. There
are no clear cut narrative or discursive approaches, and the 14 chapters
move between these possibilities to enact their own speci?c and sometimes
creative response to that tension.
To address this tension in this introduction, we would like to formulate
three immediate, and for the reader pertinent and pragmatic, questions. The
?rst question – ‘(how) do narrative and discursive approaches work within
entrepreneurship studies?’ – can only be responded to by inviting readers to
read and work with Chapters 2 to 10, and to see whether they work for them.
These nine chapters can be seen as experimenting with narrative and discur-
sive approaches, and for the authors it has been an exciting and di?cult tra-
jectory, not in the least because all of them have come with embodied
experiences rather than with armchair observations. The second question is
‘what are the larger stakes for entrepreneurship when turning to language-
based approaches?’ In replying to that question, we can refer to the new
1
themes that we might address in studying entrepreneurship, but also to the
broader debates one gets involved in when taking the linguistic turn in entre-
preneurship seriously. There are two chapters in this book – one by Steyaert
and one by Hjorth in between which the other nine chapters are situated
(kept hostage?) – that address explicitly the broader conceptual movements
that are at stake when one works with narrative and discursive approaches.
Both chapters might help readers to prepare for reading the di?erent appli-
cations tried out in this book. The third question – ‘how can we be moved
by these approaches?’ – and simultaneously our third encouragement to
readers to join this movement, is again replied to in three concrete attempts
of ‘readers’ who have been involved with the production of this book and
who have in writing formulated some of the inspirations and questions this
spectre of chapters raise. In Chapters 12, 13 and 14, you can ?nd a series of
replies by Katz, Gartner, and Hosking, which can inspire you to think how
these language-based approaches can be used when moving into your sphere
as student and/or practitioner of entrepreneurship.
These three questions will now be elaborated in three parts. In the ?rst
part, we present the general themes as announced by the title of the book
and further elaborated in the chapters by Steyaert and Hjorth. In the
second one we describe the contributing chapters in terms of main ideas.
Finally, in the third part, we open up to the ?rst readings of this book
(Chapters 12, 13 and 14) by Katz, Gartner and Hosking (and Hjorth).
PREPARING TO READ: NARRATIVE AND
DISCURSIVE APPROACHES
This book is clearly responding to what has been described as the ‘linguis-
tic turn’ in the social sciences and humanities. Now, it took some time for
this ‘turn’ to reach organization studies and when it did – and it still does
(see Deetz, 2003) – it emerged as an interest in metaphors as tropes in a lan-
guage re-inaugurated as an active force rather than as a passive medium for
the distanced observer. Metaphors were ‘discovered’ as tools for organizing,
often emphasized in their positive e?ects rather than their negative. With
this ‘turn’, however, not only the cultural context of organizing was empha-
sized, aiding our understanding of complex social processes, but an opening
towards ‘language problems’ more generally followed. One could say that
Wittgenstein’s turning of philosophy’s attention towards its major tools –
language in its various forms and dimensions – meant that everything was
rephrased as a linguistic problem. Structuralists thrived on this idea, leaning
on the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, to say that language is a never-
ending chain of signi?ers and that what people say can be analysed in terms
2 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
of a formal structure of language, re?ecting linguistic and cultural orders.
Claude Lévi-Strauss became a leading ?gure in this structural-linguistic
anthropology and operated as a bricoleur, using concepts knowing that
these could not be grounded in truth nor ?xed by some higher meaning.
Already here was an opening towards the force of power in language use.
This meant that the discursive nature of language was brought back into
focus. Philosophy and anthropology played their important parts in this
process. This made the rather weak interest in questions of politics and
ethics impossible to keep out of the studies.
Boosted further by the postmodern debates on the role of the (social) sci-
ences in the formation of the human, especially inspired by Michel
Foucault’s work, organization studies turned towards organizational prac-
tices with novel perspectives. Especially through the discussions on the
ethics and politics of organizing, the linguistic as well as the non-linguistic,
the discursive as well as the non-discursive, speech and text as well as bodies
and aesthetics were now part of studying and theorizing organization. It
took some time for the linguistic turn to reach entrepreneurship studies. It
would be fair to describe Gartner’s ‘Words lead to deeds’ (1993) as one early
example. Others have followed, but we still lack the breadth and depth these
approaches could bring to entrepreneurship studies. This book tries to con-
tribute to a remedy against this lack. It does so emphasizing the narrative
and the discursive as part of e?ects of this linguistic turn.
To answer a question of what the point would be with narrative and dis-
cursive approaches in entrepreneurship studies we would start with a ques-
tion ourselves: ‘What is silenced by the lack of a response to the “linguistic
turn” in entrepreneurship studies? What major contemporary debates are
we staying out from?’, and, as we here limit ourselves to narrative and dis-
cursive approaches as examples of responses to this turn, especially: ‘What
is silenced by the lack of narrative and discursive approaches in entrepre-
neurship studies? What major themes do we leave out?’ Quite obviously, the
chapters of this book are all di?erent answers to this question, demonstrat-
ing what could be done and what speci?c (new) themes emerge. But many
of these answers can be linked to the broader debates that the linguistic turn
has brought to the social sciences, organization studies, and now also to
entrepreneurship studies. With two conceptual chapters by Steyaert and
Hjorth, we try to bring to the foreground some of these debates that co-
construct the frames of this book, in which the di?erent chapters move
themselves. In Chapters 1 and 11, we prefer to refer to entrepreneurship as
forms of social creativity, taking place primarily in societal rather than in
business contexts. Entrepreneurship is a societal force: it changes our daily
practices and the way we live; it invents futures in populating histories of the
present, here and now. In such processes, entrepreneurial processes, the
Introduction 3
present and the future is organized in stories and conversations, the primary
form for knowledge used in everyday practices. In addition, in such entre-
preneurial processes, the discursive nature of knowledge, including self-nar-
ratives, present a major challenge for subjects in entrepreneurial processes.
Subject positions, or roles in discourse, have to become stabilized and
related to others in dialogical and discursive practices of organizing desires,
attention, resources, and images. Entrepreneurship as a dialogical creativity
is located in between the possible and the impossible. Understanding the dis-
cursive reproduction of knowledge and practices often means a heightened
sensitivity in the face of how ‘normalities’ are reproduced, and thus what
force anomalies carry. Convincing others – directing desires, organizing
resources, dealing with obstacles – and sharing images of ‘what could
become’ is done in small narratives to which people can relate. This book
has collected discussions of the discursive and narrative of entrepreneurial
processes, and we now turn to a short description of what they do.
READING CONTRIBUTIONS: OVERVIEW
In nine chapters, namely Chapters 2 to 10, narrative and discursive
approaches are tried out and presented. They are all somewhere, speci?cally,
in between narrative and discursive. We can imagine readers picking what
seems the most tempting from the titles and this overview of contributions
to create their own (dis)order of reading and connecting.
Sami Boutaiba, responding performatively to the opening chapter on
prosaics by Steyaert, takes us into entrepreneurship in the making. He
brings us into a story of a start-up, but told in a new way. The story as such,
we learn, is kept together by thin threads between di?erent small narratives
carrying energy and explanatory force for their narrators. Facing demands
from their own primary images and stories of what they were supposed to
become, they struggle to relate themselves – as a group – to external ‘audi-
ences’ demanding certain kinds of stories. Boutaiba exempli?es how a pro-
saics of entrepreneurship takes us into ways of knowing entrepreneurship
previously lacking in our ?eld.
If Boutaiba’s story reminds us of what is now already seen as a typical
‘new economy’ kind of start-up, characteristic of the millennium switch-
over, Monica Lindh de Montoya’s world, as she enters the streets of
Caracas in Chapter 3, has got far less media attention. As if we were sitting
in the back of one of the cabs of the ‘driven entrepreneurs’ her story is
based upon, so close to us are the everyday troubles and struggles to ?nd
opportunities and create a life of one’s own. Lindh de Montoya reminds us
of the anthropological contributions to entrepreneurship studies and
4 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
shows us how this perspective draws attention to aspects of entrepreneurial
endeavours we otherwise often miss. The anthropologist locates entrepre-
neurship in the midst of society and social processes of making a living in
its fundamental sense.
Again, in Chapter 4, Lene Foss’ story brings us even closer yet into the
(geographically) remote when she tells the story of an e?ort to narrate an
entrepreneurial identity in the process of establishing a theatre in a rural
(Norwegian) region. In a way, it is a classical story with references to
Horatio Alger, Emilia Erhardt, Marie Curie, Witold Gombrowicz, Ivan
Karamazov and Louise Bourgeoise; people creating lives and stories,
inventing and re-inventing their identities. In Foss’ case there is a fascinat-
ing story of a move (literally) to the boundary of the possible and an
attempt to move that boundary beyond present limits. It is a story of being
on the move – between centre and periphery, between past and future,
between identities. A central vehicle for this movement is narratives, and
self-narratives in particular.
We have all heard about the start-up mecca of the Bay Area, the Silicon
Valley ventures, and the dot.com adventures. Ellen O’Connor’s Chapter 5
takes us to this world of speed, expectations, dreams, competition and
changing technologies/preferences. The world of the IT economy and the
challenges to get attention and legitimacy in a market crowded with ‘hungry
sharks’. Legitimacy is a central problem in entrepreneurship studies. But
seldom(if ever) have we got to read such a close-up study of legitimacy prob-
lems as we do in the way of O’Connor’s. The chapter evolves equally well as
an illustration of how narrative knowledge and narrative forms of knowing
play a crucial role in everyday organizing. It addresses howthe concept of an
‘entrepreneurial team’ (or teamentrepreneurship) is at stake here. This study
not only shows how legitimacy building is central to venturing, but it also
gives body to central business administration concepts – such as strategy and
?nancing – which in this story take on a ‘live’ (in the making) sensation.
Robert Smith and Alistair R. Anderson collect in Chapter 6 plenty of
entrepreneurial stories, so-called e-tales: hagiographies, classical e-tales,
entrepreneurial biographies and novels on entrepreneurs, narratives and
their metaphorical composition as discussed in entrepreneurial studies,
familial fables and memorial tales. They examine this excellent overview
and varied spectre of stories in detail and ?nd the proverbial devil in the
e-tale, namely that all stories of entrepreneurs and on entrepreneurship
promote an entrepreneurial ethos replete with an underpinning of moral
values. They argue convincingly that narrative is not a neutral representa-
tion but instead ful?ls a moral purpose.
Alf Rehn and Saara Taalas continue in Chapter 7 to explore between the
moral and the immoral and what, as a consequence, can be assumed in
Introduction 5
entrepreneurship studies and what has already passed into the ‘taken-for-
grantedness’ of convention. Rehn and Taalas’ broadly stated ambition to
discuss the possibilities of entrepreneurship as a social science unhindered
by ‘blind assumptions’ derived from judicial and economic systems of
thinking challenges us to re?ect upon how entrepreneurship is carved out
as a speci?c theoretical domain. What happens if we think beyond these
boundaries? What could become of entrepreneurship studies should they
include empirical cases presently left unnoticed due to these assumptions-
in-use? We are invited to a discussion of what it takes for a study to be
included as an entrepreneurship study. Through their fascinating narration
of the blat system in the former Soviet Union and of Bad Boys Inc. (inno-
vative drug-dealing) we are helped to think entrepreneurship beyond the
limits of the present.
Seldom is the drama of entrepreneurial processes brought into the
research context and made to a?ect the scholarly text. Torben Damgaard,
Jesper Piihl and Kim Klyver’s text (Chapter 8), however, does so. They
make use of their experiences in the ?eld – consulting and counselling the
entrepreneur – as they make up a play in which their roles in the drama
come into use. It uses the form of drama to both ‘methodologically’ grasp
their ?eld study and analytically discuss the process of consulting and
counselling the entrepreneur. Having created this play, this drama, they step
onto another layer of the text where they re?ect upon their roles in the
drama and provide us with insights concerning the theoretical and method-
ological points of using drama in the research process.
In Chapter 9 Katarina Pettersson shows how a feminist perspective on
the Gnosjö discourse changes how this well-known Scandinavian example
of an entrepreneurial region is commonly read. Pettersson shows how the
Gnosjö discourse – and discourses on entrepreneurship more generally –
are masculine in nature. While 30 per cent of Gnosjö’s entrepreneurs are
women, they are often excluded from studies of entrepreneurship, studies
that still claim to represent the Gnosjö case or what entrepreneurship is.
Tracing the Gnosjö discourse in research studies as well as daily news-
papers, Pettersson is able to describe how these texts co-produce images of
entrepreneurship assuming its masculine nature.
Kathryn Campbell (Chapter 10) moves through entrepreneurship
studies driven by the quilt and quilting as metaphors. She approaches the
problems of ‘normal science’ and suggests ‘paradigm pluralism’ as a way to
make space for new entrepreneurship research from a feminist perspective
that can give room to women entrepreneurs. Her text seeks to allow us to
‘imagine better theories for women entrepreneurs’. To do that she suggests
we augment our symbolic repertoire through the quilt metaphor which
brings us to new insights into the entrepreneurial process. Campbell also
6 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
provides examples of how thinking with metaphors can be applied in entre-
preneurship research through discussing new strategies for theory-building.
REREADING: FIRST RESPONSES
It is no secret to say that the nine chapters we invite you above to read have
been read before. These nine chapters are a result of many readings, discus-
sions and rereadings. For the writers’ workshop at Sandhamn in the
Stockholm archipelago, where all authors discussed each other’s prelimi-
nary versions, some experienced readers were invited to join the conversa-
tions, and also, after the workshop, many di?erent readers – this time in the
role of anonymous reviewers – contributed with their constructive feed-
back to the ongoing writing process. We asked three of these reviewing
readers (of whom two also participated in the archipelago workshop) to
become writers while rereading one more time the almost ?nished book
manuscript. Our question was ‘how do these texts move you?’, and we hope
their answers might give readers a glimpse of the many pragmatic ques-
tions, intensive experiences and conceptual challenges. Jerry Katz, as a
careful listener and a constructive storyteller, formulates many pertinent
questions and has as many practical suggestions to the further application
of this book’s approaches on both sides of the Atlantic. William B. Gartner
responds by telling an intriguing story himself to set up a dialogue with
some of the chapters. He sees the book as performing the variation that
emerges from taking a narrative route, an emphasis he himself had to strug-
gle to tell people and to get published. The motive behind that struggle and
persistence, which Gartner borrows from the poet William Carlos William,
is the belief that narration and ?ction teach us to pay attention to and to
respect the stories of our life. A third response is from Dian-M. Hosking
who explores in a dialogue with Daniel Hjorth the relational implications
involved in conceiving entrepreneurship through narration and discourse.
Rather than a question-and-answer kind of interview, their dialogue forms
a double perspective, a play of act and supplement while connecting entre-
preneurship and relational constructionism.
Introduction 7
1. The prosaics of entrepreneurship
Chris Steyaert
CONNECTING WITH CHAPTERS INCLUDED
The linguistic turn and the performative turn
1
that have become more and
more prominent during the last 20 years in social and organizational
studies,
2
have recently had o?spring in entrepreneurship studies, in such a
variety of narrative (Steyaert, 1997; Lounsbury and Glynn, 2001), meta-
phorical (Dodd, 2002; Hill and Levenhagen, 1995; Hyrsky, 1999), textual
(Pitt, 1998), dramaturgical (Gartner, Bird and Starr, 1992; Czarniawska-
Joerges and Wol?, 1992; Anderson, 2003; Baker, Miner and Eesley, 2003),
discursive (Cohen and Musson, 2000; Ogbor, 2000) and deconstructionist
(Nodoushani and Noudoushani, 1999) analysis. As a way of connecting
with this increasing number of contributions on narrative, metaphorical,
dramaturgical and discursive approaches that enrich the ?eld of entrepre-
neurship as well as with the chapters included in this book that undertake a
similar endeavour, I would like to pursue one particular view to underline
what it is that these linguistically-oriented approaches do and can do for
understanding and conceiving the complexities of entrepreneurial pro-
cesses. While the di?erent chapters in this collection illustrate there is much
‘the linguistic turn’ can do for entrepreneurship studies, I would like to elab-
orate on one such possibility, namely, that these language-based approaches
to entrepreneurial processes are all conversational research practices that
allow us to address the everydayness – the prosaics – of entrepreneurship.
The potential of narrative, dramaturgical, metaphorical and discursive
analysis lies maybe not only in their singular application but above all in
their combined use, in the interrelationships between narration, drama,
metaphor, discourse and deconstruction. Therefore, I will set up a conver-
sation, an informal exchange of views that can connect the various linguis-
tically inspired frameworks in entrepreneurship studies and refocus them as
‘conversational studies’ of entrepreneurial everyday life. Such a refocus
responds to the need for processual conceptions of entrepreneurship
(Steyaert, 2000) and to the creation of a social science view (Swedberg,
1999) that situates the social process of entrepreneurship within everyday
social interaction. Through developing this conversational view as a
8
Bakhtin-oriented dialogical approach, the prosaics of entrepreneurship
thus combines this unique feature and association, namely that the every-
dayness of entrepreneurship refers as much to a mundane, and – why not –
even a boring posture as to a literary connotation where a prosaics – as in
the novel – addresses the actuality of becoming, its ongoing becoming
e?ected through conversational processes. As in Bakhtin’s work where art
and lived experience are intertwined, where speaking appeals to everyday
utterances and to the authorship of the writer, so also is entrepreneurship a
process of creation that connects the everyday with the artistic (Holquist,
2002; see also Hirschkop, 1999). A prosaic approach stresses that entrepren-
eurship is a form of co-authorship in the form of collective stories, dramatic
scripts, generative metaphors and concurring discourses. With a prosaic
study of entrepreneurship, we leave a predominant focus on model-building
and general concepts that this ?eld has promoted (Steyaert, 2000) and take
the route towards a study of the conversational processes that account for
the everydayness of entrepreneurial processes. To establish that route, I will
?rst indicate the main features that a prosaic approach focuses upon, a form
of messiness that implies surprise, open-endedness and un?nalizability.
Second, I will elaborate these features of a prosaic approach through a
Bakhtinian conceptuology based on the notion of addressivity, heteroglos-
sia and polyphony. Third, this prosaics will be related to more recent contri-
butions that depart from the linguistic turn, such as narrative, genealogical
and deconstructionist analysis, and that share common interests with pro-
saics. As a conclusion, I will indicate three dimensions of a prosaic approach
that can form parameters for future research in entrepreneurship as it
embraces wider horizons.
INTRODUCING PROSAICS: SURPRISE, OPEN-
ENDEDNESS AND UNFINALIZABILITY
A prosaics acknowledges the importance of the everyday and the ordinary,
the familiar and the frequent, the customary and the accustomed, the
mediocre and the inferior, in short, the prosaic. Prosaics will be developed
out of the work of the Russian literary theorist Bakhtin, and is a term,
actually a neologism, used by Morson and Emerson (1990) as a general
interpretation of his work. Bakhtin preferred prose over the poem in
writing a theory of literature, against the general tendency to see theory of
literature as poetics and to analyse prose as rhetorics, denying its own kind
of literariness. The analysis of the novel as a literary genre gives the oppor-
tunity to approach style not in the ?rst place as a characteristic of the
author but as part of the genre. For instance, the novel according to
The prosaics of entrepreneurship 9
Bakhtin orchestrates the diverse languages of everyday life into a heteroge-
neous sort of whole (Morson and Emerson, 1990, p. 17). Using the ‘model’
of the novel for conceiving, analysing and writing up research projects will
‘direct’ entrepreneurship scholars to (studying) the writing of novelists and
their styles.
The point of departure of prosaic writing is the belief that the everyday
is the scene where social change and individual creativity take place as a
slow result of constant activity. Innovation is not the Great Renewal but the
daily e?ort of thousands of small steps which – after all – make a di?erence.
This implies that one acknowledges the importance of everyday speaking
where people talking with each other are as much authors as novelists. In
addressing tiny, little alterations, Bakhtin joins writers such as Tolstoy and
Chekov who see in the everyday events of life, in every thing, the ‘greatness’
of living. These examples of two main ?gures of Russian literature should
not be misleading. What Bakhtin was thinking of is not only literary high-
lights, selected by the history of literary criticism, but a much more multi-
coloured stage of forms and genres:
At the time when major divisions of the poetic genres were developing under the
in?uence of the unifying, centralizing, centripetal forces of verbal-ideological
life, the novel – and those artistic-prose genres that gravitate toward it – was
being historically shaped by the current of decentralizing, centrifugal forces . . .
on the lower levels, on the stages of local fairs and at bu?oon spectacles, the
heteroglossia of the clown sounded forth, ridiculing all ‘languages’ and dialects;
there developed the literature of the fabliaux and Schwänke of street songs, folk-
sayings, anecdotes, where there was no language-center at all, where there was to
be found a lively play with the ‘languages’ of poets, scholars, monks, knights and
others, where all ‘languages’ were masks and where no language could claim to
be an authentic, incontestable face (Bakhtin, 1981, pp. 272–73).
As prosaics has a sensitivity for the eventness of an event, for its creative
moving ahead, it is highly suspicious of systems and all attempts that try to
create all-encompassing patterns. Prosaics’ and Bakhtin’s resistance to
systems can be read as a way to avoid monologization, a process through
which all elements are ordered and ?xed and through which surprise and
freshness become excluded. In creating systems, there is a chronic double
danger. One is the act of exclusion, things become driven out and end in a
state of ‘non-existence’, and the unnoticed becomes even more unnotice-
able. Another is that things which happen accidentally are meaningless (at
least to the system being created) and not related but become somehow
related, meaningful and are no longer accidental. Here we can point to an
important turnaround, which relates back to a statement by Deleuze and
Guattari (1994, p. 201), opening the conclusion of their last book What is
philosophy? Their statement – ‘We require just a little order to protect us
10 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
from chaos’ – emphasizes that the (over)production of order has to be
accounted for, not that there is disorder. As Morson and Emerson point it
out, mess is the natural state of things (p. 30). Our lives and living is messy.
To assume and create order is a task, a project; it is stepping into the pro-
duction of organizing. In creating a somewhat ordered life, many people
create an even bigger mess; all of us, go through that stage, for a day, for a
week, for a couple of years, even for a lifetime. Whether disorder and mess
is seen as a problem, depends on if one considers ‘order’ as an ideal, and all
its related discourse, such as security and stability, as preferable. In stress-
ing ‘mess’, one acknowledges a becoming-ontology, which is the point
where this turnaround should be positioned. This mess is called by Deleuze
(1995, p. 138) ‘holes’, the parts of our life where our identity crashes, our
voice stutters: ‘That’s what I ?nd interesting in people’s lives, the holes, the
gaps, sometimes dramatic, but sometimes not dramatic at all. There are
catalepsies, or a kind of sleepwalking through a number of years, in most
lives. Maybe it’s in these holes that movement takes place’.
Calling things a ‘mess’ should not be seen as something unpleasant or
negative, but as part of the open and creative becoming of life, inexhaust-
ible and un?nalizable. Call it surprises, or adventure, or movements indeed,
but when we act and speak, we are working as much with intentions as with
surplus we cannot anticipate or know. Some of us – persons as well as
organizations, just to take two well-known constructs – are good in exclud-
ing ‘surplus’. Organizing could be seen as the practise of excluding surplus,
of avoiding gaps. That is when we are acting in monologues, when the other
can only enter in my life and conversations in the way I want it and like it.
If I practise the genre of dialogue, the other is able to tune in from the
surplus every listening and presence creates, and thus not from the part the
other understood I brought in (because that would be mere repetition,
which is, as we have all experienced, funny and irritating). Then, if I am
responding from the surplus I create to what the other ‘gave’ me, I am taken
by a process that is never-ending and never the same. One could call this
cycle an adventure, or yes indeed, a mess. As people sometimes say, we fell
from one surprise into another.
THE CREATION OF A LIVING WORLD: A
BAKHTINIAN PROSAICS
The above, in a nutshell, says that prosaics addresses forms that are open-
ended, accounts for the creative part inbecoming, andacknowledges the aes-
thetic dimension of science. In short, it is an approach that takes part in a
worldbecomingandthat canbeconceptuallyanchoredinBakhtin’s language
The prosaics of entrepreneurship 11
theory, addressing how in everyday language, communication creates as
much mess as message. And for creative living, what we need is both. The
‘mess’ is not a problem, or something to be reduced or avoided, but the nec-
essary di?erence whichmakes the dialogue goon. Bakhtin’s theory is insome
way both overturning the classic sender–receiver theory of communication
(the message part) as the poststructuralist language theory avant la lettre (the
mess or di?erence part) by bringing themtogether in one conception of lan-
guage. Howdoes language work then according to Bakhtin?
He departs from the concrete utterance as the smallest unity in com-
munication:
Every concrete utterance of a speaking subject serves as a point where centrifu-
gal as well as centripetal forces are brought to bear. The processes of centraliza-
tion and decentralization, of uni?cation and disuni?cation, intersect in the
utterance; the utterance not only answers the requirements of its own language
as an individualized embodiment of a speech act, but it answers the require-
ments of heteroglossia as well; it is in fact an active participant in such speech
diversity. And this active participation of every utterance in living heteroglossia
determines the linguistic pro?le and style of the utterance to no less degree than
its inclusion in any normative-centralizing system of a unitary language. Every
utterance participates in the ‘unitary language’ (in its centripetal forces and ten-
dencies) and at the same time partakes of social and historical heteroglossia (the
centrifugal, stratifying forces) (p. 272).
What Bakhtin brings in here is that in communication, there is not only
a unitary or common language, the thing we focus habitually on as neces-
sary for understanding, there is simultaneously a participation and creation
of diversity, through which communication and meaning escapes us and yet
becomes possible. This is the play of ‘surplus’, which Bakhtin relates to the
‘addressivity’ of an utterance – I don’t talk to the walls but to somebody in
particular, not necessarily ‘present’, and who ‘listens’ from within certain
horizons, from a speci?c context which can never be the same as the one
speaking. Surplus emanates from this open and active listening, a kind of
‘live entering’ which should not be seen as empathy, where the merging
evades the space for surplus.
Surplus is also e?ected by ‘heteroglossia’, by the simultaneous presence
of several social ‘languages’ co-habiting one language. In communication,
we do not only speak ‘polyglot’ – through many tongues, but also hetero-
glot – through a mixture of social and historical ‘back vocals’ which echo
social backgrounds and reverberate past uses. We all speak with accents
and intonations, and this not only gives an aura to our speaking, it is our
speaking. As rooms are never echo-free, communication constantly pro-
duces tones and overtones, and there can never be the simple ‘message’
(except in totalitarian systems). Surplus can thus be connected to
12 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
‘polyphony’. Polyphony builds on the idea of the utterance where speaker
and listeners emerge as co-authors, recreating a dialogic relationship. When
we speak with each other dialogically, there are already two conscious-
nesses involved, there is already a combining of several voices. When we
said before that communication can never be only ‘message’, we disre-
garded how power is enacted in an encounter. As in a totalitarian situation
(for example, propaganda), communication can be only message, since it is
‘served’ as a monologue, as blocking of surplus. Bakhtin contrasts here
internally persuasive discourse and authoritative discourse, where the latter
supposes one cannot ‘retell things in one’s own words’, from one’s own
developing discourse. The word is ?xed, and not supposed to lead to new
words. In a polyphonic situation, the process is never ?nalized nor
?nalizable, as consciousnesses meet as ‘equals’, as ones which a?ect the
other to a?ect oneself, as voices full of ‘eventualities’ or event potential. It
is here that Bakhtin uses Dostoyevsky’s writing to illustrate the polyphonic
novel, where the writing author takes a new position towards his own
writing. Dostoyevsky is not in full control of his ‘personages’, but they take
over, so to speak, and, from their own space and surplus, the novel devel-
ops as an event; more than that it is steered through a plot.
With the notion of ‘surplus’, we can reframe what we sometimes call
creativity. Surplus is the stu? of creativity so to speak. Life is stacked and
congested with surplus. Creativity is therefore not an exceptional condition,
but an everyday occurrence: ‘For Bakhtin, creativity is built into prosaic
experience, into all the ways in which we continually turn what is given into
what is created. To live is to create, and the larger, more noticeable acts we
honor with the name creative are extensions and developments of the sorts
of activity we perform all the time’ (Morson and Emerson, 1990, p. 187).
The idea of surplus that I linked earlier to addressivity, heteroglossia,
and polyphony, and, in the end, to the creative process of life, gives a very
di?erent view on ‘living speech’ and, after all, on life. Due to centripetal and
centrifugal forces, language is like a sea, giving ebb and ?ow, a creative va-
et-vient, through which it is itself on the move and constantly renewed from
within. Language is not an abstract system or langue but a heterogeneous
interweaving of languages with di?erent social and historical tastes and
smells. In the happening of the utterance as a concrete social act, something
is said, with an over?ow of intonation, contamination, pronunciation, allu-
sion, citation, etc. This kind of ‘direct dialogism’ is enacted through this
interplay of utterances as described by Bakhtin (1986:91):
Utterances are not indi?erent to one another, and are not self-su?cient; they are
aware of and mutually re?ect one another . . . Each utterance is ?lled with echoes
and reverberations of other utterances to which it is related by the communality
The prosaics of entrepreneurship 13
of the sphere of speech communication . . . Each utterance refutes, a?rms, sup-
plements, and relies upon the others, presupposes them to be known, and
somehow takes them into account.
The point is that all of us are constantly participating in this rich play
being as much surprised as used, as much enlightened as confused by the
things we hear ourselves say and by what others bring back to that:
In real life, we very keenly and subtly hear all those nuances in the speech of
people surrounding us, and we ourselves work very skilfully with all these colours
on the verbal palette. We very sensitively catch the smallest shift in intonation,
the slightest interruption of voices in anything of importance to us in another’s
person practical everyday discourse. All those verbal sideward glances, reserva-
tions, loopholes, hints, thrusts do not slip past our ear, are not foreign to our lips.
All the more astonishing, then, that up to nowall this has found no precise theor-
etical cognizance, nor the assessment it deserves (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 201).
For Bakhtin, the novel is the place where such an intensity of living
(speech) can be reached, and the place where such an assessment can be exe-
cuted. In this option, the issue is not to consider to assess ?ction novels as
an entrance to management (see Alvarez and Merchan, 1992; Czarniawska-
Joerges and Guillet de Monthoux, 1994), but to reckon prosaics as a con-
ceptual, analytic and writing style for empirical research.
EXTENDING PROSAICS: NARRATION, GENEALOGY
AND DECONSTRUCTION
Prosaics can be related to more recent (in the sense of coming after
Bakhtin) attempts that departing from the linguistic turn have tried to
develop alternative approaches to overcome system-building. I will discuss
three examples – namely narrative, genealogical and deconstructive ‘analy-
sis’ – with regard to their prosaic inclinations.
Narratives and Local Accounts
Since Lyotard’s (1984, p. 64) point that ‘the little narrative remains the
quintessential form of imaginative invention’, one can easily think of
stories as related to a prosaic approach. For Lyotard, little narratives have
a centrifugal function, as they can put pressure on institutional authority
and bureaucracy, and thus go against the Grand Narratives (Sim, 1996). It
is a matter of move and countermove, constantly, without accepting or
applying to external rules. Such a (postmodern) artist or writer
14 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
is in the position of a philosopher: the text he writes or the work he creates is not
in principle governed by preestablished rules and cannot be judged according to
a determining judgment, by the application of given categories to this text or
work. Such rules and categories are what the work or text is investigating. The
artist and the writer therefore are working without rules in order to establish the
rules for what will have been made. This is why the work and text can take on the
properties of an event . . . (Lyotard, 1992, p. 15).
As a consequence, one is working within the frames of the narrative one
is engaged in, which is not ‘transferable’ to another story one might get
involved in. Little narratives are small-scale ?ctions which are providential,
temporary and local, and make this no secret to the reader. In a similar way
as Bakhtin stimulates us to focus on disorder, Lyotard believes (postmod-
ern) science should orient itself to the instability and
by concerning itself with such things as undecidables, the limits of precise
control, con?icts characterized by incomplete information, ‘fracta’, catas-
trophes, and pragmatic paradoxes – (it) is theorizing its own evolution as discon-
tinuous catastrophic, nonrecti?able, and paradoxical. It is changing the meaning
of the word knowledge, while expressing how such a change can take place. It is
producing not the known, but the unknown. And it suggests a model of legiti-
mation that has nothing to do with maximized performance, but has as its basis
di?erence understood as paralogy
3
(Lyotard, 1984, p. 60).
Richardson’s account of the use of the narrative comes close to a
prosaics-oriented legitimation: ‘If we wish to understand the deepest and
most universal of human experiences, if we wish our work to be faithful to
the lived experiences of people, if we wish for a union between poetics and
science, or if we wish to use our privileges and skills to empower the people
we study, then we should value the narrative’ (1990, pp. 133–34). Stories
allow the story-teller to interweave in sequence and in consequence, and
hence in detail, the ongoing events lived by people. Stories can be prosaic
in the sense that the eventness is not lost in writing or telling. Stories can be
seen prosaic in a more de?ned, Bakhtinian sense as they emerge as novelis-
tic. For this, ‘that which makes a novel a novel, that which is responsible for
its stylistic uniqueness, is the speaking person and his discourse’ (Bakhtin,
1981, p. 332). Stories are thus interweaving personages that ‘speak’ with
each other from their own developing languages.
While there is nopossibility fromthe outside tode?ne a story, andits many
genres, as prosaic, it can be easily con?rmed that a narrative writing has
many, even unanticipated possibilities for prosaics. The example I will give
here is the anecdote, this special kind of story that is given by Van Manen
(1990) a special place in his hermeneutical phenomenological approach to
pedagogy. The anecdote is a secret, private or hitherto unpublished narrative
The prosaics of entrepreneurship 15
or detail of history (Van Manen, p. 116). Its Greek meaning of ‘things
unpublished’ gives it its special prosaic status: a short passage of life, not
worth becoming o?cial and published. Research based on anecdotes is con-
sidered no research, and thus not to be published. Prosaic-oriented research
would welcome the anecdote, as a special genre that can be concrete, and still
full of sensitive insight and proverbial truth (Van Manen, 1990).
Genealogy and Super?cial Secrets
The relatedness between prosaics and genealogy, I think, can be explored
around their mutual interest for ‘super?cial secrets’. Aprosaic ethnography
tries not to be super?cial in how it represents life due to technics of abstrac-
tion, nor does it move everyday events beyond their appearance, turning our
daily small secrets into mysteries. Prosaics balances between the hollowness
of abstractionandthe secrets of the surface. Foucault, inmovingfromarche-
ology, and the formation of discourses, to genealogy, is seeking out what
Burrell (1997) calls ‘super?cial secrets’. According to Dreyfus and Rabinow
(1982, p. 106) for the genealogist, trying to record the singularity of events,
there are no ?xed essences, no underlying laws, no metaphysical ?nalities.
Genealogy seeks out discontinuities where others have found continuous devel-
opment. It ?nds recurrences and play where others found progress and serious-
ness . . . Genealogy avoids the search for depth. Instead it seeks the surfaces of
events, small details, minor shifts and subtle contours.
As in the case of the little narrative, genealogy cannot move to the centre,
failing when displacing established systems:
genealogy cannot cease to be marginal and oppositional and still be genealogy
. . . (It) is essentially a readiness to continually problematize established truths
through development of alternative accounts and critical analyses of targeted
facts, concepts, principles, canons, natures, institutions, methodological truisms,
and established practices (Prado, 1995, pp. 151–52).
In some way, it cannot do without the grand narratives, as genealogy
wants to act as a counterpoint, similar to Bakhtin’s ‘double-voicedness’. As
for prosaics, genealogy can only ‘succeed’ when it moves away from what is
expected to be ‘consulted’, to seeking ‘in the most unpromising places, in
what we tend to feel is without history’ (Foucault, 1984, p. 76). Genealogy
becomes highly ‘prosaic’ in its search for ‘e?ective history’, a term Foucault
draws from Nietzsche, and in trying to be ‘close’ but not closed:
E?ective history . . . shorts its vision to those things nearest to it – the body, the
nervous system, nutrition, digestion, and energies; it unearths the periods of
16 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
decadence, and if it chances upon lofty epochs, it is with the suspicion – not vin-
dictive but joyous – of ?nding a barbarous and shameful confusion. It has no
fear of looking down, so long as it is understood that it looks from above and
descends to seize the various perspectives, to disclose dispersions and di?erences,
to leave things undisturbed in their own dimension and intensity (p. 89).
Deconstruction and What Fell O? the Table
The little narrative as well as the genealogical approach can be related to
prosaics, as they oppose systems as much as they are opposed to being
systems themselves. A similar point can be made about deconstruction and
the way Derrida has thought of it, according to Eagleton (1996, p. 128):
Derrida is clearly out to do more than develop new techniques of reading:
deconstruction is for him an ultimately political practice, an attempt to disman-
tle the logic by which a particular system of thought, and behind that a whole
system of political structures and social institutions, maintain its force. He is not
seeking, absurdly, to deny the existence of relatively determinate truths, mean-
ings, identities, intentions, historical continuities; he is seeking rather to see such
things as the e?ects of a wider and deeper history – of language, of the uncon-
scious, of social institutions and practices.
Deconstruction is indeed a ‘technique’ of reading, which as no other
approach plays out the centrifugal e?ects of language, by showing how
every text can have a double reading, which emerges in the margins of the
?rst reading. Such a process is endless, as every marginal text can be reread
into a new text. When we write or speak, we are always in an intertextual
space, so that the intention of what we say, is already overturned, dissemi-
nated in new meanings: ‘There is a continual ?ickering, spilling and defus-
ing of meaning . . . All language, for Derrida, displays this ‘surplus’ over
exact meaning, is always threatening to outrun and escape the sense which
tries to contain it’ (Eagleton, 1996, p. 116). The notion of surplus is used in
both Bakhtin’s and Derrida’s thinking to indicate that meaning is always
providential and momentous,
4
and ?xation of meaning is a moment in an
unarticulated stream of endless meaning. Prosaics and deconstructionism
use both a way of ‘reading and writing’, to acknowledge the never-ending
Heracleitean movement, and to give the text a voice. As Chia (1996, pp.
19–20) phrases it, deconstruction
leads us to understanding organization as a fundamental reality-con?guring
process; an ontological activity of carving out and making familiar a world which
we therefrominhabit. Adopting a deconstructive stance in the practice of organ-
izational analysis involves the careful unfolding of texts, events and organizing
processes through a strategy of ‘close reading’ . . ., it involves meticulously chart-
ingout thestrategicmaneuvers of orderingandorganizingentailedincreatingnet-
works of relations in order to mobilize bias towards serving a particular function.
The prosaics of entrepreneurship 17
THE WIDER HORIZONS OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP
RESEARCH
When reading the chapters in this volume, the prosaic tones of entrepre-
neurship are becoming illustrated, echoed and multiplied: we meet the
closeness of prosaics in Boutaiba’s story of the everyday unfolding of
Yala-Yala, a meeting of four partners conversing discourses of time with
a big T in a drama of insigni?cant moments; we learn about the super?cial
secrets of taxi owners and taxi drivers and their mundane yet so over-
whelming problems as they resonate in the hurly-burly of Caracas; we
zoom in on the small moves of an actress, her becoming entrepreneurial,
as she draws upon stories, discourses and dramas that form the heteroglos-
sia of her past to invent a new form of community-anchored theatre; we
follow in O’Connor’s story, in a series of close-ups, a un?nalizable conver-
sation of legitimation that echoes the discursive stances of a set of actors
that follow each other up on the scene of a new internet enterprise; we hear
about more, even suspicious secrets as we follow Rehn and Taalas in their
suspicion and even resistance to the system-building of entrepreneurship
and as they visit what traditional entrepreneurship scholars would con-
sider unpromising places to study entrepreneurship; more resistance to
system-building is echoed as Pettersson gradually dismantles the male-
dominated discourse that should accomplish the entrepreneurial aura of a
region, and as Campbell questions the construction of a normal science,
another monument of male signature, and reinvents what entrepreneurial
studies can be through the metaphor of the quilt, a most heteroglossic
fabric to interweave colours, stories and inclinations; with Damgaard, Piihl
and Klyver, we are able to watch a ?ctive play, a small event that allows us
to more precisely understand the relationships entrepreneurs, consultants
and researchers can form with each other; as Smith and Anderson read a
series of stories, we meet again and again the same moral discourse that
imbues ‘the story of entrepreneurship’ as a centripetal force in the variety
of stories we can tell about entrepreneurship. Every one of these chapters
forms a story of its own, creates its own balance of prosaic detailedness,
dramatic stance, metaphorical inspiration and wider set of discourses to
construct the eventness of the entrepreneurial endeavours they speak
about.
These chapters illustrate what entrepreneurship can be after its linguistic
turn, and their prosaic inclinations allow us to identify three parameters
that can form a potential for future studies of entrepreneurship, if we
accept we must embrace even wider horizons. The developmental agenda a
prosaic approach suggests is to concentrate our studies upon the philo-
sophical, the social and the aesthetic of entrepreneurship. After and via the
18 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
linguistic turn, more turns turn up: the philosophical/vitalist, the social/
performative and the aesthetic/literary.
The Philosophical of Entrepreneurship and Vitalism
Life has to be lived. With that simple ‘saying’, we undermine any idea that
would pretend that events could be captured in plain predictions, complete
deterministic schemes or pre-existing patterns. There is an openness that
resists all forms of system-building and that embraces a world becoming. If
entrepreneurship is, according to a prosaic premise, to surrender itself to
?oating around in the ?ux of becoming, it will have to turn to the so-called
philosophers of becoming (Steyaert, 1997). The list is long ever since
Heraclitus launchedhis idea that ‘one cannever steptwice inthe same river’.
In the history of philosophy, other names, such as Nietzsche, Bergson,
Heidegger, Whitehead, have connected their philosophies to this very idea
of becoming, which has at the end of the second millenniumexponentially
been haunted by such thinkers as Deleuze, Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard,
Serres, Derrida, Bakhtin, de Certeau and others. There is a lot of intertex-
tual potential to pursue. The choice of using Bakhtin to conceive a prosaic
approach in this text emerges now as a rather reductionist one, and, even
more, by its shortness, hides the intertextual constitution of Bakhtin’s writ-
ings, interweaving the di?erent threads of the so-called Lebensphilosophie,
explored by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson, Dilthey and – especially
signi?cant for Bakhtin – Simmel and Cassirer (Brandist, 2002). But beyond
Bakthin, there is a whole philosophical oeuvre from Serres’ Genesis (see
Steyaert, 2000) to Deleuze’s vitalist and neo-materialist philosophy that can
allowus to conceive entrepreneurship as a becoming, never again enclosing
it in a reductionist scheme or system.
The Social of Entrepreneurship and Performance
With a prosaic approach, entrepreneurship is enacted through daily activ-
ity and interaction. It is a social process, that requires study in such a way
that the approach does not kill what it tries to study, and respects the event-
ness of the events through which it proceeds. By approaching entrepreneur-
ship as a prosaics, we can situate its formation there where it happens and
where it can happen: as lived experience, as story, as drama, as conversa-
tion, as performance, in all its everydayness. Such a prosaic approach of
entrepreneurship implies that we (re)connect to a range of diverse
approaches that takes their departure in social theories – as developed in
sociology, anthropology, psychology, cultural studies – that only occasion-
ally have been applied in entrepreneurship studies (see Swedberg, 1999).
The prosaics of entrepreneurship 19
The social process of everyday life, as it (per)forms entrepreneurship can
become connected to Gar?nkel’s and Cicourel’s ethnomethodology, de
Certeau’s practice of everyday life, Go?man’s dramaturgical sociology,
Geertz’s thick description and many social constructionist theories that try
to conceive the sociality of everyday life (see Shotter, 1991 and 1993, and
Hosking and Hjorth, Chapter 14).
What connects many of these social theories is the performative dimen-
sion of everyday life (Sahlin-Andersson and Sevón, 2003). Everyday life is
about everyday practices. Prosaics thus connects or combines the linguistic
turn with the performative turn. For instance, Bruner (1990, p. 34) inter-
prets the function of narrating in a dramaturgical sense: ‘When we enter
human life, it is as if we walk on stage into a play whose enactment is
already in progress – a play whose somewhat open plot determines what
parts we may play and toward what denouements we may be heading.
Others on stage already have a sense of what the play is about, enough of
a sense to make negotiation with a latecomer possible’. Narration allows us
to connect to the play that we join constantly in di?erent contexts, and that
we partly co-create, drawing upon the range of discourses we can (or are
allowed to) weave in. The sense and direction of the play is constantly in
need of new interpretations and new interactions even when a very known
and rehearsed script might be followed. Narration remains an open text as
others step in or out of the conversation. For Bruner, narration is also an
accounting for the exception that occurred, rebalancing the canonical and
the expectable with the unexpected. In that sense, a story is not only about
mess but, based on Burke’s dramatism, also about ‘trouble’, when certain
canonical stances become violated or are missing (and new narrations need
to be developed). The performative and interactive side of prosaics doesn’t
limit the processual interest to the here-and-now or the micro-level of face-
to-face situations. Every performance is conversational in a broader sense,
as its intertextuality introduces and omits certain discourses and power
relationships, implying societal scripts of which some are hard to change
while others can be resisted. While all the world may be a stage, men and
women are not merely players, nor are their scripts free to be written.
The Aesthetic of Entrepreneurship and Writing
With the performative of prosaics, we have set one foot in the aesthetical.
Bringing in the novel as the central vehicle to look at social processes as an
un?nalizable text where centrifugal forces are not outdriven by centripetal
habits, and where a detailedness is created so that the eventness is not lost,
requires a study of aesthetic processes. For Bakhtin, the novel is ‘[T]he only
genre which is in a state of becoming, therefore it more profoundly, essen-
20 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
tially, sensitively and rapidly re?ects the becoming of actuality itself’
(Bakhtin, 1981, p. 7, translation by Hirschkop, 1999, p. 12). To draw upon
the novel to conceive entrepreneurship is then to acknowledge the similar
authorship the writing of life presupposes as in literary writing. The ques-
tion is then: What forms, genres and styles of writing can become implied
here? Can we foresee how the centralizing tendency of the academic publi-
cation systems can be interrupted, or, at least, is it possible to move to
another more prosaic scene, where a variety of conceptual and writing
forms can be played out, and where every research study experiments with
its own form, as knowledge creation cannot be disconnected from form
creation? In what melange of more local and ‘popular’ genres, forms and
styles would we arrive thus? After the linguistic turn, ahead of us is to focus
on the styles and stylists of our theories (Czarniawska, 2003) and – to put
it simply in a grand way – rewrite entrepreneurship (Hjorth, 2003).
The prosaics of entrepreneurship 21
2. A moment in time
Sami Boutaiba
THE WAY OF BECOMING
This chapter has it that life be understood as a becoming process. It is nor-
mative and political both in the sense that understanding life as a becom-
ing process privileges a moving dialogue between human beings. This way
of entering an understanding of any kind of social life is heavily in?uenced
by the writings of Bakhtin (1981, 1984, 1986, 1993) and Morson (1994)
who also depicts his own work as Bakhtinian (ibid., p. 5). In what follows,
I will elaborate upon some of the central concerns of literary philosopher
Mikhail Bakhtin in order to clarify the conceptual framework that has
informed my understanding of the ?rst approximately one and a half years
of YalaYala’s existence as a company. I see no better way of entering the
work of Bakhtin than the following quote that has been translated by
Morson and Emerson (1990) from a Russian text:
5
One must not, however, imagine the realm of culture as some sort of spatial
whole, having boundaries but also having internal territory: it is entirely distrib-
uted along the boundaries, boundaries pass everywhere, through its every aspect
. . . Every cultural act lives essentially on the boundaries: in this is its seriousness
and signi?cance; abstracted from boundaries it loses its soil, it becomes empty,
arrogant, it degenerates and dies. (Morson and Emerson, 1990, p. 51)
From this quote’s emphasis upon boundaries, it becomes possible to
address a number of related concerns of Bakhtin. In this chapter, it is con-
ducive to start in his book-length essay on the chronotope (literally
meaning time-place, but usually translated as time-space), which appeared
in the collection called The Dialogic Imagination (1981, pp. 84–258). In this
essay, Bakhtin re?ects upon the way literature always understands the life
and experience of its characters from an underlying conception of time and
space, of which time is depicted as the primary category of the chronotope
(Bakhtin, 1981, p. 85). In the essay, Bakhtin discusses various literary
genres and the capability of these genres to capture a time that is open, a
time where all the small steps of everyday life are allowed to do something,
to move the characters as the narrative develops. In fact, the essay can very
22
much be read as a juxtaposition between the novel that, according to
Bakhtin, depicts a life where characters enter a crude contact with the
present, and other genres that each in their own way fail to apprehend that
the everydayness of interpersonal encounters, various events, challenges,
and even the seemingly smallest action, make a creative di?erence as to the
life of the characters depicted in the narrative. Or as he writes in another
essay in the same collection: ‘The novel comes into contact with the spon-
taneity of the inconclusive present; this is what keeps the genre from con-
gealing’ (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 27). Thus, Bakhtin actually tries to advocate
6
the
kind of temporal existence, where the present doesn’t lose its presentness,
because only in the present, as David Carr (1986) also makes us blatantly
aware throughout his whole book, can we gain a renewed sense of what we
are all about, of the kind of narrative that is meaningful to our existence as
we see it here-and-now. It is exactly Bakhtin’s emphasis upon the present-
ness of the present that allows for a sense of freedom, but we are wise to
caution already here that Bakhtin doesn’t imply a romantic sense of
freedom that may come from a loose sense of a boundaryless existence. On
the contrary, boundaries help us explore ourselves as liminal heroes, and it
is this exact emphasis upon liminality that makes Bakhtin’s plea for an open
time a prosaic one. In fact, the latter emphasis upon prosaics can already
be understood as a possible continuation of his phenomenological writing
(see Gardiner, 2000, for discussion) in his early work called Toward a
Philosophy of the Act (Bakhtin, 1993). In this book, ardently opposing any
kind of theoretism, i.e. systematic ways of thinking, he repeatedly empha-
sizes the ‘eventness of Being’ (Bakhtin, 1993, p. 1), or the ‘once-occurrent
Being’ (ibid., p. 15), andby sodoing makes a plea for non-alibis, for address-
ing the movement of time and the beings we become in this movement.
Whether we construct our lives in one way or the other, we always become,
and Bakhtin’s voice urges that it makes a crucial di?erence whether we are
able to address these ‘de?ning traces of existence’ (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 100),
whether we are able to enter a dialogue with ourselves while becoming. If
not, we come to lose the sense of historicity, the sense that time is not
reversible in terms of what it makes us. This latter is also a way of empha-
sizing that the emphasis upon the presentness of the present is not a way of
talking about an isolated present ‘that banishes both memory and antici-
pation’ (Morson, 1994, p. 201), as if the here-and-now didn’t already
produce an echo of an earlier time and a certain promise of a time to come.
On the contrary, we are dealing with a time that is already temporally exten-
sive, a time that already leaves a trace, and without this sort of understand-
ing of historicity, we become oblivious to the fact that characters, cultures
and life tout court, though un?nalized (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 83) and them-
selves moving events that obligate us to play with and along as well as to
A moment in time 23
interrogate, are also obligated to try to understand how and to what extent
time has already made us other. I guess my dual emphasis upon playing and
a more serious and critical self-interrogation already places me in between
some of Bakhtin’s own writings. On the one hand, the book called Rabelais
and His World (1984b) and its underlying metaphor of the carnival clearly
deals with dominant norms from a playful perspective, whereas for instance
his book called Towards a Philosophy of the Act (Bakhtin, 1993), works to
create a certain sense of seriousness around the consequences of our acts,
of addressing life as an event and does it in an ethically responsible fashion
by making ourselves answerable (Bakhtin, 1993, p. 16), to other people as
well as to ourselves.
It is exactly the act of addressing what we become, the traces of our exist-
ence, when thrown into the prosaics of everyday life, which invites us to
interrogate the possibilities for other narratives through which our life
could be meaningful. Thus, it should be stressed that addressing life and the
way it already appears meaningful, is an action, an active e?ort of getting
the sense of the small steps and what they have made us. A way of losing
one’s innocence, one might even say. This kind of existence already reso-
nates the challenge of getting the sense of a dialogue between what is
already actualized and what is potential, between what Morson (1994,
Chapter 5) would call sideshadows and life as it is presently understood. In
such a dialogue, the sense of freedom and the sense of ‘who we are’ emerge
from the ongoing dialogue with the boundaries of existence. This is exactly
the reason for which it becomes di?cult to accept perspectives on emer-
gence that reduces ‘the act of creation’ to a certain time-period, and to some
but not other activities, as seems to be the case in the otherwise very inter-
esting article on organizational emergence by William Gartner (1993, pp.
232–33). As I see it, we need to recognize that the entrepreneurial (read:
creative) activity is an inherent part of everyday life, and even the seemingly
trivial activities of everyday life have great capacity to move us in new and
unexpected directions. This seems to me one important way of entering a
process-sensitive conceptualization of entrepreneurial action that Steyaert
(1995) and Gartner (1993) both seem to call for in their use of, amongst
others, social psychologist Karl Weick (1979) and his tenacious insistence
upon a process-vocabulary of organizing.
There is a further remark to make on the becoming perspective devel-
oped here. Thus, every process of becoming is essentially social. Even in the
seemingly most solitary movement, we are always-already situated in a lan-
guage that is social. As to the act of starting a new company, it seems to be
one, almost paradigmatic example of a human project and the kind of rela-
tional e?ort involved in this (the e?ort of making others believe in an idea
or product, the e?ort of moving together to make the voice of the company
24 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
a strong one, etc.). Generally speaking, I agree with Gartner (1993) that
re?ections on entrepreneurship ought to focus, not upon individuals who
are entrepreneurs, but upon entrepreneuring as a social activity. To be sure,
a lot of the bias in entrepreneurship studies focused upon individuals may
derive from the fact that a lot of studies are based upon retrospective
(Gartner, 1993) interviews, where people (notably leaders qua the Western
preconception of the kind of role leaders are supposed to play) centralize
themselves in a manner little justi?ed in the actual process in which they
were involved. As this analysis is mostly based upon a real-time study, it
seems more conducive to the kind of process-understanding focused upon
social becoming (Morson and Emerson, 1990). This re?ects the belief that
any individual will always-already be a part of a social process, already
enmeshed without being obliterated as if ‘it’ was a mere docile body de?ned
and moved by a social machine.
To sum up, I quite tenaciously insist upon process. I do this through an
underlying questioning as to the ability of the people that I have investi-
gated to maintain a critical dialogue with their own process of becoming in
their way of narrating existence. As I already hinted at with the Bakhtin
quote in the beginning, such a dialogue is about liminality, and the chrono-
topic understanding already suggested that it was about a temporal and a
spatial liminality. Concisely speaking, this actually ties together the notion
of dialogue, process, time, and space. Thus, the possibility for an ongoing,
critical self-dialogue, and the process-sensitivity this entails, can be either
impeded or made possible depending upon the extent to which temporal
boundaries and spatial boundaries are allowed to be renegotiated along the
way. Temporal boundaries tell us something about the moments that are
allowed to do something to our understanding of existence. Spatial bound-
aries tell us about the way people interact with di?erence (Bell, 1998), and
whether they actually address these di?erences in a moving dialogue in the
social space that emerges between members of a given community. The
story that I present to you as a reader is rather detailed and generally
written in the spirit of the following quote:
Unlike quantitative work, which can be interpreted though its tables and plot
summaries, qualitative work carries its meaning in its entire text. Just as a piece
of literature is not equivalent to its ‘plot summary’, qualitative research is not
contained in its abstracts. Qualitative research has to be read, not scanned; its
meaning is in the reading. (Laurel Richardson, 2000, p. 924)
I hope my text will move the reader along and that meaning will emerge
in the very (entrepreneurial?) act of reading the quite detailed analysis. It
is an analysis of a small, newly started company called YalaYala.
7
In the
analysis, I show and discuss how the members of this company had great
A moment in time 25
di?culties taking in the prosaics of their everyday experience in the way
they narrated themselves. I will elaborate upon how YalaYala narrated
company life in between what Bakhtin (1981, p. 278; 1984, p. 63) has
called the chronotope of the threshold, and an epilogue time, which is
Morson’s (1994, pp. 190–98) softer term for Bakhtin’s (1981) concept of
Épic time. Alife poised on the threshold is Bakhtin’s way of talking about
an extreme sense of openness to the possibilities of life, the freedom of
getting the sense of the possible qualitative diversity in the cross-section
of a single moment (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 29), but it is essentially also a sense
of time that lacks extension, that views life as little but a series of syn-
chronic slices. As will become clear in the analysis, this sense of time
seemed inherent in the way they created a ‘space of free agency’, the pro-
pensity to accentuate the agency part of free agency, the alleged prepa-
redness to seize the demands of the immediate moment, and the refrain
of following leads. As to epilogue time, it is a notion pointing at a life that
has to be lived out, as opposed to being lived ‘fromthe middle’. In the epi-
logue, all the important stu? is over, and what remains is the cooling down
of the ‘ever after’. This sense of time seemed inherent in the immense
importance YalaYala attached to the way their project came to life, the
temporal pocket of what was narrated as YalaYala’s genesis. Most impor-
tantly, perhaps, it seemed that the space of free agency and the chrono-
tope of the threshold that was built into it (a time of fast moments and a
fragile social space of ‘surface interaction’) stayed with the members of
YalaYala during the time of my investigation, even though it actually
took quite a struggle for the members of YalaYala to become able to
ignore what they were becoming in the prosaics of their process. It is this
struggle that I try to discuss in terms of YalaYala’s ability to let their
ongoing experience do something to their initial idea and their commu-
nal narrative. I do this by discussing how they took in various challenges
along the way in their narration, such as what happened: when they got
an ‘o?er’ to be bought; the writing of a business plan; the arrival of a new
partner; the di?culties of leaving space for the individual members; the
entry of new employees; and the exit of some members along the process,
etc. The way I understand their process, YalaYala’s ‘interaction’ with each
of these events told us a great deal about their ability to enter into a
moving dialogue with what they were becoming, which is really what pro-
saics is about. With this introductory foreshadowing, I invite you, the
reader, to enter the story yourself.
26 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
THE TIME OF THE NAKED SPACE
The ?ve founders of YalaYala had their domicile in a small base-
ment in Copenhagen. They were ?ve younger persons around the
age of thirty, four men and one woman, all educated in the school
called ‘Kaospiloterne’. It was two relatively naked rooms with some
black desks with few things on them, a few papers and a couple of
portable computers at the desks where members were seated.
When entering the ?rst room, three small picture frames hang on
the wall with hand-written notes on them. It was the result of the
brainstorming processes the members had gone through in their
search for a suitable name for their company. They settled on
YalaYala Ventures and Consulting,
8
which to them was a signi?er
of the way of life of the new economy. The name YalaYala is Arab
for ‘fast, fast’ or ‘come on, come on’, connoting the speed at which
everything, allegedly, changes. Autrement dit, there was no time to
waste! Also, they insisted that the name shouldn’t have the word
chaos in it, since they were a bit tired of this brand and also wanted
to do something that wasn’t immediately identi?ed with being a
chaos pilot. I was told that none of them had ?xed places in the
rooms. Chance or the fact of working together on a project might
determine where they would sit. When entering the second room,
the ?rst thing that met the eyes was the big poster on the wall. It
had an aggressively-looking man on it, pointing his fat index ?nger
in the direction of his audience. The poster had the words written
on it: ‘Speed is God and Time is the Devil’! I was going to meet all
?ve members at once, so that they would be able to decide,
whether I could follow them the next couple of years. They
accepted my project without any hesitation. They only wanted to
get a rough feeling about how much time I would demand of them.
As they told me: ‘time is scarce and we are not always here’. It
became a short meeting, then, since they liked the idea of
someone following them for a longer period: ‘It will be a bit like
having our mirror following us around to tell us who we are’, as one
of them remarked during the course of the meeting. Besides, they
were used to the attention, they told me, because they had all done
their studies at ‘Kaospiloterne’
9
at a time, where media interest in
this ‘alternative’ education was rather intense: ‘We are quite used
to the attention. We’ve had journalists going in and out of the
school from the very beginning of our studies’. At the very same
meeting, they asked me whether they would be able to hire me as
A moment in time 27
a consultant from time to time. I was a bit surprised, since the four
of them had just met me. The ?fth I knew from ten years back and
we had not remained in contact in this in-between period.
Nevertheless, they seemed to seize an opportunity when they saw
one. Or as one member formulated it: ‘If we see a possibility, we
act fast. That is what we are good at, we have a competency for
acting’. Moreover, the members emphasized that they had a dual
focus: they worked with new ventures (what they referred to as
entrepreneurship) and they worked with consulting (what they
referred to as intrapreneurship). As it said on their homepage:
‘YalaYala, establishing the new, renewing the established’.
As a space, the basement left little traces of their inhabitants. It could
easily be emptied without leaving any trace of its inhabitants and, as such,
the existence in this space appeared a fragile one. The same fragility could
be found in the way they referred to their genesis, what was narrated as the
Beginning of it all. Hence, all ?ve members had, alongside others, been
invited to a job interview in a consultancy company that had very close con-
nection to the school of chaos pilots (where the members had also gradu-
ated). However, the impression of the meeting was not good at all: ‘it didn’t
really click’, ‘they were too old-fashioned with their hierarchy, short-term
perspective, and lack of vision’, as some members told me. Besides, the
company had the kinds of jobs, which members wouldn’t like to work with.
Mostly, it was very short-term jobs, a process-consultation of a couple of
hour’s duration, seminars, team-building events, and the like. So they all
had this feeling that this relationship with the consultancy company was
not going to work. On the way back to Copenhagen, something apparently
happened: ‘We all looked each other in the eyes, and that’s where we fell in
love’, ‘on the train back home from Aarhus, we suddenly became focused
on doing something together’. As it were, this was narrated as the momen-
tous moment of their existence, the event around which their existence
could become their own, the way in which being a member of the new
economy came to existentially matter as opposed to simply automatically
identifying themselves with the new economy hype that prevailed at the
time. That was their way of moving from mere category to narrative, in the
words of Donald Polkinghorne (1988, p. 21). In short, moving from an
event seemed important to be able to go beyond being plain and simple
dopes of a cultural category. This seemed to be YalaYala’s way of touching
a prosaics of existence (Morson and Emerson, 1990), of getting a thresh-
old moment (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 248) that moved them in their story about
themselves. This small story even seemed to have the kind of dramatic
28 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
element that emerges from almost becoming part of what one truly is not,
a threat to the authenticity of their self-understanding. One member made
this point particularly clear: ‘when I come to think of it, I believe it was
extremely lucky that the others and I didn’t go into this ?rm. It would have
been so . . . not us’. Fortunately, the story seemed to go, there was a reso-
lution to this small drama, that is, they discovered what they didn’t want to
identify themselves with. They got an anti-?xation point, a direction in
which they shouldn’t move. If there is anything that can be referred to as
the origin of culture, I believe that it is this kind of sensory topic (Shotter,
1993b, Chapter 3), understood as ‘places’ in the ?ow of experience that can
somehow be ‘found again’ (Shotter, 1993b, p. 63), and ‘places’ that arouse
strong feelings as only a sense of genesis can do. Subsequent to this deci-
sive moment, life could really begin, or so the story went. Let us look closer
into what it did begin with.
THE SPACE OF FREE AGENCY
As a radical counter-move to the depiction of the consultancy
company, the members decided to create a network of free agents
that could: choose the jobs they thought were interesting and ‘felt
for’, abandon wage-earner mentality,
10
and be extremely mobile as
individuals and leave the network if something more interesting
came along. In other words, the network was going to be a ‘plat-
form’ for the individual: ‘I guess all the members of YalaYala were
kind of hungering for the openness . . . or freedom that YalaYala
could give them as compared to other, more traditional compa-
nies’. The way the members spoke about their project, it surfaced
repeatedly that they were going to create something, which was to
be completely different from what they believed to be the core of
the traditionalist consultancy company, a new type of ‘expressive
organizing: ‘. . . it was a neat way to create an organization. We
have been the kind of people who constantly look for new, expres-
sive types of organizational forms’. At the time, they did not want
to create a company in the traditional sense of the word. In fact,
anything that connoted something traditional was not comme il faut
in the way they narrated themselves. Hence, instead of becoming
a traditional, legal company, they de?ned some kind of loose
af?liation among the members of the network with speci?c ideals
tied to it: ‘We want a network where we can do what we really like,
say yes to jobs and also say no to jobs, and just be who we are.
A moment in time 29
We want room to be ourselves. And we want to be free agents
working in a transparent organization, where we know each other
and trust each other’. They disliked the idea, as it were, of being
one person at home and another when they performed their job. In
the name of individual freedomand free agency, they came up with
what they referred to as a minimal community: ‘We wanted to
create a community in the simplest way possible, we wanted to
shorten it down to as little as possible, which is why we came up
with three things – name, website, and of?ce’. On the basis of these
three basic elements aimed at supporting the practical existence
of the members of the network, they were to do something, which
was not going to be too narrowly de?ned in fear of placing a too
tight limit on themselves. As a consequence, they broadly referred
to their working areas as Entrepreneurship (doing consulting in
newly started/not yet started companies) and Intrapreneurship
(doing consulting in existing companies). In sum, those were the
ideas that crystallized subsequent to their meeting with the consul-
tancy company.
It seemed that the notion of free agency was an identifying theme that
was mentioned over and again to describe what YalaYala was all about.
Apparently, it held a promise of a brand new sort of community. However,
it could also be interpreted as being on the brink of nothingness. I deliber-
ately write ‘also’, because their movement produced a tension-?lled envi-
ronment (Morson and Emerson, 1990, p. 145) that seemed in between
forces of centrifugality and forces of centripetality’
11
(Morson and
Emerson, 1990; Bakhtin, 1986). Perhaps a bit counter-intuitively, the space
of free agency did not only create a group of people who all ran in their
own directions without any sense of community. To the members of
YalaYala, the space of free agency was very much seen as an opposite to
the way of work in the old economy that was associated with rigidity, wage-
earner mentality, narrow job functions and hierarchical relationships
between the people in the workplace – a way of organizing that seemed
embodied by the ‘traditionalist’ consultancy company aiming to hire them.
In this respect, their movement had a somewhat strong ideological tone,
one of wanting to create a more human organizational space. In fact, so
many times did they mention what they didn’t want to be, departing from
the bad experience they had in their encounter with the consultancy
company, that their universe began to look almost Manichean. As such,
their movement held in common a very distinct feature with that of para-
noid stories (Keen, 1986). Thus, they were moving by means of a seemingly
30 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
very clear-cut polarity between ‘good and evil’, as if they were on the run
trying to escape what they had almost become. I believe that it was this
strong experience of otherness that endowed their movement with a sense
of centripetality, a sense of coming towards a centre. They were moved to
become other, to embark upon a quest (Downing, 1997) to conquer space
in the virgin land of the new economy. Most important, the evil face of the
consultancy company experienced in the encounter seemed to have created
a sensory topic (Shotter, 1993a, 1993b), a shared moment of togetherness.
In short, they narrated themselves as protagonists of a new epoch, as if they
had seen and experienced the collision between two distinct epochs in their
encounter with the consultancy company that was simply categorized as
‘old economy’. And it is exactly in this type of movement that important
clues to understanding the becoming process of YalaYala emerged. Hence,
in this movement, seemingly utterly separated epochs de?ned the point of
departure. Thus, it seemed that it was a very radical break that YalaYala
de?ned between them and the consultancy company that had almost hired
them, but which they had managed to escape in the nick of time. Yet, to a
large extent this radical break with the consultancy company seemed a
radical break with themselves. Thus, YalaYala had a contact network of
people that was quite overlapping with the one of the consultancy
company, as one member also once mentioned to me in a casual remark.
Besides, they had been doing the exact same kind of work all along that the
consultancy company were identi?ed with (short-term jobs like team-
building courses, small process consultations, arranging workshops, etc.),
and the consultancy company had employees that were chaos pilots and
was generally closely tied to this chaos-pilot milieu, of which all the found-
ers from YalaYala also were a product. It was in this sense that it seemed
extremely radical to say that everything that company was, they wouldn’t
be, because in a sense they already were. As such, they talked about some-
thing that looked like a radical conversion, a submitting of themselves to a
thoroughgoing programme of reconstruction that made their own past an
absolutely closed one (Bakhtin, 1981), sealed o? from a moving dialogue.
In this way, they were not only placing themselves in a time that was sup-
posed to be utterly di?erent from the time of the consultancy company,
they were also creating a story for themselves in a manner that made them
utterly foreign to their own biographical time, which, by its very de?nition,
is always a time characterized by duration and small, prosaic moves
(Morson, 1994; Bakhtin, 1981, 1986).
12
It seemed that the way of the ‘clean
break’ was probably too abrupt, that a slowly evolving path was needed,
and perhaps also at least some sense of a plan as to how to go about it, how
to become other. Still, it is not my (exclusive) purpose to totally deconstruct
the centripetal force of this sensory topic that the encounter with the
A moment in time 31
consultancy company produced. I only mean to say that a sensory topic can
turn into something else if a movement is de?ned as if seemingly di?erent
times were sealed o? from each other. More precisely, it can turn the move-
ment into an epilogue (Morson, 1994, pp. 190–98), a carrier of dead lan-
guage, as if the depiction of a meaningful existence would always require a
saturated reference back to the moment of de?ning their ‘otherness’,
turning the presentness of the ongoing present (Morson, 1994, pp. 176–77)
into both afterword and negation. That is, it was often talked about as if it
was the concrete peak moment of their existence that had already happened
to them and created a negative point of reference. For now, I will leave
this as a crack of doubt to the sense of meaningful existence that appeared
to be the product of this frequently mentioned and highly value-laden
encounter.
However, there was also a strong element of centrifugality in their move-
ment in the ?rst place. Thus, free agency was not only an aspect of their
becoming that helped them distinguish between their organizational com-
munity and that of the consultancy company. On the contrary, it was also
an invitation to enter into a speci?c form of relationship with each other in
which the forces of centrifugality (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 272) worked. By focus-
ing on the individual and evoking the metaphor of a platform for the indi-
vidual, YalaYala seemed to think of their community as: a point of take-o?
for the individual, a resourceful ground for individual opportunities, a
place of individual freedom and mobility, a place that could be left if no
longer deemed valuable for the individual in question. One member char-
acterized one of the essential thoughts in the design they had in mind in the
following way: ‘I guess one could see our idea in the light of the ?lm called
“Heat” . . . do you know it? In this ?lm, Robert de Niro has an ideal way of
living. He is committed to what he does, but he is always capable of leaving
everything behind within seventeen seconds’. There can hardly be a more
precise and illustrative way of showing what Richard Sennett (1998, p. 79)
had in mind when he said that people in the new capitalism relied upon a
speci?c mantra regardless of what they were involved in: ‘The trick is, let
nothing stick to you’. The reference to ‘Heat’ was an envisioning of an
eternal preparedness to let go, to begin anew, as if their involvement in the
everyday, communal life was strictly instrumental and fundamentally exter-
nal to the person in question. As a consequence, then, the coexistence of
these members could be seen as somewhat fragile. The demand for toler-
ance of individual idiosyncrasies was very high, and perhaps it was in this
light that the almost idyllic atmosphere at meetings should be interpreted.
Everything seemed to be pretty easily accepted (projects, leads, ideas), and
nobody had any noteworthy arguments over matters of concern for
YalaYala as a community. The moment as perceived by the individual was
32 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
what counted, and it was in this sense that YalaYala’s way might be referred
to as the way of the moment. It was in this way that the sense of commu-
nity of YalaYala always seemed threatened by the centrifugal forces from
within. The members should be able to spar with others free agents in the
network, and everybody would be able to bene?t from YalaYala as a point
of take-o?. They got access to each other’s clients, could use each other as
subcontractors, could ask for advice, and they deemed that it would be less
lonely if part of the same network was housed on the same location.
However, should it cease to be a powerful take-o?, YalaYala (as a commu-
nity) would be already and only in the past, or so the story went. And it was
all in the name of freedom and with only a limited sense of community. In
fact, YalaYala was narrated in a way that made it share one prominent
characteristic with that of the shopping mall. In a shopping mall, people
come for the sacred purpose of consumption (Bauman, 2000). A shared
physical space where individuals come to consume whatever is there in the
space. In such a space, an actual interaction between individuals is already
an interruption, already something that comes in the way of the irredeem-
ably individual pastime that it is to shop (Bauman, 2000, p. 97). Just as it
was evoked by the idea of a platform for the individual, the individual was
there to gain something, and they were never to commit themselves to
YalaYala in a way that prevented them from being able to move on, should
they suddenly feel a desire to do so. Even though that seemed to be the ulti-
mate tendency of this ideal of being mobile, free agents, it was also a con-
sumerist utopia that lived side by side with a rather strange bedfellow,
namely with an ideal of what Bakhtin (1981, p. 133) has called public exter-
iority. Thus, while wanting to enjoy the possibility of freedom to move
wherever, whenever, members of YalaYala simultaneously talked about
their community as one that embraced whole human beings, a community
where members could and should be open on all sides, completely ‘on the
surface’ (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 133). Thus, besides mobility, extreme openness
and transparency seemed to be the other aspects of being free agents,
namely a freedom to reveal themselves as they ‘really were’. They wanted
no distinction between work life and life tout court, as they believed this
kind of distinction to be a remnant of the old economy. In this sense,
YalaYala was narrated as a very totalized space embracing whole individ-
uals in a way that stood in stark contrast to their idea of extreme individ-
ual freedom and minimal ties to the community. As such, the tension
between centripetal and centrifugal forces seemed inherent in the ideal of
free agency in itself, and gave the community aspect of YalaYala a rather
fuzzy status. What were they really to do together? However, only shortly
after their existence, after some two months, the members of YalaYala were
forced to insist upon what YalaYala should do as a company, as they quite
A moment in time 33
suddenly initiated a dialogue with a large, international company, which
had communicated an interest in buying YalaYala.
A WORLD OF SUDDENLYS
The company did not really know YalaYala, and wanted a business plan
from the members. To YalaYala, it almost seemed overwhelming:
Our ?rst milestone came, when already in January we were o?ered to be bought
by a big, Swedish Internet company. We were terribly ?attered and sat laughing
about the fact that one could be starting . . . we had formed the company the pre-
ceding month, that was when we became registered as a company, and now
someone was knocking on the door. And somehow, we thought this was
extremely fascinating, and we were a bit . . ., we had dollar signs in our eyes, wow,
now we were going to be millionaires a month later.
Even though the situation was surprising, there was also a sense in which
it ?tted into their story about performing in the new economy: ‘Apparently,
we made a good ?rst impression, because they wanted to buy us just like
that’. Perhaps, then, it was all about ?rst impressions!?
For the members of YalaYala, this meeting only seemed to reinforce the
impression of the importance of the rhetoric of speed and of seizing the
moment. In fact, it brings to mind Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler that Morson
(1994) and Sennett (1998) both discuss. In The Gambler, the hero lives for
the moments where he is waiting to see the result of the roulette. He doesn’t
wait for the result per se, because when the roulette has ?nished turning, all
the excitement is gone, all the thrill of not knowing what will happen next
will be over. Thus, whether he wins or loses is not of too great importance,
because that has got to do with the bearings on the prosaics of everyday
life, and to the gambler, these two spheres are fundamentally separated.
Instead, what he lives for is the intensi?ed present, the dramatic possibility
of going either way. I have a very particular reason for drawing upon such
an extreme temporal orientation as that of gambling. Thus, what was
common to the ecstatic behaviour of the gambler and the way that
YalaYala de?ned their existence was the scant attention to the prosaics of
everyday life. When YalaYala started a business that they were going to
develop, they didn’t seem to gain the opportunity to get a grasp on the tem-
poral ?ow of their existence before they were interrupted (by a possibility,
not an actual o?er, of getting bought) that the prosaics of everyday life
might only be of very little importance. It was a bit like an impression that
there wasn’t a story to be lived, only a shiny surface to be performed. This
interruption from the potential buyer to their still very nascent sense of
34 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
normal condition seemed to involve such a high state of energy, that before
and after was pushed away in favour of a desire to reach this intensi?ed
present, the present of all presents (Morson, 1994, p. 106 and pp. 201–4;
Sennett, 1998, p. 83). They were ecstatic by the apparent speed of the new
economy, and by the prospect of becoming rich as if a whirlwind motion
had carried them way forward as compared to a normal, incremental line
of development that one might expect from more ‘traditional companies’.
As such, the experience seemed to reintroduce the possibility of radically
distinguishing themselves from the slow way of the old economy, of
viewing themselves through the eyes of a time that was radically other. At
a time where members somehow felt it to be di?cult to explain to friends,
family and business partners what they were up to, what was their raison
d’être, they were nonetheless looking at a potential o?er to be bought
for somewhere in the neighbourhood of some 20 million DKK: ‘Sometimes
one does get a bit annoyed not being able to explain to others what
YalaYala is all about. Friends are asking, my family sometimes asks and we
get a lot of questions from our network in general’. As such, the sudden
possibility of being bought by the international company buttressed the
impression of speed, and also of doing impression management vis-à-vis
the outside (Go?man, 1959). The fact that others showed signs of believ-
ing in YalaYala who hadn’t ‘proven’ anything as yet only seemed to rein-
force the very radical sensation of becoming while performing in the sense
that they had to invent themselves on the spot in a business plan vis-à-vis
the potential buyer. Life seemed instantaneous, indeed, and even though it
did create a bit of panic in YalaYala, the panic was of an ecstatic nature,
one of seizing the moment.
ESCAPING PROSAICS
The process of writing a business plan revealed itself as a very concrete
actualization of a hypothetical mode of time (Morson, 1994, pp. 214–27).
Ironically, producing a business plan was one of the things which the
members had been trying to avoid from the very beginning: ‘. . . if you look
at a business community, then you have to create a business plan together,
which become a kind of a raison d’être, but it is very complicated and it
takes a long time, and it is perhaps not that fun, it becomes very homework-
like . . .’. Boring and time consuming or not, the members of YalaYala
found themselves in a situation, which demanded a business plan. Besides
the fact that they weren’t sure as to how to de?ne their working areas more
in detail, nobody had any ?rm sense of how to go about such a task. As
such, it revealed another paradoxical feature of their existence even more
A moment in time 35
clearly. Hence, one of the things that nascent companies face very early in
their process is the challenge to write a sound business plan able to persuade
the participants in the company itself and possibly also potential investors
that the company is based upon ‘healthy’ business considerations. In this
sense, when trying to persuade nascent companies that they should hire
YalaYala to help them do the necessary work in a start-up process very rad-
ically placed YalaYala ahead of themselves (Carr, 1986, p. 81). They were
to do for others what they hadn’t done before, not even for themselves. A
bit ironically, then, one might agree that time was indeed the devil in the
becoming process of YalaYala.
13
However, it seemed a rescue plan was in
sight, as YalaYala got a new and sixth member, who in the name of equal-
ity also became a partner. There was some disagreement as to why they
needed yet another partner, but the potential opponents didn’t insist upon
their points of view. YalaYala still seemed like what Sartre has called a
group-in-fusion (Carr, 1986, p. 136), that is, a movement of people that act
as one. Besides, there seemed no time to dwell in this potentially centrifu-
gal line of movement. They had to work on their business plan. They had
to de?ne themselves on paper even though they had no clear sense of who
and what they were. What was demanded was a centripetal movement that
could narrow down what YalaYala was all about in a manner that could be
communicated to the potential buyer and possibly also to the rest of the
audience of their organizational life.
14
However, most of their ideas had to
do with the kind of way they wanted to work, that is, as free agents in a
transparent organization, and whom they wanted to work with, that is,
people they liked and people that also shared the ideals of organizing. As
to their area of expertise, they had great di?culty getting closer than
working with ventures and consulting. But then again, if they could get an
o?er to be bought on the basis of a very improvised story about what kind
of di?erence YalaYala would be able to make in the world, perhaps it didn’t
really matter. Perhaps what really mattered was in fact the freedom to
become whatever the moment deemed necessary. Perhaps there was no
need to do anything else than pretend (Bakhtin, 1993), being a company in
the new economy. Anyhow, they started working on a very hypothetical
business plan that was mostly about what could be in the future and was,
as such, both a way of escaping the prosaic present and of trying to make
a sell by producing potentiality disguised as actuality. Thus, YalaYala pre-
sented itself as an organization that did consulting on a strategic level in
organizations, even though they hadn’t any such projects and lacked the
contacts necessary to get them. They especially emphasized working with
new ventures, and they did have a lot of contacts to new entrepreneurs.
Ventures seemed to be the star of their existence: ‘We are all pretty crazy
about working with ventures, being there in the building of something
36 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
brand new. It is so close to what we do ourselves’. Often, members would
state that YalaYala as a whole was moving towards ventures. The area of
ventures was something they could easily identify with, being a venture
themselves, and YalaYala seemed to enjoy the status as risk-willing and
action-oriented that this connection seemed to imply. In this regard, ven-
tures seemed almost a chronotopic motif (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 97) signalling a
kind of kinship, risk-willingness, and perhaps, most importantly, di?erence
vis-à-vis the company they almost became part of. The speculative dimen-
sion of it all became even more accentuated by the fact that the newpartner
took, and was allowed to take, the role as leading author of the business
plan, since none of the others had any strong desire to go through the
demanding, existential self-disclosure this might prove itself to be. One
might wonder, then, if the sixth partner became an alibi for being (Bakhtin,
1993), a bu?er shielding a hypothetical mode of being from the messiness
of everyday life. But perhaps these remarks are too hasty? After all, getting
another to look at yourself, at the community you belong to, can obviously
also be a speedy way to borrowthat vantage point, which a more peripheral
participant might provide (Lave and Wenger, 1991).
A FAST ALIBI
In any case, they managed to escape the prosaics of everyday life, notably
of getting new clients and selling projects. In the ecstatic and ?attered
atmosphere they produced a feeling that prosaics did not matter. Prosaics
somehow became ‘less real’ than the forced de?nition of potential actual-
ity on the particular kind of shiny surface that a business plan was. Hence,
de?ning and orienting themselves in the direction of new ventures seemed
to make their own becoming a very fragile one. It seemed capable of creat-
ing a particular sense of time, namely a time of high moments where the
prosaics of everyday life became the sideshadow. Intuitively, it seemed like
a desire for a dramatic narrative of risk (Sennett, 1998), of going out there
on the edge, taking a kind of pleasure in the open road that might lead to
sudden greatness or sudden nothingness. They could easily become a
company placing their bets on the wrong horses and losing it all within a
very short period of time. This seemed to be the connotations that the space
of ventures produced. Yet, if there was such a desire, it was overshadowed
by their less emphasized area of consultancy. Thus, doing the consultancy
necessary to generate a minimal turnover proved a seemingly more humble
means of survival ‘behind the scenes’. It was the least emphasized but the
most necessary for survival. It was a bit like a ‘working man’-sideshadow
always-already there to pave the way for the star of their existence, namely
A moment in time 37
that of working with the ventures, the adventurous sphere where anything
might happen. As such, consultancy made possible the lofty rhetoric about
being in the venture business. In fact, working with ventures seemed to
inspire them to such a degree that they were almost sitting on the edge of
their chairs when talking about their visions of working with ventures.
When talking about it, what was a vision for the future and what was their
everyday life seemed to fuse in a blurry mist. They were keen users of the
language of ‘just about to’, of always coming closer to venture business in
a movement away from traditional consultancy.
15
As such, they expressed
a ?rm belief in what might be referred to as an alchemy of becoming,
always haunting and hinting at the transformation on the verge of materi-
alization. As it turned out, the maximally intensive period of having to deal
with these issues of self-de?nition and potential belonging to the interna-
tional company was not to last for long, since the relation with the company
faded. The international company became involved in another large buy-
up process and suddenly did not respond to the questions about the poten-
tial buy of YalaYala that the members posed by e-mail. Apparently, the
‘semi-o?er’ didn’t stand. All of a sudden, the members of YalaYala found
themselves forced back to the prosaic details of their own existence, which
had largely been neglected in the temporal density of rush hour. In a sense,
it was back to small thoughts, small movements through time, which stood
in stark contrast to what was envisioned for a brief period, namely becom-
ing a part of a large international company, working as a team in it, build-
ing an ‘in-house greenhouse’ for new ventures and potential spin-o?s inside
the company, as one of the members called it. In the aftermath of rush
hour, everything seemed a bit heavy, a bit less glamorous, and perhaps also
a little overwhelming in the dim sense of the word. Most importantly, they
seemed to have experienced a lapse into a virtual time-pocket, one having
nothing to do with, or at least a very ambiguous relationship to, their prac-
tical existence. Coming back to practical existence proved to be a coming
back to less than the same, of no progression in time: ‘. . . now we are back
where we started, a couple of months has gone by, we have used quite a bit
of energy on it, we haven’t had a lot of jobs in the meantime . . . we were
still on the same level as three months earlier’. As such, the members of
YalaYala were forced to deal with the fact that they had to sell some pro-
jects in order to get things moving.
As time passed by in YalaYala, the great pathos of freedom inherent in
the talk about a space of free agency seemed to be sideshadowed by another
more lurking storyline, namely that of entrapment (reacting to what comes
along as if trapped by the demands of the moment) that cannot gain
any place in their narrative as they seduce themselves into the language
of freedom. Thus, a lot of the jobs they had virtually ?owed into the
38 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
organizations by the telephone and the members simply reacted quickly.
Usually, it was people they already knew from their network of chaos
pilots. And the jobs that would come from this source were typically of a
very short duration. In fact, it was exactly in this regard that the sideshadow
of the potential problems with their characteristic ‘way of the moment’ was
able to cast a darker shadow upon the somewhat ecstatic enthusiasm about
the freedom of the moment: ‘One of our problems is the bunch of short-
term jobs we get. We want big projects, but our network seems best at pro-
viding smaller jobs’. It was also these glimpses of frustration that opened
a window to another, more concealed function of the language of freedom.
Thus, it made it possible for the members of YalaYala to stay so ?rmly
tucked in the realm of mere possibility, without a sense of playing with the
already actualized, that even the freedom of the present moment could also
be interpreted as an excuse not to de?ne a path in the sand. Nowhere was
the ideology of the freedom of the present moment more obvious than in
the constant evocation to the ‘leads’ that might be followed: ‘We spend
more than half of our time at smaller and potentially greater leads, things
that might lead to big stu? or nothing at all’.
16
As it were, leads seemed the
primary chronotopic motif (Bakhtin, 1981) in their process that accentu-
ated just how important the chronotope of the threshold actually was.
Hence, freedom was never just freedom to do that special kind of thing they
really wanted, because they couldn’t and didn’t. They took the jobs that
came their way in order to get bread on the table, the most prosaic of things.
And there was no time to waste on precious considerations as to whether it
was the right kind of job. It was food on the table, and the weekly morning
meeting always brought up the question of the economic state of the
company here and now. Survival seemed to be an undercurrent of this
description. In this regard, they always lived with the sense of urgency that
made it di?cult to see in what way they could really be seen as free (agents).
The fact that it was the same jobs YalaYala got as the ones they associated
with the consultancy company, the radical other of the absolutely closed
time of the old economy, was pushed aside in favour of the great value and
decisiveness they put into each moment and each lead in the name of what
it might lead to. In short, their narration made a virtue out of necessity! If
they were forced to react each time they got a job opportunity at a speci?c
moment in time, at least the pervasiveness of the threshold-thinking in
YalaYala endowed these moments with a more exciting aura than ‘having
to do it in order to survive’. However, insisting upon this interpretation of
their process would surely have been a downright betrayal of their sense of
what really moved them, of the freedom that YalaYala praised regardless.
A moment in time 39
ACTING OR MOVING ALONG?
There was also a sense of irony at play that had to do with their tendency
to narrate themselves in the active mode. They believed themselves to have
a competency for acting, a feature that they occasionally contrasted with
the more contemplative analytical skills ‘typical’ of theoretically schooled
people: ‘What this organization does not have is analytical, more theoreti-
cal skills. We are good at acting. We just do things. We don’t always worry
whether we have the right kind of prerequisites for doing what we do. We
just do it.’ However, a certain element of passivity also seemed built in to
their process. Thus, YalaYala seemed to be killing time in the sense of
waiting. Thus, for a long period of time, various leads were able to raise the
atmosphere to new peaks at the prospect of where they might lead. It had
a romantic aura, because YalaYala had very few concrete thoughts as to
how they might lead their company somewhere. Rather, it seemed they were
to be led somewhere, taken away when something exciting came their way.
However, one kills time when waiting for something important to happen.
One kills time when what comes after appears to be more signi?cant than
the time one is submerged in. Indeed, there are many ways to kill time, and
I mean this in the double sense of the word. In one sense, the nostalgic
yearning for the momentum felt at the encounter with the consultancy
company, the insistence on free agency and meeting the demands of the
moment, and the lapsing into hypothetical time, are all ways of circumvent-
ing the narrative grasp (Carr, 1986, p. 41) promising to hold together the
story of becoming YalaYala. By avoiding this, they tended towards involv-
ing themselves in idle chatter, in the frantic pursuit of the demands of the
moment, where every project might have a small and isolated meaning in
itself, but where the potential, interrelated meanings of di?erent projects
escaped any articulation. To be sure, one cannot demand a call of con-
sciousness of the ‘we’ of YalaYala in the early days of YalaYala’s existence.
But somehow the same tendency towards a fragmentary temporal existence
managed to subsist for a very long time. In fact, it was di?cult to perceive
the narrative time of YalaYala as anything but atomized. It seemed that
there was this belief in the possibility of becoming anyone through the great
promises of leads, and very little e?ort of acting to become someone.
However, signs that the prosaics of everyday life perhaps did matter
emerged when the potential o?er for being bought fell apart. They tried to
continue their daily business, which had hardly started before they were
interrupted. They were a bit tired by the experience, as one can always
become tired subsequent to an emotional peak time. However, their notion
of free agency and of building a fundamentally di?erent work place with
space for the whole human being stayed with them as a principle that was
40 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
not to be questioned. And for a very long time it didn’t become questioned
as a principle endowing, perhaps even saturating, their process with
meaning.
THE SHOPPING MALL REVISITED?
Around the time the offer from the potential buyer fell to the ground,
the sixth partner who arrived last decided to leave after a couple
of months’ membership: ‘It went so fast’, as one of the members
remarked. The rest of the members of YalaYala were very disap-
pointed and had some dif?culty letting go of the incident. They tried
to talk it through with the partner, and make him express why he
didn’t want to be a part of YalaYala. They had taken him in, made
him an equal partner in a project they thought would be of a longer
duration, and he disappeared just like that:
‘Well, we have discussed it a lot and why and what it has meant for the
company . . . when X announced that he would withdraw, our ?rst reac-
tion was disappointment that we had not been included in the decision
at all. We kind of had a hope that if anything was wrong, then you come
and say it, because in this way we might work towards something that
satis?es all parties’.
There was some hope that they would be able to make him change
his mind on leaving, but it turned out to be impossible. His decision
was ?nal, unalterable.
Re?ecting a bit upon this turn of events, the members were suddenly
faced with their own ideal, namely that of extreme, individual mobility and
freedom to do whatever, whenever. With no prospect of being bought, they
were forced back to the zone of familiar contact (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 14) that
appeared virtually empty. After some four months of existing, it was like
starting all over, albeit with less energy. Thus, there was a feeling that they
really needed to race forwards to pick up upon the lost time. Speed was
there again, this time in the guise of what YalaYala seemed to make sense
of as the wasted time of writing a business plan. Thus, there was a feeling
that this business plan couldn’t o?er them much, and none of the members
paid any attention to it. This also ?tted the kind of storyline they created
for themselves as to the last partner’s disappearance: ‘He wasn’t really
cooperative’. They reasoned that he never left any space for the other
A moment in time 41
members to enter into the process of writing the business plan. Perhaps it
was no wonder, then, that the rest of the members didn’t really feel for it?
Yet, a di?erent interpretation also seemed possible. Thus, there might also
be some sense in saying that the members of YalaYala were looking for a
double alibi for being in the way Bakhtin (1993, p. 40) talks about the
matter. First, they let the last partner become the lead author of a project
that they had been thinking about for more than half a year,
17
which was
basically like having someone else author their company’s evolving life.
Second, they retrospectively criticized the fact that he didn’t leave a space
for them to come in and be co-authors. In short, they didn’t undertake the
responsibility of self-de?nition, and then they were looking for someone
outside themselves to be responsible for this state of a?airs, thereby invent-
ing an alibi for the alibi. I guess that in this latter line of argumentation, the
last partner truly had to be de?ned as someone outside the ideological com-
munity of YalaYala, even though their ambitions implied a di?erent kind
of self-re?ectivity: ‘We want an organization with room for self-realization,
therefore no clauses and ?xation . . . one of the fundamental thoughts
about newly employed is that if the person would like to leave the company
again, then it is the company that is wrong’. Still, they made sense of the
actual event in a di?erent way:
I think we just had to face that X wasn’t really an entrepreneur like us. He wasn’t
ready to deal with this kind of risky life, in an ugly basement with cheap furni-
ture . . . he wanted a large salary, that we weren’t capable of providing, safe
employment conditions that we weren’t capable of giving him either. He wasn’t
really committed to this kind of life, he wasn’t truly an entrepreneur.
In this way, one might say that the remaining members attempted to neu-
tralize the eventness (Bakhtin, 1993) of his disappearance by placing him
in a world, which was somehow radically di?erent to their own. Being
another, it was fundamentally for the best for him to disappear, because
sooner or later, he would have found out that he was in a universe of strang-
ers. Still, all the talk about his disappearance, the extent to which it occu-
pied the members also hinted at the fact that it was an interruption to their
monologic (Bell, 1998, p. 53) narrative of individual mobility and freedom,
which they struggled to become able to ignore.
Furthermore, they also criticized his inability to ‘show’ himself in the
authentic, human space that YalaYala was supposed to inhabit. He was
playing a closed game that was foreign to the ideal of public exteriority.
Instead of telling the members that the ?rst grains of doubt as to his con-
tinued participation in YalaYala had emerged, he delivered his message
suddenly and in a monologic fashion that wasn’t open to other voices.
42 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
Hence, the ideal of public exteriority, and the rather strong demand for
living on simultaneous planes, was completely sidestepped.
18
Yet, the
re?ection that they didn’t undertake was whether the ambition of an
extreme individual mobility was too radical and suspenseful for maintain-
ing any sense of community. Moreover, no one from YalaYala began pon-
dering whether the ideal of public exteriority in an intimate environment
was really the right ideal at all. It might not only prove itself to be
su?ocating, but also downright dangerous to any sense of community,
because of the pressure to confess (Usher et al., 1997) that it had built in.
The long discussions over his disappearance hinted at another relation
between individual and community than the ideal of mobility represented.
Maybe it did matter if members committed themselves for a longer time.
As one member said: ‘ When I think about YalaYala, I become damn
proud. And the most important . . . it is the human beings, the personalities
and competencies they have’. Maybe, then, it was a problem if the commu-
nity was nothing but an apparent external resource to the becoming process
of individuals. Maybe, then, YalaYala was more than a shopping mall, and
what they wanted to do together more than consumption (Bauman, 2000).
If the above reasoning hinted at a community that very ardently hung on
to a story about a community that cherished individual freedom, not the
least by making space for ‘total expression’, they later came to realize that
it was a plane of their existence which had acquired a life of its own. As it
were, these had little to do with their experience of their everyday life.
THE VANISHED INDIVIDUAL
From day one, there had been an overwhelming focus upon the individual,
and it was quite a shock to members when they realized that virtually every-
body had a strong feeling that there wasn’t any room for the sacred individ-
ual at all, they always had to ‘think YalaYala’. As one member mentioned:
‘In the beginning, there was no room for thinking about the individual.
YalaYala was in focus, ?ghting tooth and nail to succeed, it had to be an
experience of success.’ The chronotope of the threshold, the temporal
density of the time of freedom, had become a bit like residing in an ever-
lasting state of the kind of fragility and restlessness that comes from always
thinking potentiality, of always experiencing time as a discordant experi-
ence (Polkinghorne, 1988, p. 129). With so much energy invested in a new
start up like YalaYala, so much identity at stake by virtue of the fact that
YalaYala was narrated as a space of the whole, authentically present
human being, YalaYala appeared to be everywhere at all times. In this
respect, there seemed to be a strong yearning for being able to narrate the
A moment in time 43
clear ‘we’ of YalaYala (Carr, 1986), of coming to terms with the centrip-
etality of their movement, which was also re?ected in YalaYala’s tendency
to de?ne ‘identity-seeking’ meetings (mission and vision; strategy; core
competencies), and the communal refrain of asking whether they were
‘close enough’ by de?ning their working areas as entrepreneurship and
intrapreneurship (consulting and ventures). Yet, what also became clear
was that the members had great di?culty bringing into the meetings the
experience from their everyday work life that was by and large closed to the
gaze of other members. As it were, they had to rely upon very general
descriptions of the projects undertaken by members, and even more
vaguely the kinds of leads telling members what might potentially be in a
future that was never too far away, but neither was it ever imminent. It
didn’t make matters easier to deal with that they were constantly evoking
the image of the threshold (Bakhtin, 1981) in their manner of talking. It
always appeared that they were moving towards a moment, where things
would become clear. With such a pervasive sense of restlessness, perhaps
the individual just had to wait. Or perhaps some kind of action had to be
taken. YalaYala went for the latter solution and by so doing, avoided
betraying the aesthetic whole of their narrative process, which had an
underlying insistence upon an agentive existence. The beloved and almost
fetishized individual had vanished and they somehow had to ?nd a way to
bring it back in. Thus, YalaYala did a ‘culture session’ with two psycholo-
gists supposed to help YalaYala focus upon the individual and come closer
to self-de?nition. Every member was fed up with the fact that a lot in their
way of doing things wasn’t as transparent as they would have liked it to be,
that every action, every phone call, every little experience potentially
demanded the attention of everybody, since they were all responsible for
everything, or nothing, as some members stated when hinting at the conse-
quences of this impossible demand for hypersensitivity. In short, it was as
if they no longer wanted that which they had together to be a no-man’s-
land. As a consequence, they decided to de?ne some roles for the di?erent
members, and most importantly according to themselves, they decided to
make one of the members a CEO (Chief Executive O?cer) even though his
position was thought of as an ephemeral one. He should work to disappear,
that is, make the very role of CEO super?uous, create the right kinds of
mechanisms that would make spontaneous self-organizing possible.
FACING THE DIALOGIC OTHER
Nobody really knew in any great detail what the others were doing. Often
people had their jobs saved on their own portable computers, for which
44 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
reason they strictly relied upon a short, oral brie?ng at morning meetings
once a week or the kind of brie?ngs/discussions they had at more sponta-
neous meetings. However, it was often unlikely that all persons would be
able to attend these meetings, since members might as well be working with
clients. In sum, the members knew very little about the substance of other
members’ past assignments and their immediate jobs. Hence, the intensi?ed
present of reacting to the job that came their way was often that of an iso-
lated individual. While celebrating the alleged freedom of every moment
that this temporal orientation was said to make space for, a stage also
seemed set for a possible rebellion. Thus, as time went by, members still
more often recalled their ambitions when establishing the company:
moving together, a space for the individual voice, working with companies
on long-term projects, whether it was new ventures or large, established
companies. They were quite far from ful?lling this ambition, and from time
to time, slightly annoyed voices interrupted what had practically turned
into a monologue of freedom
19
that made members reluctant to obligate
each other to de?ne a more concrete path to follow. De?ning themselves
was mostly thought of as a problematic limitation, and the drive to become
someone never seemed strong enough to sti?e the automatic ideal of the
many ‘free’ voices. Yet, their way of practising this ideal failed to take into
account that voices don’t become voices in a community until they do
something to each other, until they move each other in a dialogue. Until
there is friction, that is. In a bizarre, paradoxical vein, what seemed in fact
to be an ambition of living out an ideology of symmetric relations and of
everybody getting a voice in the process, and, consequently, a view of a
community living on the plane of a polyphonic dialogue, where no partic-
ular author holds the ‘ultimate semantic authority’ (Morson and Emerson,
1990, p. 238), had become something else in the process. It had become a
smooth and anonymous plane between them that did not leave much space
for going beyond the fragile existence of good intentions. It had, in itself,
become the ultimate semantic authority of their existence and, as such, the
almost perfect alibi for being (Bakhtin, 1993). All ?ve members were also
founders and perhaps it was easier for them to reproduce an ideology that
got part of its momentum in a moment of a strongly felt otherness than it
would be for people who hadn’t experienced it ?rst hand. Somehow this was
to be ‘tested’ with the introduction of two new employees that came respec-
tively in the late spring and summer of 2000.
The founders of YalaYala hoped that the introduction of both members
might help YalaYala move. They were both hired because the founder liked
them, not because they had projects lined up for them. And, importantly,
they were both hired as employees, and they didn’t gain partner status,
which was a consequence of YalaYala’s experience with the disappearance
A moment in time 45
of the sixth partner, an event which apparently had moved them to become
other. As the ?rst employee already knew the members, was also a chaos-
pilot, and had been there for a couple of months, his socialization wasn’t
thought to be that big a challenge. However, it was di?erent with the second
employee, who seemed to be everything YalaYala deemed they weren’t, but
which they in ?ashes of time believed they needed. She was a woman (of
which there was only one among the ?ve founders); she was not a chaos
pilot; she already had experience of a large consultancy company with the
kind of consulting that YalaYala aspired to; and she had a ‘heavy theoreti-
cal background’, as the members referred to repeatedly when highlighting
the fact that she had a Masters degree from a Danish University. Somehow,
her arrival seemed an interesting turning point in YalaYala, because this
employee was clearly also seen as someone who had a more traditional
background, education-wise and job-wise. It might only be a ?rst move
towards opening up to a new kind of member that would probably have
more legitimacy in relation to the kind of long-term consultancy projects
on a strategic level that they were aiming for, but hadn’t really been able to
get: ‘Today, our company is strong in terms of generating ideas. But we
need the ballast, the ones that can consolidate, the ones that can document
. . . the prerequisites for realizing our ideas’.
They hoped to learn a lot from her, and even arranged for her to do a cul-
tural analysis of YalaYala as a rite of passage (Trice and Beyer, 1993), but
eventually they didn’t ?nd the necessary time. Once again, time was the
devil. She was busy enough learning the way of going about things and
talking in YalaYala, which she deemed to be quite a big challenge, since she
had never experienced a work culture like the one she saw there. As she
mentioned herself: ‘these persons just talk as if anything was possible. I
think it’s a bit di?cult to decode what is behind all this, but I suppose I will
learn. I am more used to very “slow” and a bit more dusty cultures, so I am
really trying to ?nd my place in this’. It soon became somewhat clear that
both parties really had the experience of two worlds meeting: ‘It is two
worlds meeting. She comes from there, an enormous theoretical founda-
tion, she looks at us as play-men . . . that is a big advantage. The di?cult
thing for her is that we just do things without having the theories behind it.
We move fast. But we try to meet each other.’ Even though she was clearly
seen as a stranger, it was as if she was an uncomfortable stranger in them-
selves (Steyaert, 1997, p. 9) in the sense that it was another, which they
apparently had to address when they spoke of themselves. On numerous
and very di?erent occasions when they tried to characterize what YalaYala
was all about, they emphasized their strong propensity to act as opposed to
being more contemplative. Thus, it seemed that the strangeness of the
employee was always-already their dialogic other (Bakhtin, 1986). It should
46 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
be remembered that YalaYala, from the very beginning, had wanted to
escape the kind of short-term consultancy jobs they were familiar with as
chaos pilots. They had wanted to do large consultancy projects on a strate-
gic level, and had, sometimes a bit too insistently perhaps, tried to convince
themselves that they already had what it took. Interestingly, she had no
prior experience with new ventures, only with consulting. Maybe, then, the
story of YalaYala had moved a bit towards consultancy, the area that kept
them alive while only being a more anonymous sideshadow (Morson, 1994)
in the o?cial narration of YalaYala? When asking the members this ques-
tion, it did not seem so. On the contrary, members still talked about moving
‘closer to ventures’, but still this area could not provide a steady source of
income, and the voice of pro?tability seemed to gain in force along the way.
Apparently, YalaYala was telling a persuasive story about themselves, since
the second employee very rapidly became what appeared to be a fully-
?edged member of the new economy buzz of speed and change and the
fuzzy teleology of creating a more human space of organizing and the
duality of working with ventures and consulting. Why specialize in a
certain type of product, in a speci?c sector or whatever? As she mentioned
herself; fascinated: ‘I think it is pretty impressive, there is such a positive
spirit and con?dence in this company. It seems they just do things, if I
should judge from the talk going on in this organization’. Thus, she clearly
seemed thrown into an organizing process, where members seemed inclined
to think that pretending, being in no particular place at all (Bakhtin, 1993),
was the way of life in the new economy. One might easily suspect that this
radical otherness may have pushed forward an urge to belong, an urge to
throw aside what she had been beforehand in order to quickly learn to
become that particular same, who was no one in particular. To be no one
in particular seemed a de?ning characteristic of what it meant to be in a
no-man’s-land, where every idea and thought ?oats around as if it was no
man’s thought (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 93). In such a space, nobody can obligate
other members on a particular path, as this would already be a violation
and trespassing on individual turf. This feature of no man’s thought in no-
man’s-land had a concrete, empirical address in the often-evoked emphasis
on making products that were supposed to be elaborated and materialized
in writing, but which seemed forever deferred. Members of YalaYala
excused themselves by evoking the fact that it was a very oral culture, which
didn’t bother to go through the lengthy process of writing. Obviously, this
made words in YalaYala more fragile, less capable of entering into contact
with the jobs people did in their everyday lives, with prosaics that is, and
less capable of holding back time and insisting upon a particular path.
Obviously, one might suspect that nobody bothered to make detailed,
written descriptions of products, because they themselves suspected that it
A moment in time 47
wouldn’t make a di?erence, that nobody in a space of free agency would
feel obligated. Even the aspect that everybody seemed obligated to, the
venture part of their story, seemed to take a peculiar turn in their process.
Thus, one day the CEO mentioned that their ?rst employee had posed an
intriguing question to which he had no clear answer: ‘How come I always
have to work with ventures when having a cup of co?ee in the evening. How
come I don’t do it during the normal working day?’ This was like a
Bakhtinian (1981)
20
‘character’ asking from a position on the edge, a
demasking hinting at a possible self-deception in YalaYala. At the time, the
CEO had said that they had two money-generating ventures in the
company, both of which produced a small income and both of which were
created before YalaYala started as a company.
21
Could it be, then, that the
space of ventures was close to being an empty space? Could it be, then, that
the enthusiastic source of centripetality uniting them (Bakhtin, 1981, p.
272) was really nothing but a movement towards emptiness? It seemed that
the lofty and fascinating rhetoric about ventures had also shielded them
against the prosaics of their own existence that seemed to tell the uno?cial
story of the type of short-term projects that was associated with their anti-
?xation point. Thus, faced with the interruption of their monologue of
moving towards ventures, it seemed that they were faced with themselves,
with what they didn’t want to be and had been trying to escape from since
the threshold encounter, their genesis. Paradoxically, YalaYala who nar-
rated themselves as fast movers were suddenly faced with a temporal stand-
still, a seemingly innocent question that sucked them into their past.
Confronted with this friction to their story of being a company working
with ventures, and thereby facing a subtle proposition that the real shadow
of their existence was rather ventures as opposed to consulting, a space had
to be created for the venture part of their existential self-narrative. As it
turned out, the members of YalaYala engaged themselves in a paradoxical
movement of simultaneously making room for and ?ghting the venture
space that had suddenly entered the prosaics of their existence.
FRICTION EMERGING
As such, YalaYala was moved to become what they, all along, had
said they were moving towards, namely a company making space
for working with ventures. More energy had to go into this, and it
was encouraged by the fact that YalaYala landed a large venture
project where they became responsible for ‘building’ (develop the
concept, recruit members) a network arena in Copenhagen called
48 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
United Spaces. This quite resembled their own initial idea/ideology
when starting: free and highly mobile members, the network as a
resource and platform for individuals, members that cared and
helped each other, etc. Members of YalaYala talked about this
project as if they were coming full circle, and they were to move
into this ‘network arena’ themselves as well. Generally, it was
notably the second employee and one of the founders who
became more explicitly focused upon doing venture work.
Things were changing in YalaYala. Now, working with ventures took
time away from other activities, most notably from activities that gener-
ated an income, and it was in this sense that YalaYala was faced with their
own story in a manner that prosaically mattered. As it were, working with
ventures was risky in the sense that the return on the invested time was
highly uncertain. This was most notable with the ?rst employee, who
started working on a venture that aimed at developing a new wireless
game for the Mobile Internet, an area that was largely unknown to the rest
of the members. Somehow, this lack of knowledge seemed a problem, sud-
denly everybody hungered for a more detailed knowledge. This was highly
unusual, a bit like committing a Gar?nkel
22
in YalaYala, where members
generally avoided insisting upon critical questions in the fragile in-
between space of members. The second employee observed this very
clearly after she had been there some months: ‘I have come to realize that
being a member of YalaYala means that one cannot argue with each other
. . . or it’s extremely rare anyway. It is as if everybody has to be nice to
everybody . . . It simply isn’t legitimate to say to another that what he is
doing is not ok’. It was unusual and, as such, it altered the atmosphere in
a way, which I could not help noticing while attending meetings. To dimin-
ish the knowledge gap, they all agreed that the ?rst employee should give
a small lecture educating the rest of the members, but it only resulted in
still more questions. Thus, with the venture space ‘taking on ?esh’, the
chronotope of the threshold (Bakhtin, 1981) took on a new meaning in
YalaYala’s existence. It made their existence a bit more nervous, as the
threshold thinking had acquired a concrete address that created an occa-
sion for a moving dialogue.
However, most of the questioning that followed was mediated by what
may be referred to as a ‘technology of suspicion’. Thus, the CEO developed
a small technological device that dictated every member to codify his or her
use of time. Allegedly, it was to create a transparent space more in line with
the original ideal of a network of free agents that were there as authentic
persons with nothing to hide but a lot to share. As a device, though, it did
A moment in time 49
create a space of doubting, of making people answerable to what they did
in their everyday life, which was largely invisible to other people. However,
most importantly, it created a legitimate channel for everybody to ask ques-
tions of the ?rst employee related to the ‘pro?uence’ (Randall, 1995)
23
of
the venture with the wireless game. When would investors come in, what
did the market want, was it progressing, were all questions that the ?rst
employee had great di?culty answering. Obviously, the narrative temporal-
ity of this venture was fuzzy since it only provided a sense of a beginning
and little sense of an ending, but in this way it resembled YalaYala’s own
story. At least the other members could say that they did sell projects and,
thus, contributed to the survival of YalaYala, which seemed to be the
implied context of the meetings on ‘time consumption’. In this movement,
a division between consulting-oriented and venture-oriented members
gradually emerged. And the venture space seemed inhabited by the ?rst
employee and one of the founders that were then identi?ed as venture
people. Ventures had moved from the status of everybody’s space to their
personalized space, and it was becoming a problematic space by the same
stroke. In other words, the move from happily embracing the rhetoric of
‘anything can happen with this’ to ‘tell me exactly what is happening and
what will happen with this’ seemed to be the emerging dialogue. This emer-
gence of a problematic venture space only seemed reinforced by the fact
that the venture partner almost never registered his use of time. What did
he really do all day? Suspicion as well as suspension was mounting. It was
in this movement that members began a more focused sensemaking as to
their way of being together. In their own way, members started questioning
whether there were some problems in the way they related to each other:
‘Maybe we have given each other too much room, maybe we just feared
con?icts too much . . .’. What was articulated then was the lack of friction
in the becoming process of YalaYala, the lack of de?ning creative limits in
the social space, a certain yearning for the kind of dialogue that would
prove able to unsettle an in-between social space into which there was no
‘live entering’ (Bakhtin, 1993, p. 1), a communal narrative space that left
little or no trace at all, except for the still more fragile, temporal pocket and
limit of their genesis.
In parallel with the tendency to marginalize the venture space without
directly articulating that this was the movement they were in, ‘ordinary’
consultancy also came under increased pressure, because everybody had to
run a bit faster and sell more, now that the venture space had become, dare
I say, something else than a simulacrum (Baudrillard, 1994). With this
increased pressure towards selling, the mantra of following leads for what
they might lead to lost some of its appeal. The chronotope of the thresh-
old seemed to turn slowly into something else. ‘Don’t follow futile leads’,
50 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
seemed to become a concern in their movement, a concern that was also
accentuated in the emerging distinction between good and bad sellers,
which took on a particular signi?cance in relation to the second employee,
the radical other. The time of selling that grew still stronger in YalaYala
seemed to be a time of an isolated individual in an isolated present. All
ambitions of doing a long-term project on a strategic level were cast aside
in order to sell su?ciently to keep a decent salary for everybody. To be sure,
landing a large project would obviously mean more time used, but it might
also mean more money that would buy them time before they had to sell
new projects again. In any event, the time of constantly selling proved itself
to be a rather frantic time, because selling basically meant using time to try
and land a project. If the project wasn’t landed, time was obviously lost in
the sense of not being equal to money. And if time didn’t equal money, time
would indeed prove itself to be the devil, but this didn’t mean that ‘speed
was God’. Rather, speed was the remedy for the most banal of matters,
namely that things take their time, a seemingly very trivial wisdom that
YalaYala nonetheless never really made any space for. Life in YalaYala was
instantaneous, and the second employee came to su?er from this, because
her time was that of thorough preparation, of a certain slowness that might
produce a postponed acceleration once a project was landed, and the time
of slow preparation was utterly foreign to the members of YalaYala. They
clearly had a more improvisational style.
It was interesting to see how the second employee had moved in and out
of the rhetoric going on in YalaYala. In her ?rst months in YalaYala, she
had generally accepted the new economy hype as performed in YalaYala,
the instantaneous way of the moment. Thus, she had thrown the style of
her past experience aside quite abruptly, as if her biographical time was one
of radical discontinuity (Bakhtin, 1981). Yet, the slow and thoroughgoing
style gradually emerged again. The space for her as other proved very
fragile, notably because it became increasingly clear that the language of
speed, which YalaYala continually performed, had been reinforced by the
fragile situation they found themselves in. Yet, and more signi?cantly, she
had largely remained another. A dialogic relationship requires that both
parties in a dialogue change to become someone else (Clark and Holquist,
1984, notably pp. 64–69), but this didn’t seem to be the case. Throwing
everything away in her ?rst period, however illusory this was in the long
run, she almost instantaneously and inadvertently tried to copy the tempo-
ral existence that YalaYala performed, namely the idea of being able to
cross a threshold that would make her past fade into oblivion, in a whirl-
wind motion, as Bakhtin (1984, p. 28) vividly depicts. She didn’t plan to do
this. It just happened. This situation very much reminded one of the two
strategies that according to Lévi-Strauss (see Bauman, 2000, p. 101) were
A moment in time 51
ever deployed in human history to deal with the otherness of others: either
otherness is dealt with by means of the ‘emic’ strategy of vomiting, that is,
by spitting out the other in a way that secures the community from con-
tamination. Or one deals with otherness by means of a ‘phagic’ strategy of
ingestion, of making the other the same. For a while at least, it seemed that
it was the second strategy that characterized the second employee’s interac-
tion with the community of YalaYala. Moreover, if she tried to become
other, YalaYala seemed to be doing the opposite. When they talked about
her (to be sure, in a very friendly manner, because there was this atmosphere
of being friendly), she remained someone who was other, someone who
went about things in a radically di?erent way with her ‘heavy knowledge’
and thoroughgoing style. Obviously, it was slightly paradoxical, as she had
been invited into their community as someone who could make a di?erence,
someone who held the promise of eventness (Bakhtin, 1993), a promise of
movement in self-understanding. However, if YalaYala were faced with
their boundaries in themselves (to the extent that she already represented
the stranger in themselves, the dialogic other, who had been there from their
start) by inviting her into their community, I had di?culty seeing how they
actually transcended them as they ‘interacted with di?erence’, as Bell
(1998, p. 53) would express.
I should probably add that YalaYala had made it extremely di?cult to
actually transcend their own self-understanding, since they had virtually
de?ned YalaYala in a way that came very close to pure movement. They
were ready to become anyone as opposed to becoming someone. As such,
it appeared a more or less permanent alibi for being (Bakhtin, 1993), a per-
manent pretending, and a form of self-narration that in all its preaching
about being fast movers had remained rather frozen. Moreover, in the
movement of focusing the attention of selling here and now, almost regard-
less of the kind of project they took in, even the ideal of movement and
freedom seemed to have faded quite a bit. Preparedness to become anyone
seemed replaced by preparedness tout court. And in the sense that this pre-
paredness was de?ned, the most abrupt of temporal orientations, because
there was no sense of teleology whatsoever in this time of tiny fragments,
the second employee was de?ned as someone who couldn’t sell in the same
manner that other members could. In short, she wasn’t able to perform the
‘YalaYala way’, and this was a ‘fact’ that was articulated by her and them
both. However, on the whole, it was very di?cult to see what characterized
the YalaYala way. They talked about moving fast and being change agents,
but as their one-and-a-half year birthday slowly approached,
24
it was really
di?cult for them themselves to get a sense of their own movement. And for
the second employee, it might have been even more di?cult. As she men-
tioned on one occasion:
52 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
I think everybody in YalaYala has welcomed me, and I couldn’t help noticing the
good atmosphere in YalaYala . . . everybody was very nice, and it was easy to feel
welcome in a way. But it was extremely di?cult for me to understand what was
going on in this organization . . . there was so much talk, and questions always
led to more talk . . . they were generally talking a lot in Yala Yala . . . as was I,
because it kind of grows on you.
In fact, the degree to which the talk of moving fast was fuzzy became a
bit clearer at a meeting I held with two founders (the CEO and another of
the ?rst ?ve) and the second employee. In this meeting, I asked the CEO
how far they had got with their ambition of only taking in long-term pro-
jects. It seemed a bit as if he hadn’t thought about this before, but on his
estimation, he guessed that YalaYala had gone from two-hour projects,
perhaps half-a-day, to two-day projects. That was a big di?erence, as he
emphasized, although he also admitted that perhaps it wasn’t as big as they
might have expected given the time that had gone by. But with the second
employee looking at him, slightly surprised, he admitted that it had been
more di?cult than he had expected, than everybody in YalaYala had
expected. In spite of all the important events in YalaYala that I have been
referring to, the members of YalaYala still talked about coming home,
when they talked about the time of moving into the network arena. They
still talked about moving into a form of organizing that was essentially
theirs. And, at ?rst glance, I could easily appreciate what they meant by it.
THE ADVENTURE TIME OF COMING HOME
One partner who was co-responsible for the project of developing
the whole concept of the United Spaces had an interesting remark
referring to a conversation she had had with the architect of the
new place they were to move into.
25
Talking about the kinds of dec-
orations to put on the wall, the architect was very determined not
to put anything on the wall, no pictures or the like. As she said, she
didn’t want anything to hold back time. In fact, the architect,
YalaYala, and the people behind the concept in the ?rst place,
wanted to design an open, transparent space. All this was thought
out in the name of social creativity and increased possibilities for
networking amongst the free agents. Moreover, United Spaces
was to be ?lled up with moveable tables so that the individual
agents inhabiting the space could move around, talk with different
people, be mobile tout court.
A moment in time 53
That seemed close to YalaYala’s initial idea. Close enough, anyway, for
them to be plotting (Ricoeur, 1984) their movement as one of coming
home, although there was also an element of narrative seduction (Shotter,
1993b) in this narration. They were making their own existence timeless, as
it were, narrating their community as if everything in between their begin-
ning, where they talked about a network of individually mobile free agents
inhabiting a transparent space, and the time of moving into the new space,
was like an extra-temporal hiatus that had to be overcome in order for them
to coincide with themselves, that is, become what they had been all along.
26
The great paradox of YalaYala’s narration was that this sense of adventure
time (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 87),
27
a temporal existence that totally killed the in-
between of the narrated moment of the genesis and the moment of total
and absolute coincidence, had in fact become their last refuge against
prosaic existence. As already indicated, it was a sense of an ending that had
very important sideshadows (Morson, 1994), not only in the light of all
their small prosaic moves on the way, but also in the light of what happened
during my last phase of investigation. They moved into the new premises
in May 2001, and it was around this time that the pressures towards selling
made YalaYala de?ne two important consequences. For one, the temporal
horizon of the venture on the wireless game that the ?rst employee had
been working upon for a long time was narrowly de?ned. If he couldn’t
raise any money for this venture by the summer of 2001, the venture would
no longer be a part of YalaYala. As the employee had explicitly articulated
that working with ventures was his ‘drive’ and passion, it was di?cult seeing
how he could remain in YalaYala if the project didn’t get any money. In
fact, he was already in the margins of their existence, and when the project
failed to raise money, everybody thought it was the right thing for him to
leave YalaYala. As to the second employee, the categorization of her as
someone who wasn’t a good seller got the upper hand well into the summer
of 2001. In the name of survival, the other members of YalaYala told her
that she couldn’t remain there. In the story about improvising in order to
survive, she had not only remained another, she had become, however sadly
everybody thought it was, an antagonistic character. As a consequence, she
had to, in the words of Levi-Strauss (Bauman, 2000, p. 101), be vomited,
spat out of the community. She simply wasn’t a fast seller, and that was
apparently the only thing YalaYala had room for in their quest for survival.
Thus, the ?ve founders remained, but the one founder who had oriented
himself towards working with ventures, had told the others that he needed
some time o?, which he planned to take within a couple of months. When
the others asked him how much time, he wasn’t really sure. He wanted to
travel a bit, escape the rather frantic time that faced YalaYala. Before
departing though, he promised the rest of the members to ‘sell like hell’, but
54 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
he failed to perform in a time where YalaYala was struggling. Over the
summer, he left nonetheless, which was a huge disappointment to the rest of
the members, but they had some di?culties confronting him with their dis-
appointment. In the course of this development, they did come to a decision
to let go of the venture work altogether. In fact, the di?culty confronting
the founder who wanted to travel a bit
28
also seemed a di?culty confront-
ing the story they were still inclined to tell about YalaYala. It was still the
story of realizing and coming home to the space of free agency they had
envisioned all along. To be sure, I have to admit that stepping into United
Spaces seemed an immense challenge, as United Spaces as a project was
?lled up with the hype about free agents in a fashion that resembled the way
they had started their own little community. Perhaps it was a bit like becom-
ing timeless. Yet, I also sensed that the sideshadows could become some-
thing more than mere shadows of their existence. Hence, there was some
talk about the challenges of the future: ‘I really think we have changed in
our process. We are no longer the same, and perhaps we have to modify some
of our ideas . . . I’m not quite sure how we should go about this, what we
should change and in what way . . . we’ll see’. There had been a series of
events that had done something to the members of YalaYala, something
that, in a certain sense, was irreversible and so part of their movement.
They had been very disappointed with the disappearance of the sixth
partner that came in and quite rapidly disappeared again, highlighting the
paradox between individual mobility in a shopping mall community and
an ideal of public exteriority demanding the ultimate and transparent pres-
ence of every member: They had experienced a situation where the highly
praised individual had virtually vanished in the pressure towards thinking
‘YalaYala’, never the single individual. They struggled with the question of
aboutness, the common action of YalaYala. They struggled with the lack
of transparency. They had been moving away from ventures, which in the
o?cial, monologic rhetoric was that which they moved towards. As a con-
sequence, the past moment of meeting their radical otherness more than
ever threatened to reveal that what their radical otherness did (small con-
sultancy jobs of a very short duration), was very close to what they did
themselves. Maybe, then, the past threshold moment wasn’t what it had
seemed to be. They had come to a situation where survival seemed all that
really counted. In this movement, the chronotope of the threshold virtually
faded. The way of the moment was no longer that of a praised potential-
ity, it was a moment of relentless pressure towards selling, life becoming
‘one damn thing after another’. In this movement, they ultimately came to
de?ne themselves as exclusively oriented towards consulting. Even the
ambition of doing long-term consulting on a strategic level had disap-
peared. Selling to survive also meant that the stranger in them, the dialogic
A moment in time 55
other of ‘heavy, theoretical knowledge’, had to be vomited, because she
embodied the voice of that dialogic other. They became disappointed once
again with the departure of one of the ?ve original founders, although he
simply seemed to act upon the ideal of individual, unrestrained mobility of
free agents. Thus they seemed; as it were, to expect more of the in-between
of members, but they had di?culties articulating what this ‘more’ was. In
the light of the development, there were good reasons to say that the story
of coming home was indeed a way of sliding into the adventure time that
seemed a perfect alibi for not going into a dialogue with what they had
become, the new boundaries of existence that had emerged with the traces
they had left. Adventure time seemed to be a way of killing the time in the
middle, a way of securing that the plane of the moment where they came
up with the vision of a network of free agents could coincide with itself,
become what it had always been. However, important changes had clearly
emerged with the eventness of the events depicted above, and it was in the
light of these events that the story of coming home resided in a very
tension-?lled environment. It was also at this time that I stopped my inves-
tigation of the becoming process of YalaYala. Thus, it was in this tension-
?lled environment that they were challenged to grasp together a new story
about YalaYala, challenged to undertake the responsibility of moving away
from pretending and into a dialogic narration that had room for becoming.
Time would probably show if they had succeeded in doing this because time
was, after all, still open.
56 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
3. Driven entrepreneurs: a case study
of taxi owners in Caracas
Monica Lindh de Montoya
Anthropologists have written relatively little on the subject of entrepreneur-
ship, although students of the subject would agree that at heart it concerns
human cooperation, and is thus deeply embedded in cultural practices. Most
anthropologists who have given attention to the subject have discussed the
entrepreneur as an innovator who takes advantage of the di?erences in cul-
tural values (Barth, 1967) or knowledge and networks (Barth, 1963) to set
up pro?table market niches or for political ends. Others, such as Green?eld,
Strickon and Aubrey (1979), Long (1979), Long and Roberts (1984) and
Green?eld and Strickon (1986) have examined particular enterprises, often
focusing on the use of household labour or the intergenerational changes in
business con?gurations within a more general discussion of the role of
entrepreneurship in economic development and social change.
29
Additionally, one might consider anthropological work on markets and
marketing as of some interest to entrepreneurship, including that of Plattner
on peddlers in Mexico (1975, 1985), Babb on women in markets (1989) and
Geertz (1979) on the economic mechanisms, such as bargaining, at work in
a Moroccan marketplace, or suq. Yet despite these interesting contributions,
anthropological writing on entrepreneurship as such is scarce, although
people engagedinall kinds of business activities andnegotiations ?ll our eth-
nographies. There are, for example, the sharecropping peasant who rents
land and mobilizes a team of neighbors and kin to contribute the elements
needed to raise a crop and bring it to harvest (Cancian, 1972) and the artisan
who develops particular handicraft skills or new techniques to remain com-
petitive eveninthe face of industrial production(Gudeman, 1992). There are
transporters (Wilson, 1984; Alvarez and Collier, 1994; Lindh de Montoya,
1996) who develop enterprises in rural-urban trade, or trade between
di?erent markets. Nonetheless, such studies rarely address entrepreneurship
per se; they do not focus speci?cally on the challenges inherent in construct-
ing and running a business operation, or on how entrepreneurial strategies
and options are embedded within the cultural context and provisioning
systems of a particular society.
57
The majority of the anthropologists cited above have worked with eth-
nographic material from Latin America.
30
In this region as in others,
studies in entrepreneurship focused on the themes of social change and eco-
nomic development (Stewart, 1991), with the entrepreneur seen as an agent
of social change, and entrepreneurship, a potential recipe for economic
development. While anthropologists are generally interested in how entre-
preneurs move between, and make use of their access to di?erent social
worlds, and how they put resources together into viable business ventures,
studies in disciplines that dealt more speci?cally with entrepreneurship tend
to be descriptive and prescriptive. Written with the aim of fomenting and
improving business activity in developing economies, they often concen-
trate on uncovering the source of entrepreneurial characteristics and abili-
ties, seeking to de?ne the essence of the entrepreneur and the economic and
social circumstances encouraging innovation and risk-taking.
Studies of entrepreneurship as such tend to center on more formal, large-
scale endeavors, rather than the small business activities that individuals
may set up in the course of their lives as they devise survival strategies,
decide to invest a windfall, or try to diversify their income possibilities. Yet
such small business endeavors proliferate in Latin America as in most of
the developing world, often occupy a substantial portion of the owner’s
time and energy, and sometimes they do grow into larger, sustainable com-
panies. In developing countries, a substantial part of the economy is made
up of such small businesses, formal or informal; and as Hernando de Soto
(1989, 2000) has noted, they face immense challenges in both formalizing
their activities and gaining access to capital. A closer examination of them
can reveal how they accumulate and focus resources, and the constraints
under which they operate.
This article discusses entrepreneurial activities within the taxi sector in
Venezuela, and focuses particularly on small-scale entrepreneurs in
Caracas, the capital city. It examines the strategies of six individuals who
own taxis, and rent them out to taxi drivers, called taxistas, for a daily fee.
I will also relate some of the business strategies used by these drivers, who
set o? each day to traverse the streets of the city in search of the clients and
income necessary to provide for themselves and to pay the rental fee.
In popular literature, as in numerous academic studies, entrepreneurs are
portrayed as heroic ?gures, occupied in realizing a personal vision. They
are celebrated as builders, as innovators who produce new, value-creating
combinations out of previously existing elements of the society. There is
little recognition in the literature of the social base – created over many
years by the community – on which their endeavours rest (Gudeman, 2001).
The maximization of trust and the minimization of risk through a stable
political and economic system, including the rule of law, well-functioning
58 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
public and private institutions, e?cient ?nancial entities and their regula-
tion, as well as social policies which make the entire population stakehold-
ers in the future of the nation are hard-won communal gains which provide
a base for entrepreneurial enterprise. Where they are lacking or inadequate,
the basis for entrepreneurial action is very tenuous indeed.
Yet even the most benign of business environments is constantly in ?ux,
and entrepreneurs must be able to recognize and accommodate continuous
change. In the best of cases, they can be primary ?gures, central characters
who have the power to mold the environment to their needs and ends, or can
?nd opportunities to turn the unexpected to their favor. But they are far
more likely (even in developed economies) to be obliged to process the events
that ?owaround them, adapting their businesses and strategies to perpetual
transformations in the economic and political scenarios in which they
operate. And just as much, strategies are embedded in the entrepreneurs’
own personal beliefs and life philosophy, social milieu and position within
it, their experiences, and the narratives they create in making sense of them.
In the following, I will show how six taxi owners with very similar back-
grounds and general point of departure develop quite di?erent strategies to
cope with the problems inherent in managing a small-scale taxi business.
BACKGROUND
One of the world’s major petroleum-producing countries, Venezuela has
experienced substantial economic di?culties during the last two decades.
The country’s political life and economic well-being ?uctuates with the rise
and fall of oil prices, oil income providing for at least half the national
budget. Long neglected in governmental initiatives, many Caracas taxicab
drivers had been unable to acquire new vehicles or even to adequately main-
tain their cabs due to the steady devaluation of the Venezuelan currency
and the consequently escalating prices of vehicles and spare parts – a situ-
ation which eventually resulted in decrepit and unsafe cabs serving the city
of four million inhabitants. But this branch of the transport industry has
recently undergone a semi-spontaneous process of reorganization, in which
new vehicles and di?erent actors entered the marketplace, leading to a dra-
matic increment in the number of taxis in circulation.
Toward the end of the 1990s, the Venezuelan government instituted a
program whereby it was intended that taxi drivers would be able to acquire
newvehicles, and potential taxistas would be able to buy a car and enter the
market. In 1998 the mayor’s o?ce in the Libertador municipality in central
Caracas enabled people to obtain ?nancing for taxicabs through the
Instituto Municipal de Crédito Popular (Municipal Peoples’ Credit Institute),
A case study of taxi owners in Caracas 59
and the popular program soon spread to other parts of the country, with
other ?nancial institutions also o?ering easier ?nancing for taxicabs. The
vehicles were exonerated fromthe 15 per cent value-added tax, and the deal-
erships o?ered a 5 to 6 per cent discount, lowering the price of cabs about
20 per cent (Bastardo, 2001). The ?rst of these taxis on the market were Fiats
and Hyundais, but eventually all the assembly plants and distributors in the
country entered into the program, with Daewoo, Kia and Nissan being
the most popular brands. The basic, low-cost, four-door white sedans with
the characteristic yellow-and-black checkered taxi stripe along the side
quickly became an integral part of Caracas street life, and newtaxi dispatch-
ers such as Taxco (started 1998) and Servitaxi came into being. To make sure
that the comfortable, modern, new taxis were bought by owner-drivers, the
paperwork necessary to complete a sale required the purchaser to submit a
copy of their ?fth class taxi drivers’ license.
Yet for a number of reasons few taxis are sold to veteran taxi drivers. For
some, the initial 30 per cent down payment required is an insurmountable
hurdle. The steep interest rates on loans are also a large contributing factor
to the situation: they oscillated between 32 and 40 per cent during the
period of this study, to reach 60 per cent in March of 2002. Also, few taxi
drivers, and fewer of those eager to initiate themselves in the branch, have
bank accounts – much less with the cash ?ow history that would allow them
to qualify for an auto loan.
Those who do have savings, bank histories, and credit cards are the
middle class, and they have not hesitated to avail themselves of the new pos-
sibilities opened up by the taxi ?nancing plan. During the 1990s, and par-
ticularly in the last years, the Venezuelan middle class was hard hit by rising
unemployment as multinational industries left the country due to increas-
ing economic and political insecurity. Many local industries were also
forced to downsize or to close because of the di?culty of competing with
imports made cheap by an overvalued currency. With the political transfor-
mations brought about by President Hugo Chávez’ ascent to power in 1999,
as well as his leftist rhetoric and unconvincing economic plan, the job
market continued to contract. Thus a growing pool of people looked for
new means of employment and sources of income, and some saw the taxi
sector as an area in which they could apply their managerial and adminis-
trative skills in a dynamic business venture of their own.
Few members of the middle class who purchase taxis actually enter the
market as drivers, or taxistas, however. While they can, for a modest price,
easily obtain the ?fth class drivers’ license required to purchase the vehicle,
they do not have the information or practical knowledge necessary to make
a living within the very competitive taxi sector – nor do they aspire to do
so. Rather, the practice is to rent out the taxicab for a daily fee to someone
60 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
who will drive and maintain it.
31
The rule of thumb in 2001 was that one
taxi, well administrated, would leave its owner with an income of $1,000
per month, a rate of return that made it possible to pay o? loans even at
in?ated interest rates, and to add to one’s pool of vehicles fairly rapidly –
depending on the number of taxis owned, and the owner’s other sources of
income and expenses.
If many individuals who own taxis hope to expand the activity into a ?eet
of cars or a taxi line, drivers, on the other hand, are motivated to rent the
new cars with their own entrepreneurial plans in mind. After making the
money to pay the rental fee, the remaining income produced is the drivers’,
and those who know the marketplace and are acquainted with the tumultu-
ous life of the city can make sizable earnings. Taxistas are eager to acquire
permanent clients who can guarantee them a basic income, and distribute
business cards with their cell phone number, and make the social overtures
that may lead to gaining repeat clients. Most are hoping to eventually nego-
tiate an opción a compra (option to buy contract) with their cab owner, which
will allow them to pay o? the purchase of the cab gradually, while working
it. In this way they, in turn, may become independent owner-operators.
Obviously considerable risk is inherent in this kind of venture, most of
which derives from the weak institutional structure of the country, the
social chasm between the middle-class owners and their lower-class drivers,
and their consequently diverging economic goals. Generally speaking, the
owners are relatively well-educated and live in the urbanized, more a?uent
eastern neighborhoods of Caracas, while the drivers have had few oppor-
tunities in life and live in the vast, labyrinth-like, western barrios (marginal
neighborhoods) of the city, or in peripheral ‘dormitory’ towns. The
demands of making a living with a taxi – a typical day starts between four
and ?ve in the morning – makes it necessary for the driver to have contin-
uous access to the car, parking it in a safe place near his residence. So, when
the owners watch their shiny new entrepreneurial investment speed o? with
a driver at the wheel, they have limited control over when they will see it
again and, despite assurances to the contrary, over the point in time when
they will be paid for its use. For the drivers, there is the risk being unable to
?nd enough customers to both pay the fee and make some pro?t, of acci-
dents, and the constant fear of violence: of being robbed or killed on an
unfortunate venture into a barrio.
Elements that should be mentioned because of their importance in
making this collaboration between strangers possible are inexpensive gaso-
line, cell phones, and vehicle security systems. Many of those who rent
taxis are ruleteros (drivers who do not belong to a taxi line, but circulate
throughout the city in search of customers), which would be economically
impossible without low gasoline prices. In March 2002, gas prices stood at
A case study of taxi owners in Caracas 61
less than $0.10 a liter, a cost that was easily borne by the drivers. Most tax-
istas own a cell phone, which is the vital link between cab owner and driver;
a way for the driver to get in touch with the owner if problems arise, and
for the owner to check up on him and exhort him to deposit his payments.
Vehicle security systems come into play when trust, faith and hope break
down. Many cars are equipped with so-called satellite systems by means of
which the owner can immobilize the car, but he is then faced with the task
of locating it. The more complete global positioning system (GPS) that also
locates the vehicle was not yet available as of 2002, and was also considered
by most owners to be far too expensive to warrant installation.
The structures of ownership and work that have emerged, then, require
the collaboration of members of the middle class, who have invested in taxi-
cabs, with the lower class, who drive them. Unused to dealing with each
other, and equally inexperienced in coping with the continuously changing
business climate, these groups have goals and devise strategies that are fre-
quently at odds with each other. Their social worlds and life courses can be
fathoms apart, yet as collaborators in a business venture their ambitions
and futures become intertwined. They develop narratives about the mar-
ketplace and about each other as a way of explaining, of understanding
things that happen, and of justifying their business strategies and decisions.
The people that appear in these pages were constantly occupied with, and
talking about their businesses; waiting for drivers who had promised to
come by with a payment, looking for new drivers, comparing notes and
exchanging information with other owners, buying spare parts, and spend-
ing time with mechanics and insurance company representatives. A consid-
erable portion of the time and talk was imbued with frustration and
confusion, and stories were continuously exchanged with other taxi owners,
recounting experiences lived and conclusions drawn. It was through such
shared accounts that they constructed themselves as businessmen, the
‘market’ as their arena of operations, and the ‘other’ with whom they were
working. An examination of such narratives reveals values and beliefs
regarding work, contractual relationships, entrepreneurship and the nature
of doing business, as well as the cultural embeddedness of managerial tech-
niques. It also reveals the narrators as less than heroic, as secondary ?gures
attempting to swim in rather turbulent economic waters.
OWNER’S STRATEGIES: DISTANCE, CONTROL AND
MOTIVATION
The focus of this article is the activities of an extended family in Caracas,
all of whom currently own taxis that they hire out. They are three sisters in
62 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
their ?fties, Lourdes, Magally and Ana, and a brother of theirs who lives in
the USA, Armando. A younger cousin of theirs, Henry, also owns taxis;
as does Raimundo, who is Ana’s brother-in-law. All are college-educated,
and have previously worked either in professional careers and/or in other
independent business ventures. However, they have di?erent strategies and
perspectives in regard to their taxi ventures, and do not cooperate economi-
cally, although the sisters do help each other out in solving practical prob-
lems. I collected the data for this article primarily by talking to Ana and her
husband Jorge, who were neighbors of mine when I lived in Caracas for a
few months in the spring of 2001 and 2002. I also met, and informally inter-
viewed, the other members of the family; and I frequently rode with a
number of their drivers on my errands around Caracas, taking these oppor-
tunities to speak with them. The ?eldwork was conducted during a total of
six months, and was originally undertaken with the aim of investigating the
feasibility of doing a longer study.
I will begin with Henry, the cousin, who is in his late forties. He is an engi-
neer and is presently employed on a construction project in the city, but he
has previously been unemployed or semi-employed for extended periods of
time. He bought his two taxis via bank loans, paying 40 per cent of the price
as a down payment and paying o? the loans with the rental income. He
became interested in owning taxis because his cousin, Lourdes, had one,
and she was, at the time of writing, living entirely o? the income of four
taxis. Henry ?rst bought one car, and seeing that it did produce income,
decided to buy another. His wife, a part-time sales clerk, helps him monitor
the taxi payments. She has set up a savings account for each car into which
the driver is supposed to make deposits every three or four days. Henry is
hesitant to acquire a third vehicle, however, saying that the taxi market
won’t last long:
This is a very risky business. Every day there are more of these new taxis in the
streets. Before long, the market will be saturated. Already the drivers are com-
plaining about not getting enough fares, and there’s a lot of violence – last week,
three drivers were killed in robberies. And what if the government raises the price
of gasoline? I ?gure this business will last a year or two at the most, and then
taxis won’t be pro?table any more.
Felipe, a thin and serious man in his early twenties, drives one of Henry’s
two taxis. He belongs to the Evangelical Church,
32
which occupies a good
part of his spare time, and lives at home with his mother. A few months
earlier he drove for Lourdes, who ?red himwhen he had an accident. Henry
decided to take himon when he had ?red one of his own drivers for nonpay-
ment, and the taxi had been out of circulation for a time because he could
not ?nd anyone else. Felipe is hoping to be able to earn money to continue
A case study of taxi owners in Caracas 63
his religious studies, and he also anticipates a chance to buy the car he now
drives through the opción a compra system.
Henry keeps long hours at work and sometimes calls Felipe and asks him
to give him a ride home, particularly when the driver has not paid him for
a while. This is one pretext he uses to be able to talk to him about catching
up on his payments, and also to check on the condition of the cab:
‘I’ll say one thing for that guy,’ he commented one evening after having ridden
home with Felipe. ‘He’s always behind on his payments, but he keeps the car in
great shape. When I get mad and want to ?re him, I try to remember that; it’s not
every chau?eur that takes such good care of the car. But he certainly does prattle
on – as soon as I got in the car tonight, he started telling me one of his endless
stories, about how an alcoholic uncle of his who is living in his mother’s house
had stolen some of his things, and that he had decided to move out, but didn’t
have anywhere to go. ‘Don’t tell me about your life,’ I said, ‘I’m not interested in
your problems.’ I call my drivers every day or so and ask if they have deposited
the fee, and that’s that. They have a di?erent world, es un mundo aparte . . . there
is no way you can know why they do what they do, nor should you worry about
it. If you let them get you involved in their lives, there’s no end to it. You won’t
even be able to demand they pay what they owe you. No, the worst thing you can
do is listen to them go on about their troubles.
Henry, who has considerable experience dealing with workers in city con-
struction projects, tries to keep his relationship with Felipe distant and
strictly professional, and to limit their communication to what is relevant
for their working agreement. He tries to keep the upper hand in the rela-
tionship by cutting o? social and personal talk, and therewith the driver’s
possibilities of establishing a degree of intimacy and arousing sympathy, or
creating the social obligation of sympathy, the upshot of which might well
entail ?exibility in making payments, and eventually perhaps the upper
hand in the owner-driver relationship.
Henry’s cousin Lourdes, whose enterprise originally gave him the idea of
buying a taxi, is about 50 and is a sociologist. She is divorced with two grown
sons, and worked in the banking sector for several years but quit to start a
company, a small factory producing clothing that she sold in popular
markets. When this business ?nally became completely unpro?table in 1998
she closed it down, and with the pro?ts of the sale of two market stalls she
bought two taxis. She also had her own car repainted and rented it out as a
taxi.
Lourdes has also been disturbed by the personal side of her relationships
with her drivers, and has taken measures to maintain distance and avoid
becoming drawn into their lives. She has hired Freddy, who has been
working in di?erent capacities in the transport sector for many years and is
also one of her drivers, as a go-between. He collects cash payments and
64 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
deposits them in the appropriate bank accounts, or collects the vouchers if
the driver has already made the deposit. He makes sure the taxis are being
kept in good condition, sees that the drivers carry the necessary documen-
tation, and veri?es that the vehicles are brought to the garage for service as
their guarantee policies stipulate. Lourdes pays him two days’ rent per car
per month for these services. If one of the drivers fails to make payments,
Freddy is also in charge of retrieving the vehicle, and ?nding a new driver
for it.
‘Sra. Lourdes doesn’t like to have any contact with her drivers,’ Freddy explained
to me. ‘She thinks the drivers try to take advantage of her because she is a
woman living alone, and doesn’t have a husband to back her up. She thinks that
it’s easier for me to get the drivers to pay on time, you know, easier for me to be
tough on them, and that they will pay attention to me when I tell them to take
the car in for service.
When Lourdes’ widowed father passed away and the family home was
sold, she received part of an inheritance and bought a fourth taxi, and her
older sister, Magally, also entered the branch, buying two taxis of her own
with her part of the inheritance, and a third in association with a brother,
Armando. She and Armando have an oral agreement that he will receive
Magally’s share of the income from this taxi until she has paid o? her share
of it, and then it will be hers. They expect that it will take her 18 months to
pay her share. Although Magally is also divorced and lives with her teen-
aged daughter, her manner of dealing with drivers is very di?erent from
Lourdes’. While Lourdes wants as little contact as possible, Magally
demands that her drivers pass by her apartment and pay her the rental fee
in cash every day, or every other day. She does not hesitate to call them
when she needs to run an errand, and often accompanies them when repairs
or adjustments need to be made to the cars. She has no compunctions about
hearing about drivers’ lives; on the contrary, she wants to know all about
them, and she sometimes becomes acquainted with their wives and fami-
lies. As she is a talkative, emotional person, the drivers also ?nd out quite
a lot about Magally’s life and problems.
‘You can’t trust any of them,’ Magally told me one afternoon as we were having
a snack in a shopping mall. ‘Every one of them is two-faced. They seem so won-
derful when you meet them, telling you what experienced drivers they are, assur-
ing you they’ll pay every day – they’re the wonder of the universe. But when they
have your car, you ?nd out who they really are. They don’t come by and pay, they
don’t answer their cell phone when they see your number and know who’s calling.
I don’t know how many times I’ve had to go and call my drivers from a pay phone,
in order to trick them into answering. I’ve had some who have picked up the car
and not come by for over a week, and me worrying to death that something has
A case study of taxi owners in Caracas 65
happened to them . . . and then when I repossess the car it’s got a dent, and inside
it’s ?lthy and smells to high heaven – and that’s a week’s rent lost, and a dent to
?x. Or worse, they have an accident and that’s the last you see of them, and you’re
not only out a week’s rent but also stuck with a huge bill to ?x the car before you
can rent it to someone else. It’s just incredible, how irresponsible these people are.
Most of Magally’s interest in the lives of her drivers speaks to her wish
for control over them. Like many owners, she has had some bad experiences
with drivers. She distrusts them, and seems to believe that the more she
knows about them, the more power she has to keep them from cheating her.
She generally demands a ten-day rental deposit (300 000 Bs.) before hiring
a new driver, something few potential drivers have, or agree to give. Magally
gets around this problem by demanding that her drivers deposit 5 000 Bs.
extra per day for 60 days, until a total of 300 000 Bs. has been accumulated,
a procedure resented by her drivers. Few of Magally’s taxistas last for 60
days, and she usually keeps the deposit to make up for the days they owe
her when they turn in the car.
Her distrust leads Magally to keep drivers on a short rein, demanding
frequent payments, insisting that drivers call and ask permission before
taking the car out of the Caracas area, and quickly threatening to dismiss
any driver who falls a few days behind in his fees. She frequently calls the
satellite service to have her cars immobilized so that she can repossess them
from insolvent drivers, something seldom done by the others in the family,
who prefer patience and negotiation when possible. She has had a large
number of di?erent drivers during the time she has had her taxis. Her
unwillingness to grant them leeway is, to an extent, a re?ection of her own
economic vulnerability, as her only other income is a small government
pension that is insu?cient to support the quality of life to which she
aspires. Usually behind on economic obligations herself, her anxiety about
her economic situation ?nds its outlet in her relationship with the taxistas,
who in turn ?nd her demands a nuisance in the development of their own
economic strategies. Because of her demanding personality and frequent
change of drivers, she is unable to depend solely on referrals through other
trusted drivers or taxi owners, and has resorted to putting in advertisements
for drivers in the local papers. Advertising in this way produces a wide
group of potential candidates, but seldom one with a 10-day deposit – nor
any that have reliable recommendations. Despite her desire for control over
her investment, Magally seems to take a greater risk in changing drivers fre-
quently, than Lourdes or Henry, who give their drivers a bit more individ-
ual responsibility and liberty in payment schedules.
The sisters, Magally and Lourdes, and their cousin, Henry, all work their
businesses by renting taxis, and do not o?er cars in the opción de compra
system, in which the driver signs an agreement with the owner con?rming
66 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
that he will buy the car by paying an agreed-upon fee for between 24 and
40 months. Henry and Lourdes feel that there is no need to sell the vehicle
to the drivers; on the contrary, the best way to maximize pro?ts is to rent
the cabs and make repairs to them as they become necessary. Magally adds
that there will always be a need for taxis, even if the market becomes more
competitive in coming days. Why sell a car that can be rented?
Another sister, Ana, takes a completely di?erent view of the business.
She previously ran her own company in the retail clothing business, an
enterprise that has taken a number of forms. She began by selling fashion-
able clothes that she bought on trips abroad to family and friends, then
opened a boutique specialized in children’s clothing in a mall near her
home. When she lost the contract on the shop, she eventually began to buy
clothes wholesale in the USA, selling them to major department stores and
clothing chains. She abandoned each of these enterprises as they became
unpro?table with changes in the business climate (primarily the currency
exchange rate), and eventually she decided to invest in a taxi. Today she
owns four:
‘Lourdes beat me in buying a taxi,’ Ana says. ‘She was the ?rst in the family. But
ever since I can remember, I’ve wanted to own a taxi, though I don’t know why.
I was so involved with other things that I never got around to it. But now, taxis
are one of the few ways left to make a pro?t’.
After a few months of administrating her taxis and continuously facing
the problem of drivers who failed to make payments, Ana decided to work
exclusively with drivers who take her vehicles on an opción de compra. She
tries out a new candidate for about three months, telling him that they have
to get to know each other before entering into a long-term contract, and if
he keeps his payments up-to-date and takes good care of the car she agrees
to sell it to him over a period of two years. During this time the driver con-
tinues to pay the daily rental rate, but also makes extra payments in lump
sums once every four or six months. The actual price of the car is worked
out in agreement with the buyer, and the deal is formalized in a written and
registered contract:
‘The opción a compra is really the best way to manage the taxis,’ Ana told me in
the spring of 2001. ‘One can’t work the way Magally does, and even Lourdes,
changing drivers every couple of months or sometimes even every couple of
weeks. When you take back the car you lose what they owe you, and the car
su?ers, too, with a lot of di?erent drivers. I’m in the process of negotiating to sell
two of my taxis, and now I don’t have to call and ask if the drivers have paid or
not – they come to see me and pay me in cash every Sunday. They want me to
come down and check the condition of the car and everything; they’re really
thankful for the opportunity to be able to buy their own vehicle and want to sign
A case study of taxi owners in Caracas 67
the contract as soon as possible. But I tell them they have to be completely up-to-
date in their payments if we are going to sign. It’s the only chance they have, they
don’t have bank accounts or credit cards. Once I asked Carlos (a driver) if he had
a bank card and he said, ‘Are you kidding, señora, not even to the blood bank!’ I
really prefer to work this way, I don’t like the idea of running a business where
I’m the only one getting ahead; this way the drivers are getting something, too’.
I asked Ana how she ?gured out the price to charge for the cars:
Well, you have to think about a lot of things. First, there is the price of the car;
about ten million.
33
I paid for this car in cash, with the inheritance from the
house, but if I had borrowed in the bank at 40 per cent interest it would have
cost me 14 million, and more than that if I were to pay it over two years, say
16 million. It would have been even more expensive if I had used my credit card.
And then I have to consider that if I kept the money in the bank, I would be
earning at least 25 per cent interest on it, or if I had been working with it in my
old business, I would have been earning about 30 per cent a year on it. I also have
to be able to buy a new car with the income from this one, because at the end of
two years, the car will be his . . . and then, it’s a risky business, working with taxis,
so you have to remember that, too, when you decide to sell.
Ana came to the conclusion that a fair price for the car, considering the
situation in the marketplace, the gradual devaluation of the currency which
made new cars more expensive, and the risks she was taking by having 10
million in the street – en la calle – would be between 28 and 30 million bolí-
vares.
34
It is interesting to note that she compares the new activity’s earn-
ings with her previous ones (selling clothes retail or wholesale) and with
what she would be earning in a bank, and that she includes the probable
cost of in?ation. The ?nal sum emerges from a cocktail of activities, expe-
riences, economic probabilities and the way she perceives the market at the
moment. Another part of her information, which she did not mention, but
which undoubtedly enters into her calculations, is her idea of what the
market can bear. Taxistas currently pay 195 000 Bs. a week to rent a car
from her, which over two years (with no days o?) amounts to 20280000 Bs.
In order to buy the car, they should logically be willing to pay more, but this
increase in price has to be tempered with the increase of taxis in the market,
which decreases clients and lowers fares, and the currently poor economic
outlook for the country as a whole.
Also, once the opción a compra agreement goes into e?ect, the buyer
takes on the economic responsibility for the necessary overhauls and
repairs to the car. This was a fact that Jorge, Ana’s husband, an accountant,
put emphasis on. As time passed, the cars would require more and more
service and repairs – new tires, brakes, and bodywork – and, by using the
opción a compra system, Ana was freeing herself from these costs, as well
as giving the driver a big incentive to comply in paying his fees and taking
68 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
care of the car, which would become his. If he failed to make his payments,
the car would revert back to Ana.
Armando, a brother of Lourdes, Magally, and Ana who lives and works
in the US, took the opción a compra system one step further when, observ-
ing his sisters’ activities, he also decided to invest part of his share of the
family inheritance in a taxi of his own, along with the car he bought in asso-
ciation with Magally. A few months later he also re?nanced his home in the
USA and used the money to buy three more taxis. Armando continued to
live in Florida, where he owns a landscaping business, but his sister Ana
and Jorge administrate his taxis for a monthly fee, checking on the condi-
tion of the cars and making sure the drivers make their payments.
Armando uses the opción a compra system; but with the added incentive
that the driver may, six months before he ?nishes making the payments for
the car, rent it out to a second driver of his choice, and obtain a brand-new
taxi from Armando to start paying o? again. In this way, Armando gives
his drivers a chance to become capital-owning entrepreneurs, too; and he
can do this because of his relatively stronger economic situation in the
U.S.A., and his access to credit.
Recently Armando and Ana have discussed starting a taxi association
with their cars, or entering the cars into an existing association, giving the
drivers the bene?t of receiving calls via a radio system, which would likely
increase their clientele and also increase safety. They are concerned that the
country’s declining economy and increasing number of taxis will lead to a
market glut and price competition that will make it di?cult for drivers to
pay their rental fees, while the continuing devaluation of the currency
increases the costs of both new vehicles and repairs. They predict that a
number of owners will have to get out of the market with time, and believe
that being part of an association will allow them to better compete in the
market.
Another member of this family group, Jorge’s brother Raimundo, is
involved in the taxi business in yet another way. A retired university teacher,
he obtained a low-interest state loan to construct an upper ?oor on his
home with the aim of renting it for extra income. When an architect advised
him against construction because the base of the building did not appear
strong enough to support another ?oor, he invested the loan in several taxis.
The agency from which he bought them helped him locate a driver inter-
ested in opción a compra, and to draw up a contract. Raimundo’s contracts
span three years, during which the driver pays a lower fee, 22 000 Bs. per
day, for a total of just over 24 000 000 Bs. This driver quickly recruited three
other taxistas interested in vehicles, and now Raimundo has income from
four cars. He has minimal contact with the drivers, all of whom work in
established taxi lines and pay him twice a month. His role in the market
A case study of taxi owners in Caracas 69
appears to be much like that of a bank, but it is questionable how much
pro?t he will make considering the low fee, the length of the contract, and
the recent rapid devaluation of the Venezuelan currency.
PATRONAGE AND CREATING SPACE: STRATEGIES
OF DRIVERS
If cab owners seek to establish neutral, businesslike relationships with
drivers (Henry, Lourdes, Raimundo), or to win their goodwill and loyalty
throughsocial exchange(Magally) or special incentives backedbylegal docu-
ments (Ana, Armando, Raimundo), the goal of the taxi driver is somewhat
di?erent. First, of course, it should be noted that drivers are a heteroge-
neous group, and therefore goals, needs, and strategies di?er. They may be
unmarried like Felipe, or married with four small children, like Carlos,
Ana’s driver. Some of them are veteran drivers who have been traversing the
streets of the city for many years; perhaps driving one of the ubiquitous
minibuses that tra?c speci?c routes. Others are new to the business, having
taken it up for lack of other employment. They may come from the poor
barrios of Caracas, from the middle class, and, often, from another nearby
city where work is even more scarce. Thus their knowledge of the profession
– of the city, where to ?nd clients, where tra?c jams are likely to develop
and how to circumvent them, how much to charge – also varies, as do their
preferences for working during the day, with its many tra?c snarls, or the
night, with its increased danger. A new driver is likely to have di?culties and
fall behind in payments, but he also has few contacts within the sector and
is thus less likely to quickly gain access to another car to drive if he leaves
his current boss; something which can make him try harder to comply,
working longer hours, or demanding less income for himself.
The amount of money that drivers make from day to day is an incognito
to the owners, whose share of the deal is the ?xed rental fee. Cab fares in
Caracas are negotiated between driver and client prior to the ride. There
are no taximeters or posted rates. The drivers are not employees but free
agents, and are thus entitled to charge what they like and to work the car
as much as they want to and are able, but they are not allowed to use a
second driver without the knowledge of the owner. Owners are not likely
to accept a second driver without raising the fee because of the wear and
tear on the car, which is then in constant circulation.
Yet a second driver is a strategy some taxistas use to earn more money,
or to be able to comply with payments while they are occupied with other
jobs. Guillermo, a man in his thirties who drives for Armando, starts every
day at four in the morning, when he picks up four men at di?erent addresses
70 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
and drives them to the radio station where they work. Thereafter, he has
two more steady clients, one at 6:30, and another at 8:00. He then turns the
car over to the second driver, who pays the rental fee and uses the car during
the rest of the day. Guillermo receives it again in the evening, and if he feels
up to it (he sometimes works days with his construction company, and is
also part-owner of a microbusiness that prints slogans on tee shirts) he
works again in the evening; but usually he works the car weekday mornings
and on weekends. In order to avoid discovery, Guillermo never answers his
cell phone if Ana (who administrates the car) is calling and the second
driver has the cab, since she might ask to see him immediately. He, as many
other drivers, also avoids answering calls from the owner when they are
behind in payments, hoping that they will be given more time to pay up, or
hoping to use the car as much as possible before being stopped. This is a
maddening situation for cab owners, who are not infrequently counting on
the rental payments to cover day-to-day expenses of their own. When a
driver ‘disappears’ for a time, they are also concerned that something might
have happened to him, or that he has made o? with the vehicle, and they
will have di?culties recuperating it.
While drivers want freedomfromthe surveillance of the owner in order to
be able to pursue their own goals, they simultaneously seek a more friendly
relationship with the owner. This is on the one hand quite natural in the
context of Venezuelan society, which is characterized by somewhat higher
social mobility than other Latin American countries, and di?erent social
groups mixreadilyinthe routines of dailylife. However, drivers tendtocouch
such friendships in the terms of a patron-client relationship. While owners
view drivers as free agents renting their cabs in order to carry out their own
business enterprises, drivers in practice often act as employees of the owners,
negotiating half-days without payment when they turn the car in for service,
extra holidays free, or Sundays o? – although they may well work on such
days. Nor is it unusual for drivers to ask for free days or leniency in late
payment because theyneedtoresolve complicatedpersonal problems: deaths
in the family, unfaithful wives, and seriously ill children often ?gure in such
accounts. Afriendly, but subservient relationship with the owner makes such
requests easier tomake andmore likely tobe granted, andthe subscript oper-
ating inthese conversations is that of the insecure andvulnerable situationof
the driver/client, and the relative power of the owner/patron. Occasionally a
driver will have an accident that is not covered by the insurance policy,
35
or
he will be robbed of part of his days’ earnings, and a good relationship with
the patrón also makes it possible for himto broach the topic of exoneration
for such losses. Thus there are many ways for a driver to pro?t fromproject-
ing himself as beset with problems, while taking care to not appear entirely
problematic as a partner in the taxi business.
A case study of taxi owners in Caracas 71
The majority of drivers do come from vulnerable social and economic
circumstances; indeed, one might say that everyone involved in the sector
(including owners) perceives themselves as having economic problems.
Manipulation of this social status within the business relationship is a con-
scious strategy among some, while others never say anything about their
private lives while they fall behind in payments because of multiple family
necessities. When unable to comply with payments, a driver may ask for a
special arrangement, such as paying a little more per day to catch up with
his ‘debt’ with time, or for the owner to wait a week or two while he works
extra long hours to make the outstanding sum. Or the driver may play the
situation in another way, turning o? his cell phone and disappearing,
working for as long as he can before the owner or the police track him
down, or the car is immobilized via a satellite tracker.
ENTREPRENEURS AND SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC
FLOWS
What can be said about the complexity and pro?tability of these business
arrangements? Both owners and drivers seek to pro?t from their e?orts, but
are frustrated – owners by what they consider the irresponsibility of the
drivers, and drivers by the huge physical demands of the work and the con-
stant economic demands of their families. If rental contracts are proble-
matic, what about opción a compra contracts? Do they, as Ana and
Armando hope, hold the solution to labor relationships?
Ana has, so far, ‘sold’ two of her cars. One buyer is doing ?ne, paying
regularly if a bit late. The other, in debt for over 1000 dollars, recently
returned the taxi, which was dented and had several parts damaged. Jorge
reported that when he examined the vehicle he found that it had several
poorly done and temporary repairs, such as a hose tied up with rags to keep
it from leaking. Apparently the buyer/driver was unable to bear the costs of
repairing the car, and decided to forget about the contract and just use the
car for as long as he could.
36
It becomes evident, as one listens to the narratives of both owners and
drivers, that resources from far a?eld are – and perhaps must be – mobi-
lized in order to make these option-to-buy ventures pro?table. Additional
incomes and networks developed in a variety of activities are marshalled in
the interest of maintaining contracts operative and keeping the business
running. Thus entrepreneurs frequently draw on the labor and resources of
people far outside the business itself.
Repairs and the cost of re-insuring vehicles become a big burden for
owners after the ?rst year. These new taxicabs are more expensive to repair
72 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
than older models, because they are constructed in modular units, and it is
often necessary to buy a major spare part in order to ?x a minor problem,
which increases expense for owners (and pro?ts for the dealerships). Jorge,
who spends a considerable portion of his spare time aiding his wife and her
sisters with their taxi repairs, told me about an experience with a self-taught
mechanic, Wilmer, who also worked as a driver for Lourdes.
Wilmer’s method of working was to bring his very basic tools to the spot
where the taxi was parked, and make a diagnosis. He then removed the
parts that he deemed needed repair and left them at a repair shop (in
another city two hours’ drive away, he used Lourdes’ taxi to get there) run
by an uncle of his. Because of the family connection, he could get the parts
?xed very cheaply at this shop, and could still charge Jorge a price below
the market rate. Through the use of his uncle’s repair shop, then, Wilmer
was able to make a bit of money on the side as a mechanic, a part of which
at times found its way into the fees that he paid to Lourdes for the cab
rental. The possibility of using his cut-rate services led Lourdes to keep him
on as a driver although he fell behind in payments, until he overstepped the
unwritten, but negotiable bounds of her patience by disappearing with the
cab for about ten days.
In this way, the auxiliary skills, capacity for work, and personal networks
of the drivers they contract become an important factor in the pro?t of cab
owners. While eventually the cost of repairs reduces the pro?t margin for
the owners, certain drivers (but not others) have the networks to carry out
repairs cheaply and can thus keep costs down. Drivers – and by extension
owners – depend on these resources, goodwill, and work of drivers’ family
and friends in order to make their deals pro?table. Paying market rates in
a dealer’s repair shop is prohibitively expensive, and consequently, social
relationships are transformed into capital, or replace capital where pos-
sible. These relationships are located at a social distance yet further
removed from the owners of the cars, yet through them they can extract
labor at sub-market rates, and add to their capital.
The pro?tability of taxis may be subsidized in yet other ways. Hernán,
one of Ana’s drivers who had a cab in opción a compra, one day described
in detail a conuco, or plot of land he owned outside the city limits, from
which he harvested a substantial amount of the basic foodstu?s and fruits
consumed by his family. He regularly drove the Caracas-Puerto La Cruz
route that passed nearby the plot, and was able to see to it regularly. His
wife sold cooked food in a stand at a Caracas marketplace. It was evident
that this plot of land and his wife’s work served as a base on which he could
found his own ambition to become the owner of a taxi, and that in an eco-
nomic pinch income from the food stall went to meet rental payments.
Thus multiple resources – social skills, kin, moral imperatives, and a
A case study of taxi owners in Caracas 73
variety of incomes in cash and kind crisscross in the lives of small entre-
preneurs.
37
Depending on the skill and consistency of their accounting
practices, they will be able to determine whether their enterprise is moving
ahead or is in retreat. Accounting is a subject that seldom surfaced in dis-
cussions, however, other than in conversations about upcoming expenses
and drivers being tardy with payments, while drivers might mutter that ‘this
business is only good for the owner’. Yet the many factors that had to be
considered in appraising the viability of the business might well have given
rise to more sophisticated discussions. My conclusion is that although
everyone I spoke with kept some kind of economic account of their activi-
ties, most of them had only a rudimentary knowledge of how one might
calculate and provide for the long-term pro?tability of their endeavors.
Mostly, evaluations of pro?tability appeared to be related to domestic
needs; if the business was providing for these comfortably, it was consid-
ered to be pro?table. Yet as Gudeman and Rivera (1990) have pointed out,
in daily life people adjust their belts to their means of the moment, and the
question of pro?tability is resolved through time.
NARRATIVE IN ENTREPRENEURSHIP STUDIES
AND IN ANTHROPOLOGY
In the preceding I have shown how entrepreneurship is socially situated and
embedded in the individual’s social situation and world view. Six family
members with similar backgrounds who are in frequent contact with each
other approach their seemingly identical business endeavors with widely
diverging strategies and end goals. Drivers, too, adapt di?erent strategies
vis-à-vis the challenge of earning a living circulating the streets of Caracas,
which depend on their needs, preferences and additional repertoire of
income-generating possibilities. In the process of realizing their objectives,
owners and drivers may, in turn, annex and pro?t by the work and resources
of a much broader range of individuals whose productivity ?ows into the
taxi enterprise.
None of the owners or drivers in these pages portrays themselves as hero-
entrepreneurs in their accounts of their activities; rather they tend to see
themselves as victims, warding o? the claims of their counterparts. Owners
and drivers are tied to one another by a combination of need and oppor-
tunity, but also by the traditional cultural values and social mores of the
society, and their beliefs about, and tenuous hopes concerning one another.
The working alliances that are established are far from unproblematic, and
turnover in the branch is high. What is the typical taxista ‘really like,’ what
motivates him, owners wonder, and how can I get him to take good care of
74 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
the car and deposit the rental fee regularly? Drivers, on the other hand, use
traditional social conventions and the rights and duties involved in the
concept of patronage to win concessions from owners, and to stretch the
economic leeway available to them within the alliance. The elements of raw
experience, and both ignorance and knowledge of each other are at play in
the narratives owners and taxistas construct about each other’s reasoning
and motivations, and in the strategies they use and decisions they make.
The six taxi owners in this study more or less unconsciously made con-
stant use of narratives, as did the taxistas. My neighbor Ana told me many
stories about her own and her siblings’ drivers, and about her future plans,
not only as a way of passing time with a new friend but also, I felt, with
eagerness to hear my reactions to the accounts. When she met her sisters or
talked to them on the phone, business problems were the main topic. In
these conversations useful information was being exchanged, about
di?erent drivers and their doings, and about ways to deal with problems.
Evaluations of particular situations were corroborated or refuted, doubts
voiced, reassurances sought. A body of knowledge was thus being built up
mutually through narrative exchange, while the entrepreneurs de?ned and
positioned themselves in relation to other actors, and characterized them-
selves as businessmen.
Narratives are designed within the bounds of the moral praxis of the
society, and thereby become e?cient tools in interaction between groups;
as can be seen in Henry and Lourdes’ aversion to being drawn into their
taxistas’ lives, since drivers’ representations of their reality threatened the
pro?tability of the alliances. Magally sought to turn the content of narra-
tives to her own ends to control her drivers, while Ana and Armando hoped
to put an end to their moral power by de?ning their drivers as economic
equals through a legal contract, the opción a compra.
What, then, can we learn about entrepreneurship by using a methodol-
ogy that makes use of narratives? Time-consuming and convoluted, the use
of a narrative approach in social research involves following people and
documenting their talk and actions in routine daily activities as well as at
important turning points. One must follow new leads, listen, question,
interview, record, and think about what people say in a way that strives to
see beyond the words, to read between the lines. Narratives challenge us to
seek connections, to discover the larger picture, and to make intuitive, inter-
pretive leaps in reasoning that may not always be easy to back up with the
collected data. As such, it may be academically riskier than using quanti-
tative methods that more neatly de?ne, delimit and document; for a narra-
tive strategy immediately plunges the researcher into the chaos of life, the
seeming impossibility of obtaining reliable information as one succumbs to
the inevitable selective memory, perspective and subjectivity – both of
A case study of taxi owners in Caracas 75
oneself, and of each informant. But such are the mindscapes in which busi-
nesses develop and decisions are made.
A narrative method o?ers an excellent way to get at the emotional
content of entrepreneurship, at the rationalities and irrationalities that
drive business activity, the role and use of information and misinformation,
of incentive and coercion. It will reveal the cultural codes and moral stu?
of the society, the content of concepts such as work, capital, bargaining,
commercial ethics, and success.
In the business con?gurations that the members of this entrepreneurial
family design, one sees di?erent positioning in regard to the unknown mass
of drivers: attempts to remain distant from them, to control them, to
encourage them, or to ‘empower’ them with a car of their own – if at a high
price. Among all the owners one perceives the desire to construct an enter-
prise that they can run ‘by remote control’, where they do not need to drive
the taxis themselves, and where drivers are responsible, make payments on
time, take care of vehicles, and do not try to enmesh owners in their lives
or bargain for better terms. The most extreme example of this is Armando,
who tries to run an enterprise via his sister Ana while working in the USA
Work is to be done by the drivers; the owners are to collect income on their
investment. Establishing this kind of a business might be seen as the
measure of success. Instead, however, taxi owners are drawn into an unend-
ing round of negotiation and renegotiation with wayward drivers, garages,
insurance companies, and with bureaucratic state institutions, in order to
complete taxi registration and paperwork. This continuous process of con-
frontation and concession is something that they lament, seeing much of it
as needless headaches brought on them by the inadequacies of the state
bureaucracy and the actions of their irresponsible allies. The ethics of
owners vary, but all seek to in some way sever the moral patron/client bond
by de?ning the taxistas as free agents, as businessmen in their own right.
Narratives also provide an entry into an understanding of the business
environment in the society at large, because informants are always interact-
ing with and against counterparts, institutions, and the socioeconomic
environment as a whole; and do at times come to transform the environ-
ment of which they are an integral part. Here one can uncover factors that
encourage or limit entrepreneurial activity, as well as incentives, costs, and
rewards that are more di?cult to see with other methods. One may discover
economic connections, networks, and ?ows that entrepreneurs are not
themselves aware of, or prefer to suppress, such as, for example, the role of
self-educated mechanics and car parts makers in the barrios in keeping the
liaisons between cab owners and drivers pro?table, and the taxis on the
streets instead of in the workshop. Apparent in the case of taxistas in
Caracas, too, is the high cost of capital for the disenfranchised, and the
76 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
consequences of the lack of a social support system. Even if a driver can
obtain an opción a compra contract, the probability that he will be able to
carry it through as written, working every day for two or three years,
appears slim; although chances rise if other members of the family are
gainfully employed, or if, as one driver indicated, a portion of the family
food is provided by a conuco outside the city limits. Here, again, one sees
how income from one sector of family activities ?ows into making another
sector possible, and pro?table.
Interesting in this context, too, is the pricing of rental fees. While the cost
to drivers may seem excessively high, and one might conclude that this is
the reason so many of them fall behind on payments and eventually lose
access to the cars, the high rate of return on capital is seen as a necessity for
the owners, who are subject to constant devaluation of the national cur-
rency and therewith their capital, and are apprehensive over the frequent
changes of government policy. In this insecure business atmosphere with
few incentives for investment, owners feel they must recuperate their capital
quickly or risk losing it. The weak institutions in the country preclude many
of the capital-preserving mechanisms available in more developed econ-
omies – such as ways to get debtors to pay up. Perhaps one could say that
the taxistas who do pay their rents also pay for those who leave their taxis
and a debt behind them. It is amply evident that rather than being entre-
preneurial heroes, those who remain in the branch over time are survivors
of a very volatile business environment.
It is important to keep in mind that even the simplest narratives are
complex constructions, selective accounts of selective events. As experience
is ?ltered through the observer’s senses, its representation is also ?ltered by
perspective. Organization analysts collect and analyze narratives in
di?erent ways, as Czarniawska (1998) has pointed out. In writing entre-
preneurship, there are many levels of ‘telling’, all of them riddled with
interpretations and representation, each a further step in narrating the
events. Any collected story includes the words of others. This collected
mass of subjectivity brings with it that of the researcher in collection, and
again in representation. The ways in which we shape and ?lter our repre-
sentations have been thoroughly examined by anthropologists (Marcus
and Fisher, 1986; Cli?ord and Marcus, 1986), and perhaps this has been
one of the more useful contributions that anthropology has made to the
use of narrative in social science. In my tale of entrepreneurs and the taxis
of Caracas, I amcombining stories of individual negotiations of a di?cult
economy with other stories I have previously collected, consciously and
subconsciously, including those of what a business venture ought to be,
what entrepreneurship is, and of how anthropological ?eldwork should be
carried out. The result is a new story, a new construction, bearing some
A case study of taxi owners in Caracas 77
resemblance to what might be ‘out there’ in the world, ever unfolding, and
inviting interpretation.
POSTSCRIPT
Since I left Venezuela in early May of 2002, the country has gone through
con?ictive and trying times, which have had considerable consequences
for the transport sector. The currency has been severely devalued.
38
In
December 2002 and January 2003 a two-month long general strike called
by the political opposition to President Hugo Chávez disrupted oil exports
and domestic distribution, resulting in an acute lack of gasoline. During
this period, drivers had to spend up to eight to twelve hours in line waiting
to ?ll their tanks.
39
Soon after the strike, currency controls were put in place
to put a stop to capital ?ight, a?ecting the cost and availability of spare
parts, many of which are imported. The number of cabs in the streets has
decreased, because many remain in workshops awaiting spare parts, but
more people are also taking buses and the subway to save money. Violence
has increased considerably due to the deteriorating economic situation, and
drivers are more frequently robbed of their day’s take, cars are stolen more
often, and more drivers are killed at the hands of assailants.
In the middle of May 2003, I received an e-mail from Ana and Jorge,
which recounted the changes in the family members’ enterprises. Henry has
left Venezuela for a job in France, and ‘sold’ his two cars via opción a
compra before he left. He is happy with the deal despite the devaluation,
and the drivers are complying with their obligations; the cars are being
administrated by Ana. Lourdes had one car stolen, recuperated, and then
stolen again; and another car was totally destroyed in an accident. Since her
insurance had lapsed she did not receive any reimbursement from the insu-
rance company. She continues to work with two cabs. Magally had one taxi
stolen and was reimbursed by the insurance company, but decided to sell
the other taxis due to the high cost of maintenance. She is currently looking
for another area in which to invest. Ana continues to work with her four
cabs. One of them is in opción a compra, but the driver is very remiss in
meeting payments. She wants to cancel the deal, but refrains because of the
high legal costs that she would have to meet in order to do so. Raimundo
had one car stolen and returned to him in very poor condition. He sold it
at great loss, but continues to work his remaining two cabs. Unfortunately
the drivers do not meet their payments regularly. Armando asked Lourdes
to put his cabs in a garage in the autumn of 2002 (about a year after he
started his enterprise), when he felt that repairs were eating up all the
income they produced. He planned to sell them, and did sell the one he
78 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
shared with Magally, but shortly afterwards the general strike broke out,
and was soon followed by currency controls. At present he has no way of
getting the proceeds of an eventual sale out of the country, and he is thus
undecided about what to do.
The economic crisis, then, has a?ected the owners negatively. Again, the
cab owners have made di?erent decisions as to the advisability of remain-
ing in the business, departing from their own personal circumstances. Yet
as the communal achievements of rule of law, a stable currency and free
trade and ?nancial ?ows disintegrate in the country, these individual enter-
prises become more vulnerable, and those who run them can merely hope
to stay a?oat in choppy seas.
A case study of taxi owners in Caracas 79
4. ‘Going against the grain . . .’
Construction of entrepreneurial
identity through narratives
40
Lene Foss
INTRODUCTION
The focus inthis chapter is entrepreneurial identity, atheme that has not been
mainstream in entrepreneurial research. My aim is to explore the relation
between entrepreneurial identity and individuals’ life course. The research
?eld has, to my knowledge, paid scant attention to theories that relate the
‘entrepreneurial self’ to events in the life of individuals and to the cultural
context in which they live. In a recent study it is argued that entrepreneurial
stories facilitate the crafting of a new venture identity (Lounsbury and
Glynn, 2001). I aminterested in exploring how life stories facilitate the con-
struction of entrepreneurial identity. Life is lived in places and where people
have some sort of history. Identity is therefore culturally linked. My
approach to entrepreneurship is that it is more of a cultural phenomenon
than an economic one (Hjorth, Johannisson and Steyaert, 2003). I believe
that an approach linking the ‘self’ of the individual to entrepreneurial activ-
ities can reveal howentrepreneurship is culturally situated. Stories, or narra-
tives, may facilitate a better understanding of how life-course experiences
matter for revealing entrepreneurial identity. My question is therefore: What
does a narrative – a life story – tell us about entrepreneurial identity?
My methodological approach is to narrate identity through the autobio-
graphic genre (Bruner, 1990; Davies and Harré, 1990). I seek to make a
methodological contribution to the narrative genre in entrepreneurship
studies by letting the narrator have the main voice in the chapter. I have lis-
tened to a storyteller, Bente, a 42-year-old female entrepreneur who started
a theatre ten years ago. My role has been to edit the text according to life-
course sequences I have found in her story. The chapter is organized as
follows: ?rst, I lay out the conceptual framework of identity construction
and life-course theory; second, I describe how identity may be narrated and
I give an account of the autobiographic genre of narratives; I then give a
brief introduction to the regional context of the case. The main part of the
80
chapter – the narrative – is organized as ?ve parts or sequences, followed
by an analysis and a conclusion.
IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION AND LIFE COURSE
Accounts of identity are related to the concept of ‘self’. The early key the-
orists in this ?eld, like Mead (1934) clearly stated that the notion of self is
constructed through interactions with other people. According to Cerulo
(1997) microsociological perspectives dominated identity theory in the
1970s, when the focus was on the formation of ‘me’, exploring the ways in
which interpersonal interactions mould an individual’s sense of self.
Whereas the early humanist theories assume a unitary model of self which
is based on the principles of continuity and consistency, newer post-structu-
ralist theories advocate principles of the fragmentary, shifting and dynamic
nature of self (Hollway, 1989; Tong, 1989). Jackson and Warin (2000) ?nd
that post-structuralists approaches fail to resolve the problematic nature of
the relationships between di?erent facets of self and devalue the ‘organiz-
ing’ function of self (p. 377). In a critique of approaches that assume that
individuals act like ‘chameleons’, Marsh and Hattie (1996) argue for a per-
spective that enables us to account for the ways in which individuals inte-
grate and absorb information into their existing framework of self-beliefs.
For them ‘self’ is ‘an active, organising, individual consciousness’ (p. 441).
My approach in this chapter is to make a synthesis between the post-struc-
turalistic and the humanistic view. I see the entrepreneurial ‘self’ as a multi-
faceted and dynamic one that evolves over the life course of an individual,
but I also viewthe human creation of ‘self’ as a process of constructing pat-
terns of consistency and coherence with regard to the nature of their iden-
tity in relation to others.
In exploring the entrepreneurial identity and life course I use the term
‘transition’. Transitional points are particularly rich events for exploring
changes in a person’s construction of self. Jackson and Warin (2000) state
that ‘Entry into a new social context entails a reappraisal of self-beliefs and
may act as a catalyst for signi?cant changes . . . there will be certain contexts
that will be critical in terms of bringing self-beliefs to consciousness and
making adjustments and changes to them . . . Transitional phases require
a person to “cope”’ (p. 378). I am speci?cally concerned with how the
entrepreneurial identity is linked to transitional points in the life course
of entrepreneurs – how the dynamic element in a person’s identity is con-
stituted by a variety of human experiences over time. In line with the
recent focus in identity theory (Cerulo, 1997), I approach identity as a
source of mobilization rather than a product of it. This means that I view
Construction of entrepreneurial identity 81
the narrator’s identity as a driving force in entrepreneurial activities and
venture creation. I thereby view transitions in the life course as an analyti-
cal tool to re?ect on how entrepreneurial identity is created. Transitions in
a way re?ect how an individual copes with the changes in biological and his-
torical time. This is related to the concept of agency in life course research.
Agency refers to people’s ability to make informed choices about the future
as well as their faith in personal possibility in situations requiring important
choices (Elder and Shananan, 1997). To concentrate on ambitious objec-
tives is more likely to appeal to young people with faith in their own abilities
than to those who lack self con?dence (Elder, 1974; Bandura, 1995).
Life-course theory synthesizes historical and individual elements in one
common research ?eld. The perspective includes both time, social space and
individual development (Elder and Shananan, 1997). In life-course theory
the assumption is that individuals’ developmental processes, and the conse-
quences thereof, are decided by the life course which people follow, be it
marked by good times or bad (Elder and Shananan, 1997). The life courses
of individuals are then determined through an interplay between historical
conditions, local situations and individual agency. I aim to analyse the entre-
preneurial identity in the narrative with these issues in mind.
Whereas the mainstream life-course theory is macrosociological and
quantitative in its character, more hermeneutical, narrative, biographical
and life-history approaches seem to develop within the ?eld (Cohler, 1982;
Bertaux, 1981; Bertaux and Kohli, 1984; Clausen, 1998). According to a
state-of-the art article there are few studies on how cultural life scripts
shape retrospective views (Hagestad, 1990). I want to take on this challenge
by linking the study of entrepreneurial identity to an autobiographic genre
of narratives, so that the narrator’s own re?ections over the life course can
give us knowledge of the role of ‘self’ related to a cultural context. This also
?ts well with newer identity theory which sees identity construction as a
process of self-re?ection as a person moves through time and space, and
through di?erent organizational and institutional environments (Lindgren
and Wåhlin, 2001). I see this self-re?ection as a story, and I follow Bertaux
(1981, p. 9) in preferring the term life story to life history, when I deal with
an individual’s subjective retrospective report of past experiences and their
meaning to that person.
The cultural contextualizing of entrepreneurship and the linking of iden-
tity to life course, invites us to pay attention to ethnicity. The notion of eth-
nicity can be de?ned as a sense of belonging to a community (Bradley,
1996, p. 12). On the North Calotte where the narrator in this chapter comes
from, there are several ethnic groups like saami,
41
and kven
42
in addition to
Finnish and Russian immigrants.
Hence, I subscribe to the viewthat identity both has spatial and temporal
82 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
dimensions (Anderson, 1994). The spatial refers to individuals’ attachment
to place, communities and regions whereas the temporal dimension refers to
the lived life from childhood to grown-up. This view makes it possible to
draw on recent work in human geography where the concepts of space and
time are linked together (Taylor, 2003; Thrift, 2003). I view entrepreneurial
identity as unfolding between these two dimensions. Entrepreneurship
research needs to focus on the signi?cance of place has also been called for
in recent contributions (Berg, 1997; Berg, 2002). A sense of place derives
from the need to belong and for somewhere to call ‘home’ rather than con-
ceiving of oneself as ‘just’ a member of society (Pietikainen and Hujanen,
2003). In satisfying this need for roots, people make commitment to places
(Sennet, 1999). I speci?cally draw on the concept as it has been developed
within the humanistic (cultural) geography, where sense of place refers to
individuals’ subjective perception and attachment to places (Agnew and
Duncan, 1989). My contributionhere is toconnect the constructionof entre-
preneurial identity to what place has meant for individuals through their life.
NARRATING IDENTITY AND THE
AUTOBIOGRAPHIC GENRE
An autobiography is a self-narrative of identity (Czarniawska, 1997).
Through autobiographies individuals construct past events and actions in
personal narratives to claim their identity and construct their lives
(Riesman, 1993). Lucius-Hoene and Deppermann (2000) argue that auto-
biographical research interviewing is an appropriate instrument for empiri-
cal studies of narrative identity, because it unites three crucial features that
lie at the heart of any conception of ‘narrative identity’: its life-span per-
spective, its constructivity and its social foundation. Let us examine the
constructivity of narratives and their social foundation more closely.
Bruner (1987) takes a constructivist approach to autobiographies, based
on the premise that ‘world making’ is the principal function of mind. He
argues that autobiographies should not be viewed as a record of what hap-
pened, but rather as a continuing interpretation and reinterpretation of
personal experience. Polkinghorne (1996) echoes that in a simple way: ‘the
identity story as it is lived, and the story as it is told’. Autobiographies,
according to Bruner, then become a set of procedures for ‘life making’. The
narrative achievement is in the end a selective achievement of memory call.
In following this line the narrative in this chapter is not to be viewed as
Bente’s explanation of what in her life contributed to her choice of becom-
ing an entrepreneur. It is better viewed as a story of how she identi?es
central elements in her life as important for her to share with me. To cite
Construction of entrepreneurial identity 83
Bruner: ‘eventually the culturally shaped cognitive and linguistic processes
that guide the self-telling of life narratives achieve the power to structure
perceptual experience, to organize memory, to segment and purpose-build
the very “events” of a life’ (p. 15). As I see it, the telling of the story and
Bente’s life cannot be disconnected: how she tells about herself to me is her
conception of herself. In this case I knew from prior interviews that Bente
would be a good narrator. She enjoyed talking and re?ected in a direct and
spontaneous way on my questions in face-to-face conversations and over
the telephone. She enjoyed the opportunity to tell a long story. Her open-
ness must, however, according to Bruner, be seen in relation to a culturally
shaped processes.
As Riesman (1993) points out respondents narratize particular experi-
ences in their lives, often where there has been a breach between ideal and
real, self and society. I am, as said, interested in looking for breakpoints
that represent transitions in life. Riesman further states that human agency
and imagination determine what gets included and excluded in narrativiza-
tion, how events are plotted, and what they are supposed to mean. That
leads us to a claim that narrative interviewing is a dialogical, pragmatic
activity (Lucius-Hoene and Deppermann, 2000). These authors further
state that the interpersonal relationship between narrator and researcher is
made up of institutional, imaginative, sociocategorical and other commu-
nicative frames which are enacted by both partners during the interview (p.
199). Polkinghorne (1996) stresses that told stories are directed towards an
audience, whose roles, needs, and moral stance must be observed in the
transformation into speech.
Lucius-Hoene and Deppermann (2000) argue that research in which one
works with life stories underestimates a) the performative and positioning
aspects of the narrative situation and the narrative product, and b) the par-
ticular autoepistemological and communicative tasks that arise over the
course of a narrative interview. Narratives resulting from research inter-
viewing must therefore be considered as scienti?c artefacts, demanding par-
ticular re?exive and communicative activities and skills. It is important to
state that Bente and I knew one another from two prior projects, where I
had interviewed her. I therefore knew Bente as a woman that was up-front,
direct in her talk, not shy and very accommodating in sharing her experi-
ences with a researcher.
The second aspect of Lucius-Hoene and Deppermann (2000) deals with
how we feel obliged and bound to the person to whom we present ourselves
in social contexts, our reliability and responsibility as social beings. This
makes the narrator, when presenting a story to a researcher, bound by a
social context that may a?ect how the story is told. With regard to the com-
municative aspect of the autobiographic narrative I view Bente as the main
84 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
character, the narrator. The way she told me her story may be a result of
her enjoying the situation – having someone listening to what she found
important in her life. Being an open person she truly found a close relation-
ship with me from the ?rst time. That, however, does not mean that she is
excluded from the issues discussed above, i.e. the pragmatic and position-
ing aspect of being the narrator. The way she told her story and the ele-
ments she put in there are not only dependent on time and context. It is also
a result of how she wants herself to be portrayed.
In a more concrete way the conversations between Bente and me went
thus. My ?rst question was ‘How did you get the idea of starting a theatre?’
Bente’s answer to this was very rich and indicated several issues of life-
course concern such as childhood and upbringing and the regional connec-
tion. In following the guidelines in narrative interviewing (Bertaux and
Kohli, 1984, p. 224) the rest of the conversation went like this: Bente talked
about what had mattered to her, and I intervened only when each of the sto-
rylines seemed to come to an end. My questions were sort of following up
the di?erent threads that were interwoven in her ‘grand story’. In transcrib-
ing the ?rst interview I searched for underlying themes related to transi-
tional points in her life course. I followed Riesman (1993) guidance and
structured the narrative ‘from the inside’, from her meanings encoded in
her talk. This strategy privileges the teller’s experience. The ?ve sequences
of her narrative are the result of that.
The following three telephone interviews were performed as I worked
with the text. I needed time to transcribe each interview and connect parts
of it to the rest of the text. My questions in these conversations were geared
to ?ll out the framework that was laid in the ?rst interview. I sort of fol-
lowed Mishler’s (1991, p. 277) point of arranging and rearranging inter-
views and the text in light of my own discovery of clarifying and deepening
my understanding of what was happening in the discourse. The questions
for the three subsequent interviews were carefully selected after having
worked with the text. For example, more knowledge was created around
each sequence, issues were clari?ed, some double-checking of statements
was done, and more information was produced. In a way, the narrative was
a ‘clearing-up’ experience for both of us. For her, as she felt comfortable by
being allowed to tell somebody about her life and to re?ect over issues that
clearly matter for her self-understanding. For me it was an opportunity to
let her narrative sink in as time allowed me to re?ect and write between the
interviews. The methodological approach taken here was a result of how
this process worked between us.
Construction of entrepreneurial identity 85
THE CONTEXT OF THE REGION: A BRIEF HISTORY
OF SØR-VARANGER COMMUNITY AND KIRKENES
With its geographic location to the north, bordering Russia and Finland
in the east, Sør-Varanger has a unique history, ethnicity and culture.
Archeological ?ndings show that the ?rst inhabitants, the Komsahunters,
came from the East about 10 000 ?? (Lunde, Simonsen and Vorren, 1979).
Fishing, hunting and later agriculture constituted the economic backbone
of the region – rural reindeer-keeping became important in 1500–1600. The
early inhabitants, the saami people lived as nomads and migrated back and
forth between the Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish areas.
The ?rst merchant trade between Norway and Russia, the so-called
Pomortrade, started in the latter part of 1700 where the Sør-Varanger popu-
lation traded their excess of ?sh against wheat and rye with Russian mer-
chants from the White Sea in the summer months. This ended with the
Russian Revolution in 1917. The large areas between Norway and Russia
where there never had been a national border, the ‘joint areas’, were divided
between the countries in 1826 and made conditions for good neighbour rela-
tions between Norway and Russia and later Finland. Sør-Varanger was
therefore the last part that was given Norwegian sovereignty, 12 years after
Norway was established as a nation state. After 1826 a steady immigration
took place, especially from Finland. The ethnic groups were Norwegian,
Saami and Finnish, each with their own language and culture. Sør-Varanger
was in this period a cultural melting pot where the new population began to
take form.
The main thing that came to shape Kirkenes’ industrial development was
the discovery of iron ore in the mountains outside the town in 1906 and the
creation of the mining company Sydvaranger Ltd that followed. From then
on Kirkenes developed rapidly into a modern and well-organized town
with a major industrial company serving as a cornerstone and driving force
in developing the community. The population increased rapidly, with
people moving in from other regions in Norway and from Sweden, Finland
and Russia. In 1910 their population was 3329, in 1920 4798, in 1930 7590.
In addition to the in?ux of blue-collar workers, a managerial class of
o?cers and managers employed at Sydvaranger AS developed. The town
also bene?ted from the establishment of public, government-funded ser-
vices such as the postal service, customs service and telegraph service. A
middle class of white-collar employees became the basis for a more ‘sophis-
ticated’ culture. Compared to other parts of Finnmark, Kirkenes in the
early 1960s had roads made of asphalt, ?oodlit ski-tracks, tennis courts, a
swimming pool and a revue theatre.
Sør-Varanger was a front-line area in World War II. The Germans made
86 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
Kirkenes into a main harbour for supplies in order to facilitate their attacks
on the Murmansk front (Lunde, Simonsen and Vorren, 1979). They feared
an Allied Soviet invasion of Finnmark and started a desperate building-up
of forti?cations on the Finnmark coast. Sør-Varanger was made into 13
defence areas. The Soviet response was to destroy this in addition to German
storage buildings and naval tra?c. As these were located close to Norwegian
settlements, the following three years of air raid attacks against Kirkenes
almost destroyed the town completely. The German troops were not success-
ful at the Murmansk front and after Finland made a truce with the Soviets
in 1944, the German retreat fromFinnmark started. They burned everything
behind them when retreating, making it impossible for the Russians to use
any infrastructure. Kirkenes became occupied by the Russians, who liber-
ated the area on October 25th 1944. To everyone’s surprise the Soviets did
not use their power to gain the territory of Sør-Varanger and the rest of
Finnmark, but marched out at the end of the war, on September 25th 1945.
World War II changed the border between Norway and the Soviet Union,
back to the borders during the Empire of the Tsars before 1920. The
Petsjenga area, given to the Soviet Union by Finland in 1944, was now
closed towards Norway and put under continuous surveillance. In 1947, the
195.7-km-long border was drawn in accordance with the 1826 convention.
The treaty was rati?ed by Norway and The Soviet Union in 1950. The treaty
put several restrictions on the inhabitants on each side of the border in the
two countries. This was likely to be a?ected by the foreign policy climate that
came about in the last part of the 1940s. ‘The Cold War’ was the era after
Norway joined NATO in 1949 and became a close ally of the US.
A new period of collaboration between Norway and Russia started after
the fall of the Soviet empire in 1991, in the period of glasnost and peres-
troijka. A renewal of the relationship and trade between Kirkenes and
their Russian neighbours took place. Today there are 9000 inhabitants in
Kirkenes. The town has airport facilities and is the ?nal port of call for the
Coastal Steamer. The main industries are ship repair, service and various
enterprises directed towards Northwest Russia. The close relationship
between Kirkenes and Northwest Russia is being reestablished now that the
business community and people in general have become competent in their
cooperation with Russia. Fifteen years of regional cooperation has estab-
lished an extensive political and industrial-commercial network and accu-
mulated experience in interacting with Russia. Russians constitute the
largest group of foreign settlers in a town that houses 42 di?erent national-
ities and has been o?cially designated the national junction for Northwest
Russian cooperation. A saying runs in Kirkenes among the inhabitants: ‘We
are the Russian town in Norway’ and people on the Kolapeninsula also call
the town ‘Little Murmansk’.
Construction of entrepreneurial identity 87
In 1995, after the bankruptcy of the city’s major employer, Sydvaranger
Ltd, Kirkenes became part of a national scheme to revitalize the economies
of a selected group of Norwegian municipalities. Starting in the mid-1990s,
this special status made it important for the community to generate new
ideas and to establish ?rms and activities that could employ those made
redundant by the closure of the industrial plant. With regard to new
venture creation ‘Forum for entrepreneurs in Sør-Varanger’ is a business
network for newly established businesses and the business community in
general based on informal cooperation, network coordination, shared
pro?ling and common courses to increase the quali?cations of partici-
pants. A business and real estate company called ‘Kirkenes Development’
works for industrial growth in Sør-Varanger. As the activity at Sydvaranger
Ltd. is winding up, external companies and local entrepreneurs are invited
to cooperate for the best possible working conditions, with the aim of
maintaining a viable community with no more than average unemploy-
ment. Developing Sør-Varanger into an international commercial interface
between Northwest Russia and Western Europe is part of such a strategy.
The Barents Cooperation is a Norwegian initiative, formally established
in Kirkenes in 1993, with the aim of establishing a stabilizing pattern of
cooperation between the Nordic countries and Russia, and of reinforcing
Russia’s role in general European cooperation. Another aim is to promote
a sustainable development in the Barents region, primarily Russia, which
faces serious political, economic, social and environmental challenges. The
‘Barents Secretariat’ is an inter-municipal institution and constitutes an
extensive network that possesses signi?cant experience in dealing with
Northwest Russia. Improvements in the Russian economy and economic
policies have boosted the Barents Cooperation through increased interest
in trade and investment. Norwegian initiatives to produce gas in the
Barents Sea foreshadow the expected Russian activities in petroleum in the
area, implying a growing demand for on-shore activities and infrastructure.
The Barents Cooperation is of high regional priority, and the expressed
wish is that Norway shall control exploitation of resources together with
Russia.
To sum up, the historical and cultural context of Bente’s upbringing and
the locality of her business are both challenged by being far north in a
peripheral region, seen from a national point of view. However, the region
has a strong multiethnic and collaborative culture and is challenged by a
deeper mutual interdependence with Russia after the fall of the Soviet
imperium. The community is facing the challenge of being transformed
from a typical industry work place to a community where new initiative is
needed for employment of the inhabitants.
88 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
GROWING UP, MOVING OUT AND COMING HOME –
FIVE SEQUENCES IN AN ENTREPRENEURIAL
STORY
First sequence: ‘I am used to having to struggle for everything’.
I think I was living in a world of my own for a long time, and to a larger extent
than others. I was in fact quite sporty, played handball and all the rest of it, as
well as doing dog-sledging and stu? like that. But when I went sledging I would
be in a Jack London sort of world. I would be in Alaska. And I think I played
like this for a longer time than others did. During my childhood, my mother
worked at the police station, before she took up work at a school. During the
whole of my childhood, she has been concerned with theatre and sports. She was
awarded a project in 1985, in Alta, in which she worked with unemployed youth
and theatre. In the wake of this project, a position was erected by the county –
revue and amateur theatre instructor – which she occupied until she retired.
She was a mother who would be away quite a lot. She travelled extensively, and
she was very active and committed. She was the kind of mother who always said
that whatever we didwe shouldcome home. We wouldbe welcome nomatter what
hadhappened. I hada sister whoexploredmore things thanI did. She didall kinds
of things, as kids do, but everything was alright as long as she came home. We were
given trust as long as we were responsible. Ours was a very open and lively house.
My mother was very committed to whatever she did, and she was into sports. She
played handball until she was 42 and when my sister joined the women’s team, the
two of themplayed handball together. She spent a lot of time on this.
My mother was born in 1934, and was the only girl of six children. She had
?ve brothers, and her birth was quite a happening. They sat her on one of those
old-fashioned rocking chairs, and her brothers fetched all their friends to come
and look at her. She was never pampered or spoiled, I don’t think post-war chil-
dren were, but she received a great deal of attention, and this gave her con?dence.
She was in a way cheered on because she was a girl, and this must have shaped
her personality in both positive and negative ways. She was quite pronounced in
her ways. Yet she has always taken people seriously, whether they be adults or
young people. I consider this a very good quality.
Of course there is a parallel in occupational careers between my mother and
me . . . It’s all about being introduced into the theatrical environment at an early
age. I was 17 when I ?rst worked at Hålogaland Theatre Company in Tromsø.
During my adolescence it seemed natural to do this. Being part of a milieu of
amateur theatre was for me part of growing up, and I was sort of hooked and
wanted to try more of it. One of my most important supporters worked with
theatre here in Kirkenes when I was 12 years old, and he used to live at our house.
And now he works at the Samovar theatre.
My father worked at Sydvaranger all his life, as a transportation manager. We
received all the models of the cars and the cranes from the plant and used to play
with them. As he died when I was 15 I never knew him in adult age.
43 44
But I
know that he was very creative. He had amazing drawing skills, and he made
incredible things. I have found drawings and other creations of his youth, but he
never really realized these talents to the full. I guess it was a sign of the times;
you were supposed to start work at Sydvaranger, and if you were smart you
Construction of entrepreneurial identity 89
would climb the career ladder and be promoted to new appointments. He
belonged to a small family and was an only child until the age of 15, when he
got a brother. I don’t know how old he was when he met my mother, but he was
a couple of years older than her. Coming into her extended family must have
been quite a shock to him. He always gave my mother the time she needed to live
out her own life. He was not involved in sports or amateur theatre groups or any-
thing like that. He was into hunting and ?shing, that was his ‘thing’. Thinking
back though, I realize that he must have watched us when we were kids, that he
must have been there for us.
My sister, who is two years younger, and I are very strong in many ways. The
idea of having to make your own choices and be able to stand by them . . . We
could do whatever we wanted as long as we educated ourselves and made some
choices in our lives. We have always been able to try things out, been allowed the
liberty of doing things. I went to Portugal when I was 15 years old. We have
always been allowed to travel.
My sister was six years old when she knitted me a doll’s dress. My parents were
very concerned that we did individual things. The sewing machine was always
available. We were allowed to bake, we have always been allowed things like that.
But we were quite strictly and conservatively raised. We had to do dishes every
day, we received weekly pay, and all the rest of it. We were never permitted to
leave projects halfway. We had to complete everything we started, such as
making recorder bags with embroidery, an activity that became boring after a
while. I think this might be a disadvantage for me now that I have children of my
own. I recognize this feeling in relation to my own children – being able to put
the nine-year-old on my knee and just fool around, and taking the time to do
such things. I know that this is something I have to work on. I am very conscious
of these things. I don’t believe I experienced a lot of this when I grew up. We
didn’t have these tender relationships if you know what I mean.
I am dyslexic and at school I didn’t do very well in the written disciplines, but
did better in the creative ones. I remember coming home one Christmas with a
‘can do better’ in all subjects. I felt terrible; I cried and was very depressed and
frustrated. I remember my mother comforting me: ‘But, Bente, we can always do
better in everything!’ But my sister, who barely ever opens a book, has always
received top grades. I realized at an early age that I would never have anything
for free. I am used to having to struggle for everything. I think these are experi-
ences I carry around in life. In school I had to sit in a special group where we had
to build with lego blocks. In the end I refused to do it and I managed to skip
away. The wilfulness: ‘You can do it if you want and you can move mountains if
you only believe you can’ has given me much in my professional life. I have
learned to learn text fast. I see the text as pictures. I make up pictures in my head
and memorize pictures in order to learn. I took the gymnasium in Oslo in only
two years, and learned English by having to memorize the whole book. Now I
have realized that because I had to work so hard at school I have been used to
hard work and to not giving up. It leads to something in the end.
Stories have always meant much for me. I realize that I was hooked on telling
my story for a while. I think telling stories has been my strength in a lot of areas,
especially during the last years, and I believe I have had them in me all the time.
But I have been on and o? telling these stories. I think that the theatre as a form
of expression or an art form or as a profession is broad enough to allow people
to develop – it has no limiting ceiling so to speak. You constantly grow. One has
90 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
to go back and view where one has been in life, childhood, upbringing and ado-
lescence. What happens when you get children yourself ? Why are you particu-
larly vulnerable then? I am sure I use these things pretty consciously. It is not like
I say to the audience that in order to portray this character, I have used parts of
my life which went from there to here. But I do think that I use much of it.
Second sequence: ‘Daring to apply to the theatre academy’.
I actually planned to become a nurse, but then I thought that, once in a lifetime,
one should dare to apply to the Theatre Academy in Oslo. There were three
admission tests, and I reached the ?nal one. I was then told to go home, take up
‘stage plasticity’, diet and apply again next year. I felt that the Theatre Academy
did not constitute my idea of a theatre. I went home and discovered the meaning
of ‘stage plasticity’, which, by the way, is mobility on stage. I should dance ballet,
they said. Till then, I had only played handball. Ballet was not on o?er here . . .
I went home, and worked for a year in Hålogaland Amateur Company.
That year was an immense boost for me because I constantly received positive
feedback. First of all it was an easy job for me. I worked a lot, and was home
about once a week. Yet it was a prosperous year for me: being appreciated, and
managing my work, provided me with the secure feeling of mastery and a sense
of having found something in which I might excel. I applied anew, but this time
in Denmark, at the Theatre Academy in Copenhagen. By the time I had ?nished,
I had made a choice, and my idea of what a theatre should be had materialized.
You went to school to become an actor, to become attached to a theatre where
others would tell you what to do. But I worked very hard at school – after hours
too. We did our own things on the side. We also spent a great deal of time at the
Norwegian seamen’s church where we worked in the afternoons when we
couldn’t work at school. I initiated my own activities, as when we staged a witch
cabaret – a wonderful show, with which we toured here in Finnmark.
I did not want to be merely an employed actress. Upon completing my educa-
tion, I was o?ered a job accompanying one of my teachers to Canada. I declined,
I longed to go back north. I worked for a year in Tromsø, and discovered I did
not want to be a mere actress. I felt that, should you establish something, you
had to start from scratch. I also knew that a large and well-appointed theatre
building ‘Malmklang’ with all the facilities was vacant in Kirkenes. I simply said
I was starting up, and I received 5000 – Norwegian Kroner from the municipal-
ity. I moved here where I had not lived in ten years, and established a theatre
school and a theatre. I wanted to work with all aspects of theatre, and this place
provided me with that opportunity.
These years in Copenhagen gave me an opportunity to justify the mental
choices I had already made. They con?rmed my choices, put my competence in
perspective and extended it professionally. Personally I believe these were good
years. I got the feeling that there really are no national borders. I think it is good
to bring impulses such as these back to Kirkenes.
I had a background; I grew up in Kirkenes where people were aware of what
made the wheels of society turn. Many of my fellow students had never been to
a real industrial work place. They are not visible in the city. Industries are seldom
situated in the middle of a city. This background made me feel di?erent, in addi-
tion to coming from a dull little place like Kirkenes.
Construction of entrepreneurial identity 91
Third sequence: Running a theatre up in the far north: Finding an Arctic
niche
I named it ‘the Samovar theatre’ because I saw a theatre as a Samovar, a Russian
tea maker: A beautiful thing that you can ?ll up, tap o?, and that simmers all the
time. A theatre should be like that. The Samovar theatre undertakes various
activities: we stage our own professional productions, we run a theatre school for
children and youngsters, and we cooperate with other cultural institutions and
with the region’s businesses. These are the premises on which the Samovar
theatre’s philosophy is based, and we have embodied it.
With regard to employing sta?, I chose the people in the sta? on the basis that
they had my kind of energy, or shared my theatre philosophy. I wanted people
who were not just actors, but who set themselves aims for what they did. These
issues were particularly important during the ?rst years, when o?ering the chil-
dren a proper theatre school was most important. You can’t frown and insist on
your needs as an actor in situations like that. We had to work with the children
and be actors at the same time, based on an idea of having something to com-
municate. The stories you choose must be signi?cant enough to make it on stage,
and this means that sta? must be committed. This is perhaps what I mean by
energy. We spent a great deal of time, years, to lift these people to a level of scenic
competence, a level needed for the stage.
Bente moves into the details about the premises of the Samovar theatre
and describes three elements or objectives as crucial:
(1) ‘I want to educate youth’.
We started a theatre school in 1991. Sixty students between the age of 7 and 18
have been educated there. The educational principle is to meet the challenges at
the level of each individual. For us it is important to meet the challenges at the
level of each individual. For example we had a student enrolled in 1997 who is
both blind and deaf. My colleagues worked with him continually, following his
development closely. The work proved successful: he was able to fence in the last
show of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
The theatre school was a rather smart move; in time it became part of the
culture school. We have discovered numerous opportunities in the other areas of
the culture school. The fact that we stage our own productions, in addition to
this theatre education, has provided us with a di?erent goodwill. Anything goes
as long as your children are in it. From the very start we have had, and still have,
long waiting lists of children who want to join us. Our e?orts with the theatre
school have yielded results on a national level: today four people from the
National Theatre have been trained at the Samova theatre. In addition one girl
just made it to the production line at the Drama Institute in Stockholm, where
they only have an intake of four students every fourth year from the Nordic
countries. When I meet elderly people in the street they sometimes approach me
and say: I don’t know much about your theatre but what you do for the children
is good!
In this country, professionals who work with amateurs are not regarded as
92 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
true professionals, and professionals who work with children are marginalized.
The professional milieus have not entirely accepted the way we work. In my
opinion, we cannot live in Kirkenes and claim to work only with professional
performances, and not take part in, for example, working with children. I have
been very concerned with this issue ever since 1990. For this reason, the funding
was very important to us. First of all it gave us greater economic leeway.
Secondly it gave us a measure of recognition: ‘We can’t avoid them, because they
won’t give up, so we might as well let them run their theatre the way they want
to’. We have never tried to hide the fact that we work with children and young
people.
(2) Literary classics and historical roots: ‘Such things are important to tell!’
Our objective is to present Norwegian contemporary literature in a scenic form
to children, youth and adults. Equally important is the promotion of classic
dramas from world literature, especially when the dramas re?ect current events.
Since the start in 1990 the Samovar theatre has produced 17 full-length shows
mostly based on contemporary dramas.
Our professional productions are our most important activities. They consti-
tute the enterprise’s locomotive. This is where we ?nd the strength and will to
carry out the surplus activities. We have chosen the histories and the region that
surround us as our point of departure. It is important to us to make a theatre for
the people of Finnmark, for the people of Northern Norway. We cannot stage
productions that cannot be held in a tiny gymnasium. We have tried to ?nd
stories that would be of interest to the people who live here, and we have had to
use stories or things we have heard. This is what interests us, this means some-
thing to us.
One example of such a story is ‘The Swedish kids’. The idea came from my
mother who together with 359 other children were sent to Sweden in 1944.
Kirkenes was bombed during World War II and there were only eight houses left
at the end of the war. No single kid was left in Kirkenes; they were all sent to fos-
terparents in Sweden to ‘be fattened up’. On 17 May 1945 the boat with the
‘swedekids’ docked in Kirkenes. Such things are important to tell.
For making the play we started to interview people who had been sent to
Sweden and from this we made a play based on two stories; one from my mother
and one from another woman, whose father had been a partisan in Russia
throughout the war. In other to ‘neutralize’ the play where the two women played
their own roles, a dance was added, a collaboration with a theatre in
Hammerfest, in the western part of Finnmark.
Another example is the ‘Groove’ play, a play I originally wanted to call ‘The
smell of coldness and the sight of the sea’. I got the idea when I wandered on the
quay in Kirkenes and saw the Russian trawlers. I began to talk to the crew and
was touched by their personal stories. Many of them spent half a year on the
boat before they could return to their families in Kasaksthan. I hired a writer
and they interviewed the crews on the Russian boats. They made a story and con-
trasted it to another story of Finnish immigration, based on a story from my
great-grandmother. In the end, a third element, a Norwegian story, was put in
the centre of the play and the other two spooned around it.
The professional productions are the core element of the Samovar theatre and
Construction of entrepreneurial identity 93
still represent something new in the enterprise. The professional productions
motivate us, develop us, make us think creatively and develop ideas. It is during
the theatre productions, when we play, that ideas are developed. But they are also
the locus of all the frustrations related to mediation. At the end of the day, this
is where we ?nd the energy for everything else.
(3) The Northern Peninsula as a collaborative frame of reference: ‘We feel
like inhabitants of the Northern Cap’
I think the theatre relates more to the Northern Cap than to Finnmark or Sør-
Varanger. It is important to me that we tell stories that concern the Northern
Cap, such as stories from Finland. We feel like inhabitants of the Northern Cap.
We have cooperated extensively with Russia and Finland. It has been exhaust-
ing and di?cult at times, but we have carried through. Because of our geographi-
cal situation, it seems natural to create a east-west axis instead of a north-south
axis. Finland and Russia represent di?erent artistic levels and sources of very
exciting knowledge traditions.
This cooperation is also facilitated through the theatre school: in 1994, we
made our own festival with 220 participants from Norway, Finland, Russia and
Sweden and from the Saami areas. Two Russian groups of children were accom-
modated in families in Kirkenes and the Norwegian and Russian children linked
up with one another. We have hosted this international festival for children and
youth since 1994 and received the Barents festival prize for this e?ort. In 2000
our school was given national responsibility for hosting an internationally cele-
brated children and youth event.
We are currently cooperating with a theatre school in Murmansk. They used
to have culture schools in Russia, such as piano schools or dancing schools, but
they were eroded after pérestroijka. They couldn’t a?ord the schools anymore,
and as a result we have lost contact with a lot of people in the area. But now,
Murmansk has established a theatre school, which is very much like ours and
where children ranging from 5 to 19 years of age and of di?erent levels of ability
attend. The manager is an educated actress. The old culture schools used to have
pedagogues, but this actress produces very atypical performances with these chil-
dren, and she thinks in atypical ways. We visited them in November with two of
our groups of 12- to 19-year-olds, and we staged A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
We wanted to stage a production with the oldest children from their school and
ours. Because of the visa fees and the insurance involved, such productions are
expensive. We won’t be able to cover the charges, so I think we will have to ?nd
external funding.
The concept of the border is physical in the sense that you live so close to the
Russian and the Finnish borders. You actually see the social changes because
Russians are walking the streets of Kirkenes. I use to think: He’s Russian, now
why do I think he’s Russian? In the past, we didn’t see people we didn’t know
unless we travelled. The feeling of being close to the border is also personal in
the sense of exploring one’s own borders. I would never be satis?ed if I knew
exactly what I would be doing for the next two years. Of course I have made
plans for the future of the theatre, but I know that they may change. My goal is
not to predict the future.
I have to admit that I realize the importance of taking the performances to
94 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
Oslo. I have always been very persistent in saying that ‘well, sooner or later they
will have to come here’. But after we staged the story of ‘The forgotten colony’
in Oslo, and representatives of the granting authorities came to see us, I have had
to acknowledge the importance, both for the present and the future, of going
south. Although not an admission of failure, I feel a bit uneasy about the fact
that we are forced to travel south. Yet there is no use in being stubborn, we just
have to accept the fact that the authorities are down south.
Fourth sequence: ‘I hope the theatre does something with the people here’
– the enterprise as an agent of change
The Samovar theatre di?ers from other theatres because of its geographical situ-
ation, and because we have managed, over the years, to establish cooperation
with both Russia and Finland. We are also di?erent because we work with chil-
dren and young people, a task I consider important. We don’t establish borders
between professional work and the rest, or limit ourselves to pure acting. On the
contrary, we try to erase such borders. We feel that working with amateurs is
alright, and signal that there is no harm in cooperating with Russia. It takes a
little longer – sure it does. We are di?erent from other free groups and theatres
in the sense that we erase borders and claim to manage anyway. We are also
di?erent because we thematize some of the unknown stories, and because we
choose to work on projects that may not be economically pro?table. We choose
to stand by our beliefs no matter what, at whatever cost.
We experience that we provide children with security and a ?rm platform in
life. They dare to stand up in the newspaper and say: we are against larger
schools! Young people who have moved on to other types of education return to
testify that their years with us were absolutely wonderful. Sooner of later they
will occupy positions where they will see the importance of culture. Meeting
young people their age from Russia will also be pro?table in the long run.
I hope the theatre makes a di?erence to people here at the municipality of Sør-
Varanger. I hope we can. We are not good enough, but we will be. We will
become more visible now on the ‘city stage’ more than the theatre’s ‘Tuesday in
march’ program. Our visibility should not depend on arranging large festivals or
stage productions.
Since 1994, the Samovar theatre has cooperated with the high school. The stu-
dents are o?ered the opportunity to stage a paper instead of writing it. In this
work we encounter a lot of 18-year-olds in their last year of sixth form. The
municipality arranges meetings for people who return home. I have been to a
couple of them to inform about our theatre. I have talked to these people, and I
have had the pleasure of discovering that increasingly more people have the
courage to choose di?erently, as opposed to the time I chose to apply to the
theatre academy. This is how it was: you will never succeed, you will starve to
death, and what will you become and all the rest of it. When considering the
occupational choices made by the young in Kirkenes today, and the young
people we meet, we discover that they think di?erently. Several have the courage
to go for an artistic education, creative types of education within music or
theatre, having to do with creative art.
After Sydvaranger was closed down the company’s ‘housing stock’ was sold
to the inhabitants in Kirkenes, and all the parks were put in the hands of the
Construction of entrepreneurial identity 95
municipality. This municipality has not been used to running anything at all.
After all these years with industry as the main area of employment, they have
had a hard time coming to terms with the fact that the community has to create
employment in other sectors.
But I also believe that these things are about to change, although it is a mean
battle to ?ght. One woman, who is a year younger than I am, is putting herself
forward as a candidate for the mayoralty. She is criticized by her own party, by
the grumpy old dogs. They hassle her because she represents other values, the so-
called soft values such as culture, while the old boys talk of quay constructions
and the like. This is how it is.
Fifth sequence: An unusual enterprise in a small place: the feeling of city
ache
I am the kind of person who has to be on the move all the time. I cannot be in
just one place. I always search for new milieus, new possibilities. I have the
theatre craft as my tool and I am con?dent of my competence. You are more
visible in a small local community and you get feedback – both good and bad.
In a city you are one among others. It is easier to discover things in the country-
side. I remember being very frustrated for a while when, wherever I went, people
greeted me not as ‘Bente’ but as ‘the Samovar Theatre’. I was going nuts because
I was constantly associated with the theatre. Why couldn’t anyone see the real
me, and see that I was more than the theatre? Wherever I went, the Samovar
Theatre was constantly at my tail, because all people could talk about was
theatre. I suppose they thought that if they wanted to talk to me, they had to talk
about theatre. It was very tiring for me, but I have become more relaxed now.
When I was my only concern, I became very frustrated, but now that I have chil-
dren my focus is on them rather than me. I cannot waste time being frustrated
any more.
I actually think the identity of the theatre has changed over the years, at least
in relation to the local community. It took some time for the local community to
cherish the presence of the Samovar Theatre, and to become proud of it. I don’t
think they realized the purpose of the theatre at ?rst, and lots of people still
believe the theatre is run by the local county. In a way, having a theatre in
Kirkenes is now taken for granted. It is something to be proud of. We have never
o?cially threatened to close down or asked people to ?ght for us, but we have
actually received extra grants in times of great economical need. When times
have been really hard, we have been able to manage because we receive operat-
ing subsidies from the county of Sør-Varanger.
When you get city ache you simply have to go to a city. The de?nition of a city
is a street that never ends, or a place where you can drink cappuccino, or be
where nobody knows you. I get it when I have been here a little too long, or when
I have worked a lot and have been very visible. Visibility is when there has been
a lot of publicity in the papers and when people come up to me to tell me how
nice they think it is. Of course this is pleasant but when there has been too much
of it I get city ache.
Sometimes I become fed up with being in this place, and then I know I have
to get to a city. In these situations, and especially during the ?rst years, I con-
sistently went to Copenhagen. Now I travel to Finland. I travel to recharge the
96 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
batteries, and in order to experience a more pulsating life, to observe people I
don’t know in the streets.
Sometimes, it becomes too safe here in Kirkenes, and then I think: Well, there
has to be some excitement too. You need challenges! When it gets too safe, I have
gone wandering behind Kværner Kimek. You may suddenly get the urge to see
something di?erent from the streets you have been wandering; or suddenly
think: Is there a street in which I have never wandered here in Kirkenes? There
is no such street, and that makes me panic.
‘I CANNOT REMEMBER WHAT MY IDENTITY WAS
WHEN I MOVED HERE, BUT I BELIEVE IT HAS
CHANGED’
A shift from the narrator’s voice to my own re?ections ought to be respect-
ful both of the narrator and the need for theorizing. I choose ?rst to move
through a re?ection on each sequence before relating the narrative to some
more speci?c themes within the research ?eld of identity and life course.
The ?rst sequence involves transitional points in life where upbringing
and socialization form Bente’s norms and values. This part of the narrative
traces memories from an early point of identity formation. Her parents and
her upbringing with ‘freedom with responsibility’ are portrayed as impor-
tant elements in giving a ‘boost’ to choosing an unusual education that later
ends in starting an artistic business. Choosing theatre as a work place seems
related to the cultural milieu in which her mother worked and an upbring-
ing where creativity and chores were emphasized. The sense of place is also
emphasized: by growing up in an industrious and production-oriented
culture where a cornerstone factory plays the major role in the small com-
munity, she experiences ‘what makes the wheels of society turn’. In addi-
tion she learns hardship by taking care of a sick father, being raised to be
independent and not to leave work un?nished. Her entrepreneurial identity
seems to be constructed with reference to values like hardship, sobriety,
creativity/inventiveness and independence.
Time and place shift in the second sequence, where we see transitions
with regard to choice of education and work life. This takes her to Oslo,
Tromsø and Copenhagen, all large cities compared to Kirkenes. Talking
about ‘no national borders’, she places her education and career in a wider
Scandinavian context. Drawing on her childhood memories from Kirkenes
she looks at theatre education with di?erent eyes from her classmates. Her
theatre shall be something di?erent and becoming an entrepreneur involves
more than acting on stage. With regard to her sense of place she draws on
her heritage. She uses the opportunity to establish her enterprise at a his-
toric location, ‘Malmklang’, a building which since 1909 had served as a
Construction of entrepreneurial identity 97
culture house, starting o? the revue tradition in Kirkenes. To ‘go back
north’ seems to be a part of Bente’s entrepreneurial vision; she returns to
Kirkenes with a conscious idea of how to combine resources and ideas into
a novel business.
The third sequence moves Bente’s thoughts to designing the premises of
the new business. The construction of the mission of the theatre seems to
be related to the ?rst two parts of the narrative. Bente chooses three main
visions that seem to be related to what she has experienced as a child with
a mother who worked in the theatre milieu, stories that re?ect the cultural
heritage of the area where she grew up, and a collaborative element that
revolves around what she labels ‘no borders’ in her sense of place. In creat-
ing the theatre, the ‘self’ is clearly visible. Bente wants to build up compe-
tence in working with amateurs and performing ‘stories that count’ to
inhabitants scattered all over the small villages in Finnmark. By rooting the
professional productions in a mixture of world literature and local history,
the plays become both global and local at the same time. The heritage of
the people on the Northern peninsula is the historic theme that frames the
reference for creating the identity of the theatre. The role of cultural entre-
preneurship is prevalent, as the identity of the theatre is built on stories
from di?erent cultures: Saami, ethnic Norwegian, Finnish, and Russian.
This exempli?es Hawley and Hamilton’s (1996) claim that objectives of
entrepreneurship are culture-speci?c in that the entrepreneur cannot be
separated from the cultural context. In this case the role of ethnicity and
diversity becomes prevalent in the creation of a cultural enterprise. Her
theatre reminds us of a travelling ensemble – copying the nomadic way of
life that has long traditions among the Saami people in Finnmark. To me
Bente seems to integrate the two tasks Lett (1987) says that humans address
through culture: the maintenance of human life and the maintenance of
human identity. She maintains a modern cultural enterprise, a free scenic
theatre, while at the same time preserving the cultural heritage of humans
living up north: a nomadic pattern of living.
Her theatre also breaks down national barriers by acknowledging the
knowledge and expertise of Finland and Russia. By drawing on these
resources, she manages to carve out an Arctic – not just a Norwegian –
vision of a small theatre. Her networking seems to remind us of the char-
acteristics of community entrepreneurs where personal networks enable
them to communicate identity and pride to community members
(Johannisson and Nilsson, 1989).
The identity as community entrepreneur also comes through in the
fourth sequence. Among other things a community entrepreneur ‘can be
seen as taking advantage of and improving the interrelationships between
social and economic aspects of communal life’ (Johannisson and Nilsson,
98 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
1989, p. 6). The vision that ‘the theatre shall do something with people’ is
revealed. The role of the business as an agent of change can be viewed in
the light of the fact that Kirkenes is an ‘adjustment community’. The enter-
prise becomes a vehicle for Bente’s wish to improve the local community.
Bente and the Samovar Theatre become important in the transition from
an industrial and production-oriented culture to a community where
people can also make a living from ‘creative’ and artistic work. Both the
third and the fourth sequence show how cultural processes in the commu-
nity and the region serve as inputs for the entrepreneurial identity as well
as being an obstacle to change due to the existence of Bente’s work. The
entrepreneurial identity is both mobilized through the cultural context as
well as becoming a strong mobilizer for her action.
The transitional point in the ?fth and last sequence is a re?ection of the
personal challenges of being a visible person in a small community. In
people’s eyes Bente’s personal identity melts into that of the theatre. Her
sense of place becomes di?erent – it is too small to o?er her any anonym-
ity. The last sequence speaks more than the others to the future.
The transitional points, connected to childhood, education, start-up of
the business, visions of the business and re?ections of living in a small com-
munity make up a storyline in Bente’s narrative that speaks to how she
coped with the personal past, the present and the future. The life story then
resides at a level of identity where the developing self seeks a temporal
coherence (McAdams, 1996). Growing up – moving out – coming home is
the underlying dynamic in her narrative. We see that the story integrates the
individual’s reconstructed past, perceived present and anticipated future –
rendering her lifetime in terms of a beginning, middle and an ending
(McAdams, 1985; Polkinghorne, 1988). In using McAdams (1996) frame-
work for analysing life stories I see that its ideological setting is clearly cul-
tural and community-oriented. Starting a theatre seems to be a life-long
project, where its ideology is founded in childhood. It contains crucial epi-
sodes, scenes that stand out in bold print in the life story. Such episodes are
for instance the professional that stayed at Bente’s house when she was a
child, who later turned out to be one of her strongest supporters as adults.
Another point is her failing to be admitted to the Theatre Academy in Oslo.
A third is the success with the theatre school which culminates in being able
to have a blind and deaf student playing in a Shakespeare play. The impor-
tance of these episodes is not so much what actually happened but what the
memory of the key events symbolizes today in the context of the overall life
narrative (McAdams, 1996).
The humanistic view on identity creation explains parts of Bente’s nar-
rative. Her story contains identity development that re?ects continuity and
consistency, where pieces in prior periods in life are used to explain events
Construction of entrepreneurial identity 99
in the next sequence. For example, I interpret Bente’s utterances in the ?rst
sequence where she uses her childhood (not so tender relationships) as an
explanation for thoughts in the present time (being conscious about cud-
dling her nine-year-old on the lap) as an example of the need for portray-
ing consistency and rationality in life. The organizing function of self
(Jackson and Warin, 2000; Marsh and Hattie, 1996) becomes prevalent in
Bente’s story. She integrates information from various periods in life to tell
a story that gives meaning to her choices in life, seen as an adult. Her entre-
preneurial endeavour comes out as a coherent picture: as a child she got
hooked on the amateur milieu theatre. The place for ‘working with all
aspects of theatre’ was Kirkenes. It had a suitable locality and was sur-
rounded by a culture and history that provided her with stories to tell. The
consistency in her entrepreneurial identity deals with social change: to
relate her artistic side of her business to a social context where the stories
matter to people.
Also the post-structuralistic perspective explains the narrative. The
dynamic nature of self comes especially through with regard to her sense
of place where the physical living between national borders becomes a tool
for expanding her own personal borders. The ultimate goal becomes to not
predict the future. The shifting nature of self between a ‘placebound’ to a
‘placeloose’ identity becomes prevalent. The multifaceted nature of her
identity seems to be related to what Thrift (2003) writes about the modern
idea of space as undergoing continual construction through the agency of
things encountering each other in more or less organized circulations (p.
96). This relational view of space ?ts the dynamic nature of Bentes’ iden-
tity. She shifts from using the strength of the local community, the ties to
Russian and Finnish theatre milieus, and the anonymity of being in a large
city. The post-modern characteristics of her entrepreneurial identity
becomes the ?uid transparency between regions, countries, languages and
cultures. Her business becomes an artefact of that.
Going against the grain is a metaphor that highlights her story. It is my
interpretation that Bente goes against the grain in di?erent ways: ?rstly, she
?ts the classical ‘hard-headed’ entrepreneur that goes against the wind.
Secondly there are di?erent grains in her story: her past, her life story, the
cultural context of the theatre. Thirdly, she has an innovative way of doing
theatre: the Samovar is not a classical repertory theatre, and Bente builds
concrete relationships with her context, with people she meets during her
teaching, at the places where she moves and in the community of Kirkenes.
She blurs the boundary between theatre, education and community develop-
ment. The narrative constructs entrepreneurship ‘against the grain’, which
demonstrates that parts of entrepreneurship deal with cultural change, and
requires the passion to cling to social anomaly, to use the words of Hjorth,
100 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
Johannisson and Steyaert (2003, p. 101). Bente’s identity as an entrepreneur
‘going against the grain’ shows itself as a multiply-oriented endeavour.
The entrepreneurial identity as going against the grain is clearly an
action-oriented metaphor. Identity becomes a source of mobilization. Her
identity construction involves choices that over time lead to entrepreneu-
rial decisions. The ?ve sequences contain transitional points in this move-
ment: (1) a childhood with cultural foundation and hardship in upbringing;
(2) creativity and independence in choosing an education; (3) creating an
Arctic niche as the basis for the theatre; (4) using the theatre as an agent of
change; (5) experience of city ache in a small community. These transitional
points become markers of Bente’s moves forward in developing herself and
her business. There is progress in her story, the transitional points re?ect
how Bente copes with challenges and overcomes problems. Her identity is
developing over time – it becomes a force that mobilizes action. The entre-
preneurial identity is negotiated, ?uid and contextual (Howarth, 2002). Its
temporal dimension over the life course contributes to the entrepreneurship
literature – identity evolves over time and is related to handling transitions
in life.
The narrative also demonstrates the spatial dimension of identity.
Bente’s life course is embedded in a multicultural history which seems to
make her a visionary entrepreneur. This ?nding is in line with identity
studies which claim that culture cannot be eliminated from identity con-
struction (Howarth, 2002). Bente’s entrepreneurial identity is rooted in
various cultural and historical inputs – also made through moves between
rural and urban areas – of the Northern peninsula. Travelling between
places – signi?es the spatial dimension of the entrepreneurial identity. The
nomadic aspect of the theatre seems to re?ect her philosophy: ‘My goal is
not to predict the future’. It reminds us of what Hjorth, Johannison and
Steyaert (2003) name the ‘entrepreneurial lifestyle’, which is a destabilising
of normalities so as to create the need for new organisations and new styles
of living. The challenge of place also becomes credible as it has a clear
north-south axis: Bente’s small free scenic theatre in the peripheral north
seems to work as a regional opposition against the established state thea-
tres in the urban south. To be an entrepreneur for Bente is to oppose exist-
ing norms for running a theatre, to do something di?erent.
In re?ecting on Bente’s story I marvel over one stunning theme: Why has
Bente become a person whose goal is not to predict the future? Why does
she seem to look at the theatre education in Copenhagen with di?erent eyes
from her classmates? Why is she always ‘on the road’, always seeking chal-
lenges? Drawing on life-course theory, we can interpret her childhood as
pretty tough with a mother who was often absent and a sick father who
needed care before dying when Bente was 15. Bente copes with this in a
Construction of entrepreneurial identity 101
way that stimulates her agency, which seems to be in line with ?ndings
in life-course research; individual reactions to social change a?ects agency
in later life (Elder and Shananan, 1997). Her narrative re?ects the fact
that she in later life does not seek safety and structure, but rather an ambi-
tious career which requires individual decisions, creativity and extrovert
behaviour.
Bente’s entrepreneurial identity is a result of a re?exive process where
transitions over the life course have been dealt with retrospectively. The
?ndings in this chapter can be related to newer ?ndings in identity theory,
where individuals search for identity in a multifaceted and boundaryless
manner (Lindgren and Wåhlin, 2001). The entrepreneurial identity in this
chapter seems likewise – it is both temporally and spatially complex.
Lindgren and Wåhlin (2001) point out that the identity construction is a
process and a travelling between di?erent discourses. In Bente’s narrative
there is not one factor, such as profession or gender, that seems to colour
her identity construction. On the contrary, she seems to re?ect with refer-
ence to both internal processes of becoming an adult and how to improve
society through her entrepreneurship. The transitions seem to mobilize
re?ections on howher life has evolved. It reminds me of howLindgren and
Wåhlin (2001 ) argue that crisis or other important changes force people to
develop a more complete viewof themselves and to listen more to their own
voices (p. 373). I conclude that the identity construction in this chapter
deals with an ontological aspect – a theory of being (Somers, 1994). I ?nd
that an analysis of identity construction and life course contributes to the
entrepreneurship ?eld in that a narrative contributes to the understanding
of becoming an entrepreneur. It further contributes by the fact that the life
stories produce exercises in self-interpretation (Baumeister and Newman,
1994). When entrepreneurs in dialogue with researchers tell their life
stories, it is as much to satisfy their need for making sense of their experi-
ences. This aspect of identity construction can give us insights into the
nature of entrepreneurial thinking and re?ection.
FINAL REFLECTIONS
The narrative in this chapter represents a delicate mosaic of utterances of
how entrepreneurship is socially and culturally situated in a person’s life
course. ‘Going against the grain’ serves as a metaphor when reading the
identity formation in the narrative. Bente’s entrepreneurial identity seems
always to be the ‘odd woman’ or the ‘ugly duckling’. She never seems to
behave in a way that is socially expected of her. Going against the grain also
becomes a picture of how she survives. Her entrepreneurial identity is to
102 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
search for challenges, something that she ?nds when living on the North
Calotte with geographical space, a rich history and ethnic diversity.
Her agency is a mobilizing factor for coping with transitions as shown in
the ?ve sequences in the narrative. The sequences give meaning to the devel-
opment of entrepreneurial identity over time. They cut across di?erent parts
of her life path and show the temporal aspect of identity. The sequences are
also relational in character. In constructing her identity Bente involves
central actors in her life. The narrative is clearly embedded in a societal
context. The sequences seem to draw a connection between life course and
choices leading to an entrepreneurial career. Life-course theory insists on
the dual identi?cation of age with both people’s lives and the surrounding
social structure (Riley, 1998). The life course perspective emphasizes the
signi?cance of a person’s upbringing, adolescence, education and work life.
Bente’s narrative story certainly develops from her re?ection on her ‘self’
in the two ?rst sequences to a more organizational identity in the third
and fourth sequence. The ?fth seems to involve re?ection about whether
Kirkenes is a place to age.
‘Going against the grain’ also captures the moving out and coming
home process in her story. Her identity is to be on the move, she never
makes the task easy for herself. Her life is both settled and unstructured at
the same time. The narrative is an opportunity to communicate this ambi-
guity. The strength of the narrative is to convey how entrepreneurship both
is a result of consistency and inconsistency. The contribution to the entre-
preneurship ?eld is to uncover the nomadic lifestyle through a life course.
The narrative shows the potential of life-story research for identifying
more detailed processes in human life that matter for entrepreneurial deci-
sions. The contribution is also that this happens through the stories of
entrepreneurs themselves and not through the vocabulary of researchers.
I claim that constructing entrepreneurial identity through life stories – as
re?ected in the narrative in this chapter – can enhance the entrepreneurship
?eld in at least three ways. Firstly, it may add a new dimension to theoriz-
ing about entrepreneurship. It gives us knowledge of how transitional
points make individuals grasp new directions in life, breaking patterns and
choosing their own way. Breaking with conformity is a highly relevant issue
in the entrepreneurship ?eld and I claim that life stories and life-course
theory is an interesting track for entrepreneurial scholars to follow.
Secondly, I claim that entrepreneurs’ own voices have been missing in entre-
preneurial research. Experiences, re?ections and discourses from the entre-
preneurs themselves have been an unused potential in research so far. My
approach builds on experience with action research where practitioners’
knowledge is considered equal to that of the researchers (Pålshaugen,
1992).
Construction of entrepreneurial identity 103
With reference to work on enterprise development projects my urge for
future entrepreneurship research is to take advantage of the situated
knowledge of those being studied. Life-story research and also memory
work are good approaches to do so. Thirdly, I see the need for paying more
attention to the construction of entrepreneurial identity through life
stories, as they are far too few in the present research agenda. Future
studies should choose cases as di?erent as possible in order to demonstrate
the variety of entrepreneurship as culturally situated and as located in time
and space. The research ?eld needs the richness of stories by people who
constitute the ?eld we are studying.
104 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
5. Storytelling to be real: narrative,
legitimacy building and venturing
Ellen O’Connor
INTRODUCTION
Emerging organizations are elaborate ?ctions of proposed possible future states
of existence (Gartner et al. 1992, p. 17).
Before a company exists, it is a story about an imagined future. As the
company comes into being, it still remains largely ?ctional although the
entrepreneurs ‘act as if’ the imagined future is at hand (Gartner et al.,
1992). But entrepreneurs are in the business of business, not storytelling,
which depends on others’ believing and ‘buying in’ by investing money
and/or other resources, for which they expect a return when belief becomes
product and pro?t. Sociologists and organization theorists describe this as
a process of legitimacy building (Suchman, 1995; Aldrich and Fiol, 1994).
Suchman (1995, p. 582) emphasizes that in order to provide legitimacy,
accounts about a company’s activities ‘must mesh both with the larger
belief systems and with the experienced reality of the audience’s daily life’.
This chapter presents this ‘meshing’ as a verbal process of intertextuality
(see below). Entrepreneurs operate in a world of long-standing conversa-
tions. To achieve legitimacy, their conversations must engage with these
pre-existing, ongoing, and encompassing conversations.
The study answers calls for research on (1) the earliest phase of ventur-
ing (Schoonhoven and Romanelli, 2001b, p. 403; Aldrich, 2000, p. 14;
Aldrich and Fiol, 1994, p. 664); (2) knowledge about the entrepreneur’s
day-to-day work (Gartner et al., 1992, p. 238; Aldrich and Baker, 1997, p.
394; Katz and Gartner, 1988, p. 433); and (3) the processes by which an
entrepreneur makes meaning (Aldrich and Fiol, 1994, p. 666). It focuses on
legitimacy building during the initiative phase of a startup. Although entre-
preneurship studies state the importance of building legitimacy, and
researchers have identi?ed claim-making as a key part of the process at the
industry level (Rindova and Fombrun, 2001; Rao, 2001), little is known
about legitimacy building at the individual-entrepreneurial level and at the
vital stage of initiation.
105
What stories do entrepreneurs tell to build legitimacy at the initiative
stage, and how do they formulate and develop these claims? In particular,
how and to what extent do they modify them as circumstances change –
especially if key audiences do not accept the claims as legitimate? This
study examined the narratives of an entrepreneurial team pursuing accept-
ance and legitimacy over a critical 12-month period, from January 1999 to
2000, that included (1) the recruitment of the team, (2) the legal incorpor-
ation of the company, (3) the securing of angel funding, (4) the building of
two prototypes, and (5) the ?rst sales calls for the ?rst test product. The
timing of the study coincided with the Internet boom and bust, which dra-
matically a?ected the legitimacy-building storytelling as detailed below.
The study departs from the premise that the fundamental action in
human organizing is speech (Winograd and Flores, 1986). Legitimacy
building emerges in conversations that entrepreneurs have among them-
selves, their audiences, and their environments. In narrative terms, legiti-
macy building may be de?ned as the pursuit of intertextuality (O’Connor,
2000), or the grafting of the story line of the new company onto existing
relevant, generally accepted, and taken-for-granted story lines. The study
presents a case in which entrepreneurs ?rst decided what they wanted to
build, then how they would legitimize it in the eyes of others. This is a fre-
quent occurrence in high-technology innovation (O’Connor, 2000). They
engaged in many conversations with actual and prospective partners, advis-
ors, and investors. Additionally, as noted above, the background circum-
stances of these conversations changed signi?cantly over a period of
several months, making the ‘taken-for-granted’ aspect of legitimacy more
?uid than the phrase suggests.
The primary theoretical contribution of the study is to reformulate legit-
imacy building as a highly observable social and linguistic activity, thereby
making the practice of legitimacy building easier to study empirically. The
primary practical contribution is a case study of legitimacy building as a
social and linguistic practice conducted in a dynamic, experimental, and
improvisational way. The study supports and illustrates Gartner et al.’s
(1992) description of the emerging nature of entrepreneurial behavior. It
lends insight into legitimacy-building processes in the context of signi?cant
‘turnover and turbulence’ (Aldrich and Martinez, 2001, p. 43), the ‘bub-
bling cauldron of organizational soup’ (Kaufman, 1985), and situations of
change, ambiguity, and equivocality that are the ongoing context in which
entrepreneurial action is embedded.
The study has three main parts: (1) a literature review and clari?cation
of the contribution; (2) a description of the research methods used and the
research context; and (3) the presentation and analysis of data.
106 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
LITERATURE REVIEW
The entrepreneurship literature states the importance of building legiti-
macy (Aldrich and Baker, 2001) and securing buy-in (Schoonhoven and
Romanelli, 2001a, p. 389) for ventures su?ering from the liability of
newness. Founders of ‘entirely new activities, by de?nition, lack the famili-
arity and credibility that constitute the fundamental basis of interaction’
(Aldrich and Fiol, 1994, p. 647). The life of the new enterprise may hang in
the balance (Aldrich and Baker, 2001, p. 213). Literature has focused on
legitimacy building at the general and theoretical levels (Aldrich and Fiol,
1994; Suchman, 1995) or at macro (industry) levels (Rao, 2001, Rindova
and Fombrun, 2001), but little is known about individual entrepreneurs in
the process of building legitimacy.
Suchman (1995, p. 574) de?ned legitimacy as ‘a generalized perception or
assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable, proper, or appropriate
within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs, and
de?nitions’. He delineated three main types of legitimacy: pragmatic (self-
interested), moral (a ‘prosocial’ logic whereby the activity is collectively
deemed to be right and proper), and cognitive (based on collective, cultural,
and ‘unspoken orienting assumptions’). Entrepreneurship researchers have
modi?ed Suchman’s original classi?cation somewhat, for example, as per
AldrichandFiol (1994), AldrichandBaker (2001) associatedpragmatic legit-
imacy with organizational learning and focused primarily on cognitive and
sociopolitical legitimacy (a modi?ed version of moral legitimacy). Aldrich
de?ned cognitive legitimacy as ‘the acceptance of a new kind of venture as a
taken-for-granted feature of the environment’, the highest form of which is
acceptance ‘as part of the sociological and organizational landscape’
(Aldrich, 1999, p. 230). This chapter focuses on pragmatic, or exchange, legit-
imacy as per Suchman (1995, p. 578), meaning that the entrepreneurs used
legitimacy-building narratives to raise money from self-interested parties.
However, it also focuses on cognitive legitimacy in that in order to secure the
buy-in, the entrepreneurs had to mesh their company narrative with pre-
existing, ongoing, and encompassing story lines.
According to Suchman, the ?rst two forms of legitimacy ‘rest on discur-
sive evaluation,’ the last, cognitive legitimacy, does not; in fact, vigorous
defenses of endeavors actually undermine their taken-for-grantedness
(Suchman, 1995, p. 585). But constituencies need to comprehend and trust
the newventure (Aldrich and Baker, 2001, p. 213), and founders accomplish
this through speech and conversation. Asigni?cant part of this entrepreneu-
rial work is verbal. To secure legitimacy, founders must concentrate on
‘framing the unknown in such a way that it becomes believable’ (Aldrich and
Fiol, 1994, p. 651); they must ‘engineer consent, using powers of persuasion
Narrative, legitimacy building and venturing 107
and in?uence to overcome the skepticismand resistance of guardians of the
status quo’ (Dees and Starr, 1992, p. 96). Legitimacy ‘involves the existence
of a credible collective account or rationale explaining what the organization
is doing and why’ (Suchman, 1995, p. 575 referencing Jepperson, 1991). But
apart fromthese general references to founders’ use of verbal strategies such
as issue framing, symbolism, rhetorical techniques, and charismatic leader-
ship styles (Aldrich and Fiol, 1994, p. 651), there is little empirical research
about what entrepreneurs say to whomin their pursuit of legitimacy.
Industry-level studies have, however, unpacked some of the dynamics of
legitimacy building. Rao (2001) noted the importance of contests for legit-
imacy building in the automotive industry. Rindova and Fombrun (2001)
constructed a typology of claims made at the superstructure, sociostruc-
ture, and infrastructure levels of the co?ee industry: identity and expertise
claims, leadership claims based on network position, and resource claims.
But they did not address the pivotal importance, role, and workings of
claims at the individual-entrepreneurial level. For example, in telling the
story of the evolution of the specialty co?ee niche, the authors reference
the history-changing work of Alfred Peet. However, apart from a general
allusion based on ?rst-hand reports as to Peet’s ‘intense personality and his
conviction that his practices were “the right way” of doing things’ and the
example of his insistence that Starbucks founders learn how to roast co?ee,
no detail is provided as to how Peet actually did frame issues, make claims
credible and compelling, or use powers of persuasion and in?uence.
Finally, the literature does not address the relationship between the mere
assertion of claims and the practical acceptance or rejection of them by
others. At some level and with respect to key audiences, Peet’s claims must
have ‘made sense’, ‘had value’, and at the very least, assured ‘against
impending nonsense’ (Suchman, 1995, p. 575). If legitimacy is socially con-
structed and develops from verbal actions such as claim making, with the
result of cultivating others’ trust, then researchers must look closely and
carefully at founders’ speech and interactions.
RESEARCH METHODS AND CONTEXT
The primary method used for data gathering was participant-observation
(see below), and the primary method used for story analysis is Burke’s
pentad (1969). The pentad is a useful analytic device in that it permits a
highly condensed summary of the rhetorical force of a narrative (O’Connor,
1995) according to the key dimensions of act (what the organization is
doing, in this case, telling stories), agent (those building legitimacy), agency
(how legitimacy is built, in this case, through intertextuality), scene (the
108 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
background context in which legitimacy building takes place), and purpose
(to build legitimacy but also to succeed with other personal or organiza-
tional objectives, such as to make money). The distinctions set forth in pen-
tadic analysis clarify the rhetorical and social force of particular story lines
and are especially helpful when data are gathered and interpreted in context,
meaning ?eld-work methodology.
Field-based work provides a grounding in the unique, emerging contexts
in which conversation takes place. Being on the scene day after day enables
observation and contextualization of the direct and indirect social conse-
quences. This contextual base is especially important and appropriate in
business, where organizational members have shared histories and impli-
citly shared futures (O’Connor, 1997).
Furthermore, this studytakes anarrative approachtothe gathering, analy-
sis, and presentation of ?ndings. By this I mean the adoption of a theoreti-
cal stance that posits the narrative form as an essential logic used by human
beings – social actors as well as researchers – for self-presentation, account-
rendering, and sensemaking (Johnson, 1993; Linde, 1993; MacIntyre, 1981).
In terms of research methodology, this narrative theoretical perspective
leads to an emphasis on gathering stories in natural settings as people do
their jobs (Orr, 1996), and more subtly, at the interpretive level, to a recur-
sive contextualization process in which the researcher locates a story (for
example, an account rendered in a research interview or told at a business
meeting) as interrelating with other stories, for example, other historical
accounts about or bearing on the same event (O’Connor, 2000). In naturally
occurring business conversation, a research subject may reference events
leading up to the telling of a story or may tell a story as an argument for a
particular plan (Jameson, 2001). Because of the extent of shared history, the
story could be as simple as a phrase, such as a reference to ‘the meltdown of
2000’, which invokes the shared memory of a dramatic rise followed by a
perception of hype and great loss of economic value. Although this is a mere
sentence fragment, its meaning and experience are so well known and widely
shared that no detail is needed. Organizational speech has many such refer-
ences (O’Connor, 2000) and this research is itself recursive in nature in that
there are only fragments; however, following a narrative theory and logic,
these relate to one another and to what may be conceptualized as overarch-
ing story lines.
Based on this narrative approach, and the perspective of intertextuality,
this study positions the entrepreneur in an overarching story line of legiti-
macy building accomplished through dialogue. As interactions occurred
and especially as legitimacy claims were deemed to have failed, the legiti-
macy-seeking story line was rewritten three distinct times. I was engaged
both as an observer and an actor (see below) in this process closely for ten
Narrative, legitimacy building and venturing 109
months, from January ’99 until January ’00, spending about 20 hours per
week onsite at the company and supplementing these hours via regular
e-mail and phone conversations. I had a functional role, and all data were
gathered and produced in this context. Primary data were conversations
noted by hand, e-mails subsequently printed out, successive drafts of busi-
ness plans and the investor ‘sales pitch’, and personal notes summarizing
daily events.
My involvement in the company came through a former coworker, whom
the founder had recruited to join his team as Chief Technology O?cer
(CTO), in which capacity he would oversee the technical architecture of the
product. He approached me about helping to launch the company on
account of my experience and contacts in the nonpro?t sector. Based on
my previous work experience with the CTO, my availability, and the con-
siderable startup activity going on about which I knew nothing but thought
I should know something, I agreed. There was no salary but only equity
(repurchased by the company in 2001).
Within just a few weeks, due to new leadership and changing circum-
stances (see below), my role was changed to focus on strategic and market
research. The founder had observed my habit of extensive notetaking and
asked me to attend and document important meetings with key prospective
constituents. I then would circulate the notes among the cofounders for
informational and feedback purposes, the latter being especially important
when meeting with prospective customers and investors. So, although this
study was never a formal research project, the nature of the work I did and
the documentation I produced in my work role naturally led to a corpus of
data directly relating to legitimacy building. In fact, from my earliest
involvement, I formulated my contribution as writing a story for the
company – a credible, persuasive, and worthy story – the basic de?nition of
legitimacy. Thus early on, I implicated myself in the legitimacy-building
plot through (1) my entry into the company, which came by virtue of a high
level of trust in a former colleague, and (2) my story-writing work.
Thus, concerning the preparation of this study, the research, including
the background reading on legitimacy building, was retrospective. My
project is itself narrative in that it involves grafting the story of my work
with the venture onto currently relevant theorizing about legitimacy build-
ing in entrepreneurship. This may be seen as both a strength and a weak-
ness: the latter, in that at no moment in real time was I doing academic
research on legitimacy building; the former, in that my central task was to
secure legitimacy with investors through story writing in the conventional
professional sense (market and strategic research and business-plan
writing). However, in now analyzing these data with an academic lens, a dis-
tinct pattern is observable: From start to ?nish, the venture went through
110 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
four di?erent stories, each marked by changes registering at each level of
Burke’s pentad (see Table 5.1, end of chapter). These changes highlight the
dynamic, experimental, and improvisational nature of pragmatic legiti-
macy building in the initiative stages of a venture.
DATA PRESENTATION AND ANALYSIS
Founding Story and Legitimacy
The following detailed account of the startup and its pursuit of legitimacy
building is based on my notes documenting (1) an account of historical
events about the company’s founding given to me by my former colleague,
Morgan, shortly before I joined the company; (2) an account of the
company’s purpose as told to me in an interview with Bart, the initial CEO,
in which he was persuading me to join the company; and (3) a planning
meeting in which my contribution as network-builder in the nonpro?t
sector (my initial role) was discussed. These occurred in January and
February of 2000. The founding story includes the following main parts:
Harry’s (the founder’s), reason for founding the company, his vision for
where the company was headed, and his plan for executing that vision.
In introducing me to the company, Morgan explained that he had met
Harry at a party and that the two of them spoke extensively about Harry’s
idea for a startup. Morgan said that in the fall of 1999, Harry had a series
of frustrating experiences in which he became increasingly disgruntled with
his cell-phone company. He had problems with poor reception, dropped
calls, and lost messages. Then he tried to cancel the service but it did not
stop and bills kept coming. Harry thought that he could not be the only
customer with this problem and speculated that individual frustrated cus-
tomers represented an untapped force that could be harnessed by the
Internet. If other frustrated customers could ‘band together’ (Harry’s orig-
inal expression), sending one strong (backed by numbers) message to the
company, then they could ‘get results’. But acting individually they could
never be heard. In essence, Harry envisioned an Internet service whereby
users could click on a particular social issue, see what postings were there
(for example, petitions being ?led, complaints being registered), and add
their name to this cause or support that particular campaign. The idea was
that over time potentially huge numbers of people could be mobilized to
exert pressure and e?ect change.
Morgan was a software developer. In the year that I had worked with
him, he had twice passed up chances to join a startup and felt that he
couldn’t wait any longer (‘Everyone I know is doing a startup’, he said).
Narrative, legitimacy building and venturing 111
Also, he said he liked Harry’s idea. Once Morgan was on board as CTO,
Harry sought a proven CEO and tapped a former colleague of his, Bart,
whose e-commerce company had just been acquired. From the stories that
Morgan told me about Bart (for example, how much money he had made
and how, whom he knew), I gathered that his primary job would be to raise
capital. When I ?rst met Bart, he told me that he wanted to do something
that could help change the world. He had a close friend who had a charit-
able cause, ‘Save the [sea] Turtles’. Bart said that he saw a use for the
Internet in which he could link his friend with people elsewhere in the world
who shared this same cause. They could band together and do good things.
Bart’s friend knew Woody Harrelson and also a famous activist who had a
track record mobilizing environmentalists on college campuses. He lived in
Los Angeles, and Bart was going to try to get him to move to northern
California and join the company. Bart’s plan was to go to his wealthy
friends and get a few hundred thousand dollars from each of them based
on his successful track record. In March of 2000, when I met with him, he
estimated that he would be able to raise ‘a few million’ in a few weeks.
The company would adopt a membership-acquisition business model
and the main revenue would come from advertising. The goal was to get 10
million members in one year (Hotmail had 12 million users in 18 months,
and its success was held up by Harry as both an example and a goal). The
primary target was activists. There was debate about the number of acti-
vists, how to ?nd them, and how to organize them; but the prospect went
unquestioned. Eventually the membership acquisition strategy called for
signing up (1) big nonpro?t organizations, where the presence of signi?cant
numbers of activists was assumed; (2) proven activist e-mail networks; and
(3) high-pro?le individual activists. The growth strategy was described as
‘viral’, referring to word-of-mouth and extensive e-mail forwarding. In
essence the story was about an Internet application to organize people by
common causes, and the business would succeed based on high visit rates
and advertising revenue from ‘eyeballs’ (see Table 5.1, end of chapter).
Over the next several weeks, I contacted members of my local network
to gauge interest levels and assess the viability of the story. I learned that e-
mail activism was not well developed. Online donation mechanisms were
just beginning and were not proven; also, a signi?cant number of members
were not online and business was still done the old-fashioned way. More
importantly, I learned that the biggest nonpro?ts were more preoccupied
with getting their desired message out than with either hearing from their
membership or facilitating their membership in taking on other or even
related causes. The assumption that nonpro?ts were activist havens was vir-
tually discredited. Although activists were the target market, it was almost
impossible to come up with a credible ?gure as to the number of activists
112 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
in the world; and the question as to how to reach and in?uence them was
even more di?cult. Finally, questions as to the compatibility of the
nonpro?t and activist world with the world of dot-coms were raised. One
memorable occasion was during a lunch with two well-known e-activists in
Berkeley, who cautioned that the ‘.com’ su?x would immediately raise eye-
brows: ‘How do you make your money? In what potentially corrupt scene
are we participating by virtue of doing business with you?’ The activists
advised us to build a viable for-pro?t business ?rst and then return to them
for partnering after the money matters were resolved.
In the meantime, Bart failed to raise capital. It was March of 2000. The
Internet ‘bubble burst’ has been subsequently located at this time, but at
that moment, all that was known was that e-commerce was exposed as
unpro?table, that Internet startups were losing vast amounts of money
rapidly (‘bleeding’) with no basis for hopes of return in the foreseeable
future, and that the prevailing business model based on ‘clicks’, ‘hits’, ‘land
grab’, and ‘eyeballs’ was discredited. The NASDAQ (National Association
of Securities Dealers Automated Quotation system) and the NYSE (New
York Stock Exchange) fell sharply. During March, Bart raised only $50,000
from a personal friend who had become rich by investing in Bart’s previous
company. Bart said that his colleagues were very nervous about giving
money and that some of them had lost vast amounts of wealth. Bart also
said he was tired of doing startups and that he wanted to take on a more
advisory role.
Several months later, in the fall of 2000, I needed access to a protected
document and asked Morgan to give me the password. He said it was
‘PMiHBaMga’. He explained to me that this represented the ?rst letter of
each word in the sentence, ‘[Company name] is Harry, Bart, and Morgan’s
great adventure’. I thought this helped plot the company and its founders
into a romantic, epic-heroic plot about changing the world, as is typical of
many high technology companies. It also had a fraternal twist to it and
recalls the young-men-on-an-adventure plot evidenced elsewhere in this
volume (see Chapter 2 by Boutaiba). Also, one day over co?ee Morgan
shared with me that Harry’s true motive was ‘subversive, to overthrow capi-
talism’. Although this was probably an exaggeration, Harry’s storytelling
about his reason for founding the company always emphasized consumers
banding together to ?ght and remedy corporate irresponsiveness.
The entrepreneurial team was still forming. Harry and Morgan were
joined by Rich, who became VP (Vice President) of Engineering. His role
was to oversee the building of the product. Harry and Rich had worked
together at a previous company. When I asked Rich why he joined the
company, he said that his wife had wanted to relocate from Austin, Texas
to the Bay Area, where her family lived. He also told me a story of having
Narrative, legitimacy building and venturing 113
been ‘cheated’ out of his last project, an IPO (Initial Public O?ering), and
wanted ‘do one right’. Rich did not seem interested in activism, organizing,
or related topics. Harry also recruited Emil, another colleague from a pre-
vious company, who became Chief Operations O?cer (COO), overseeing
administration and operations (o?ce space, equipment, payroll, legal
matters, etc.). In addition, the founder’s brother, Howard, was leaving his
sales job with a major defense company in Japan to join the company.
Harry said that Howard would be in charge of business development. In
his story about joining the company, Howard said that he had been talking
on the phone with his brother for months about the startup idea, and he
?nally decided it was something very exciting that he wanted to be a part
of; also, he wanted to leave Japan and return to the US while his children
were still very young. With Bart’s failure to raise money and statement that
he no longer wanted to be CEO, Howard took this role within just a few
weeks of his arrival.
In my early conversations with Howard, to whom I was assigned to
report, I was struck by his corporate-like manner. He spoke of the need for
plans, targets, and above all, a convincing value proposition for the
company. He also decided within a few weeks that the founding story was
not viable. He had asked me to identify three speci?c nonpro?t channels that
would take us to at least one million members. Although I could ?nd very
large nonpro?ts, such as the YMCA (Young Mens Christian Association)
and the PTA (Parent-Teacher Association), most of them had relatively
weak Internet presence. I could not come up with the numbers. He also
rejected the idea of viral-based growth, saying that investors disliked the
unpredictability of these models. He began work on a business-plan docu-
ment and especially on a believable way of generating signi?cant returns. So
as the ?rst version of the company story line was scrapped, it is important
to note (1) the background circumstances changed dramatically, that is, the
belief that making money was not important and that the main factor in
Internet success was ‘real estate’ was wholly discredited by the market; and
(2) the CEO was unable to raise funds and stepped out of the role.
Ironically, the CEO, whose contacts, prior experience, and wealth were
expected to confer virtually automatic legitimacy on and investments in the
company, was himself discredited during this time. It is easy to dismiss his
failure by saying that the business climate changed so dramatically, that
obviously the founding story would not work. However, there is more to
say. The Internet bubble burst aside, my research had shown major ?aws in
the story line. Activists were not easy to locate. They did not trust for-pro?t
organizations. Viral campaigns could not be predicted or managed.
However, most of us wanted it to be the case that activism could be facili-
tated, that positive social change could be accomplished through this
114 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
device, and that organizations really did care what their members thought.
Certainly the founder remained ?xed on his original story (which he con-
tinued to tell upon introducing people to the organization) that, based on
his own frustrating experiences with big companies, he would build a
product allowing people to ‘band together to get results’. Perhaps this
explains why the second version of the company story retained the found-
ing story even though it was discredited.
Legitimacy has been de?ned as a meshing with relevant, taken-for-
granted story lines. In the founding story, the company was grafted onto
several plot lines. With Bart, Morgan and Harry as the key authors, the
company was going to become a key player in a larger story about using the
Internet for social change by grouping together people into masses with
power rather than unorganized units. The principal researched and seem-
ingly validated story lines for this were: (1) increasing consumer activism,
even driven by corporations in developments such as customer-driven mar-
keting; (2) the rise of the Internet and particularly prophecy-type stories
about how the Internet would change business (‘the new frictionless
economy’), society (new and closer communities would form), and politics
(democracy would be enhanced); (3) the idea that users could be accumu-
lated en masse and that this mass could be readily converted to revenue
dollars; and (4) the concept of the Internet as the new gold rush and that
rapid movement into the market was more important than strategic move-
ment. Along with these externally focused plot lines were the personal story
lines of each of these founders in which the company ?gured as a secon-
dary element. For Bart, the company was a means to help his friend and to
do something for a good cause rather than just to make money. For Harry,
it was a way to change the power dynamic between corporations and con-
sumers and to rectify a past mistake (see below). For Morgan, it was a way
to ride a compelling wave.
First Transitional Story and Legitimacy
The ?rst transitional story, or ?rst revision of the founding story, was
authored by Harry and Howard; and the primary changes in intertextual
references were the shift from eyeballs to pro?ts and from consumer focus
to business focus. In essence, the new story emphasized money-making by
the company and fundraising by the entrepreneurial team. However, the
founding story was kept in place as Morgan and Harry said they feared a
‘loss of the vision’. In my opinion, the fact that Howard and Harry were
brothers facilitated this rewriting, as Harry was distrustful generally but
appeared to trust his brother. (Cautioning me not to say ‘too much’ about
the company, he told me once, ‘I don’t trust anyone in this Valley.’) Harry
Narrative, legitimacy building and venturing 115
had also contributed to his own problem, for he was still upset by the fact
that, he claimed, he had invented the Web Shopping Cart but had failed to
patent it and thus lost, in his estimation, great wealth. In essence, the tran-
sitional story was made up of two sub-stories: (1) the founding story, and
(2) a business story, in which the product would facilitate communication
between companies and customers. The link between the two was that the
money derived from the latter would be used to subsidize or even fully
support the former.
Howard began his work as CEO with a highly focused e?ort to ?nd a
demonstrable clientele for the product and investors to fund the company.
He asked me to research the viability of the idea and write the ?ndings in
a persuasive manner for incorporation into the business plan. Bart had
never asked for research or PowerPoint slides, but Howard insisted on
having a professional, appealing package for prospective investors. This
and the following section, about the second transitional story, draw mainly
from the initial and numerous rewrites of both these documents.
Harry and Morgan wanted to keep an activism-oriented story in order
to ‘keep the vision’. Along with Howard, they eventually agreed on the fol-
lowing new story line: The company would have two parts and the product,
two versions, one consumer-a?liated, the other, business-a?liated. The
latter reformulated the product as an o?-the-shelf customer service appli-
cation that would appear on a company’s website. By using the product,
companies could learn what numbers of customers had complaints about
what kinds of problems. The value proposition was the ability to retain cus-
tomers e?ciently by knowing exactly how to satisfy them. Howard and
Harry described the latter as a ‘dumbed down’ version of the original idea
because customers would not talk with one another, only with the
company. The former, however, preserved the activist heart of the system
in that consumers would be pursued through various means: opinion-
registering (such as Epinions.com), complaint sites (for example,
untied.org, the complaint site for United Airlines), chat rooms, and (once
again) nonpro?ts. The governing logic, however, was still to achieve critical
mass; only this time, the business-a?liated version was formulated as a
?nancial vehicle for supporting the take-o? of the consumer-a?liated
(mass use) version. (The assumption, based on information provided by a
friend who did market research for a large consulting company, was that
companies would pay a few hundred thousand dollars for this capability.)
Critical mass would be achieved by getting the capability installed on so
many sites that the company would have the unique capability of aggregat-
ing these data and using them to build large consumer groups. There was a
(described by Morgan as) ‘subversive’ element in that Harry in particular
believed that if the company achieved the sought-after reach, then it would
116 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
have the ability to sell back data about groups of consumers to interested
companies. ‘We’ll have the biggest network of G (groups) to B (business)
sites,’ he claimed, ‘We’ll be the G to B marketplace!’
But as the new story was being formulated, money was running short.
Howard and Harry decided to pursue angel investors because the target
amount of funds was considered too small for venture capitalists. Also,
Harry was nervous about his idea and felt that VCs could not be trusted.
He gave me strict warning not to describe the company to anyone without
getting a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA). The best angel prospect was
deemed to be Greg, a former coworker of Rich’s, the VP of Engineering.
The two had worked closely together for a couple of years, Greg a salesman
and Rich his supporting sales engineer. They were now personal friends. I
thought it was interesting that when Greg met with Howard and Harry, he
then went to lunch – alone – with Rich (Rich did not want to participate in
the fund-raising e?ort; he said he wanted to focus on building the product.
Nor did he attend any management meetings with Harry, Howard, Morgan
and Emil, saying that meetings were a waste of time.) For about two weeks
after the meeting, all I knew was that Greg was performing due diligence
on the company. I subsequently learned that this meant he was running the
idea by Bev, a former coworker of his from Sun Microsystems, who was
now an independent consultant specializing in Customer Relationship
Management (CRM) systems. Bev approved the company’s idea and Greg
gave the company $500,000 – enough to make it to the next major mile-
stone, which was to build a saleable product.
Howard asked me to meet with Bev in order to develop the story line for
the business-a?liated version. Bev was viewed as an invaluable resource
due to her CRM experience and contacts. (At and before that time, the
company had no advisors, partners, or employees with any professional
experience in customer relations, customer service, or related functions.) In
addition, by meeting with her and incorporating her ideas, the founders felt
that Greg would be reassured about his investment. Bev agreed to provide
consulting services in exchange for equity. My job was to meet with her, run
ideas by her, get her advice, and document her recommendations. In our
?rst meeting, Bev argued that the product was really a CRM o?ering and
that it was compelling because it ?lled a lack in the marketplace. Existing
customer e-mail handling systems did not allow customers to help each
other. Bev believed that this capability would not only relieve companies of
signi?cant time and labor burdens in replying to customer queries but also
would get customers their answers more accurately and quickly. Bev illus-
trated this idea with a picture of a reverse pyramid showing that no one was
serving a big midsection between the idiosyncratic, one-to-one inquiry (top
of the pyramid) and the commonly held, mass-level, auto-reply issue
Narrative, legitimacy building and venturing 117
(bottom). This graphic was immediately incorporated into the investor
pitch and the business plan along with a direct quote from her as an expert
in CRM systems as to the uniqueness of the opportunity.
In the meantime, Rich and some programmers he had hired had built
enough of a system to begin to demonstrate it. I was asked to accompany
the founders on visits to potential users. Leads were obtained from personal
networks, including my own. Whereas the founders saw these as sales calls,
Greg viewed them as feedback opportunities. Harry persisted in his view of
a system that would change the way business was done. Greg, on the other
hand, saw this as a waste of time. ‘People don’t know what this is. They’ve
never seen anything like it before. You can’t sell it to them yet, but maybe
you can pique their interest.’ More colorfully, he added, ‘Just forget this
power to the people bullshit.’
My role was to listen and document the interactions carefully. Since not
everyone could attend the meetings, my notes were distributed by e-mail
and feedback was elicited. How did people react to the idea? What objec-
tions did they raise? Would the system solve their problems – why or why
not? Naturally reactions varied, but in reviewing my notes from these ses-
sions, there were a few common denominators: Audiences feared (1) that
the system would operate in a suggestive, self-ful?lling manner to give cus-
tomers complaints where they otherwise might not have had any; (2) that
the system would obligate them to or lead customers to expect satisfactory
resolutions to problems; and (3) that the system would create more work
for them in terms of volume of contacts and need to address issues crea-
tively. I had a di?cult time when running the idea by some of my former
students from business school. One, a VP of Marketing for a major wine
company, told me quite frankly that his company was not interested in any
mechanism that would increase communication with customers. I felt quite
naive upon hearing this. And another former student of mine, a VP of
Customer Relations for a major fast-food company subsequently told me
the same thing, but a little worse: He said his company spent millions of
dollars getting information about customers, only to ignore it in the end.
The dual versions of the story continued to be told. On the consumer-
a?liated side, Howard decided to give the product away just in order to
obtain a beta site. I approached several of my contacts from the nonpro?t
sector. They were brutally honest. One said that she was tired of high-tech
companies approaching her as a guinea pig (apparently, many others had
the same idea as Harry did) and that the issue was one of support – they
could not a?ord the resources to either begin or continue a new Internet
service. Even if they had help in the beginning, they knew that help would
not be long-term or ongoing. Another contact stated that she wanted to see
the concept proven by a paying customer before she would adopt it herself.
118 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
The largest contingent of e-mail activists that I could ?nd belonged to an
environmental organization that had its own proprietary Internet applica-
tion – which it was in the process of selling to other nonpro?ts. Finally,
phone interviews with executive directors indicated similar responses as the
for-pro?t community: fears as to increased workload, implied promises,
and a reluctance to increase member interaction. In short, we could not
even give the product away to a nonpro?t or to an activist. The transitional
story, particularly the sub-story containing the founding story, became
completely discredited. Of more concern to me, though, were the signs dis-
crediting the business-focused story line. However, Bev’s argument had
proven persuasive with Greg; and it also convinced several friends of the
entrepreneurial team – $750,000 had been raised.
This ?rst version of a transitional story incorporated the original story
line but added a pragmatic, revenue-generating component. In essence, the
business-a?liated story would support the consumer activism story until a
su?ciently critical mass was formed on the consumer side, allowing the
company to ful?ll its vision. In this way, although a pro?t motive was
emphasized, the governing logic and anticipated outcome was still groups,
mobilization, organizing, and change.
Second Transitional Story and Legitimacy
In the meantime, the market continued to drop; and it was clear that
signi?cant value and con?dence in Internet startups, and high-tech as a
whole, was not a temporary blip but rather a new economic state. In the fall,
Howard decided to abandon the two-sided story and, with Bev’s help, to
concentrate on the business-a?liated version. In this story line, authored
primarily by Howard and Bev, the product would replace existing CRM
systems. This story line required extensive research on CRM companies,
customers, products, and shortcomings. I looked into the history of Siebel,
a long-time player in the market, and Kana, which was relatively new but
had an advantage over Siebel by having started with Web applications
(where Siebel was playing catch-up). I was humbled to learn that the Kana
developers had spent one year researching e-mail handling processes at a
major dot-com – whereas we did not even have a single person on the entre-
preneurial team who had ever worked in customer relations, customer
service, or related functions.
I interviewed several heads of customer service in local dot-coms. I
learned that customer service was not considered to be a strategic part of
these companies; rather, it was something of a maintenance function. Also,
these individuals were not in senior management, and the personnel were
considered to be low-level. This posed some problems because our system
Narrative, legitimacy building and venturing 119
was oriented to decision-making, action, and change. In fact, in an inter-
view with a head of customer service at a major software company, I was
told that the system would require completely new roles for customer
service representatives (CSRs) and could ultimately completely recast the
customer service function. Also, there were questions as to how the system
would integrate with Siebel and Kana; and the truth is, we had no idea, nor
did Harry take the question seriously as he envisioned the product as a
complete replacement for these (however, most of the companies we talked
to had at least some existing CRM product in place). In December, we came
close to making a ?rst sale, only to learn that the prospect company was
being deluged by customer phone calls and that this, not e-mail, was their
‘pain point’.
This second transitional story line plotted the venture squarely into exist-
ing territory, that is, the CRM marketplace. However, in my opinion, we
never really planted ourselves in this story line. We had an armchair per-
spective at best and lacked in-the-trenches stories and experience necessary
to bring this story line to life. Also, there remained a residual investment by
the founders in the original change-the-world/save-the-world story line.
Greg could not a?ord to put any more money into the company. Harry and
Howard were becoming increasingly disenchanted at what they perceived
as the excessively risk-averse climate. Yet Harry still talked about the system
as a superior o?ering to and ultimately a replacement for existing products.
He saw them as inferior because he felt that they did not exploit the many-
to-one communication capabilities of the Internet and thus represented an
impoverished technological vision. Harry went to Andy, a colleague and
mentor of his who had advised a number of successful startups. Andy
agreed to put money into the company and essentially save it – on the con-
dition that he would have full decision-making power.
Saleable Story and Legitimacy
This ?nal version of the company story line was authored strictly by Andy.
It positioned the product within the existing set of CRM tools and as an
add-on to an existing product line. This development occurred after my
work with the company ended (Andy brought in his own team). For Andy,
the dominant story line was integration – technical integration with the
existing status quo product line and organizational integration with the
existing corporate CRM function and the traditional corporate CSR tasks
and role. This is also a classic interpretation of legitimacy building in a
startup context. As I write this chapter, a CRM company has expressed
interest in buying the intellectual property and in bringing the software
writers, including the VP of Engineering and his team, on board; and
120 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
Morgan reports that this is generally viewed as an exciting development
since the money is almost gone and there are no other active prospects.
Harry estimates that the purchase price will repay Greg, the friends of the
team who put smaller amounts (about $50,000 each), and himself. Given
the outcomes of many dot.coms, he considers this a successful result.
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
Legitimacy building is a highly complex process involving multiple audi-
ences and actors. While the ‘act’ of legitimacy building, in the abstract
sense, may be held constant for analytical purposes, Table 5.1 (end of
chapter) shows the hectic dynamics (note all versions were formulated
within a period of ten months) of this process. At four distinct points, the
story of the company was authored by di?erent individuals, with di?erent
purposes, toward di?erent audiences, amid virtually opposite scenes.
Some patterns are worth highlighting. First, the continuous search shows
that the legitimacy-building exercise was highly deliberate: the company
story was successively reshaped and retold in the interest of establishing
legitimacy, in this case pragmatic legitimacy, meaning the securing of
con?dence to win capital. Second, the process was retroactive, meaning that
the story was provisionally accepted and then revised based on research,
feedback, and testing. Third, the founder’s authorial role diminished with
each version, although his original story retained staying power until the
very last version, over which he had no authorship whatsoever. In my
opinion, this re?ects the fact that Harry had a clear idea of what he wanted
to build and he saw stories as a means to the means of money. Up through
the very last meeting I had with him, the only story Harry told with any
passion was his story of using technology for social change. This illustrates
a paradox about legitimacy seeking in that although Harry and his team had
to take legitimacy relatively seriously in order to write a credible or poten-
tially credible story, Harry himself maintained a fundamentally radical
vision developed outside the status quo of story lines pertaining to CRM
technology, CSR job descriptions, and the low strategic value of corporate
customer service. The concern for legitimacy is a conservative one; but he
plotted his idea into an overarching story about overturning rather than
supporting the status quo. This was particularly evident based on the inter-
views with (1) marketing heads who questioned and even disputed the extent
of managerial interest in customer issues and (2) customer service mana-
gers who, given a look at the demo, began rethinking the basic CSR job
description and even its hierarchical placement within the larger organiza-
tion. It is noteworthy that the ?nal version of the company story subsumed
Narrative, legitimacy building and venturing 121
the product into an existing and fully legitimized (in the sense of taken-for-
granted/status quo) product line, technology suite, job description, and cor-
porate philosophy about customers and customer service. That this plotting
was so very far from Harry’s starting point indicates the wide disparity
between the original founding story and the achievement of legitimacy.
Yet Harry and the team were obliged to seek legitimacy in that they were
expected by prospective investors, customers, partners, and others to tell a
convincing story about why and how they were in business. From the
outset, they were embedded in a very conventional story line having to do
with approaching potential investors and the rules or standard practices by
which one typically convinces them. They had to talk them into the story
of the company. But the most important investor, Greg, told me bluntly
that he found Harry’s story to be ‘bullshit’. In his opinion, the company had
another, more legitimate and valuable story that mainly he and Bev could
see. Bev made fun of Harry when, on one occasion, he garbled her story.
Morgan giggled and expressed disbelief when he ?rst heard Bev’s story for
the company, exclaiming ‘Can you believe it? We might be a real company!’.
Greg viewed the meetings with prospective customers as feedback oppor-
tunities. He told me that he saw the company story as emergent, particu-
larly in relation to the needs and concerns shared by this audience. So the
legitimacy of the story, in the sense of ‘buy-in’, was subject to the eyes of
the beholders.
Some of these con?icts may be explained by a larger, overarching story
line prevalent in high technology, that of evangelism, that is, the mixing of
business and idealistic or ideological story lines. Harry was a man on a
mission. Morgan, in retrospect, described Harry has having a ‘high reality
distortion factor’ (a phrase ?rst coined to describe Steve Jobs’s e?ect on
customers, employees, and audiences and meaning that he could convince
people of very unrealistic things). I certainly thought that Harry had an
exciting idea.
However, his enthusiasm, perhaps fanaticism, blinded him to some fun-
damental realities of the business world, including the fact that companies
had already invested considerable sums of money in what they considered
to be comparable systems and that they also had an investment in the past,
present, and future story lines about the CSR role and tasks. (Harry was
insulated from some of these realities by having his brother as his partner.)
As long as Harry appealed to corporate audiences who were embedded in
these story lines, I could not see how to graft this story onto one that fea-
tured consumers as the main characters. The ultimate irony is that, while
pitching a highly customer-focused application, the entrepreneurs them-
selves dwelled more on telling their new story than incorporating it into the
ones they were hearing.
122 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
The case shows the dynamic and chaotic nature of legitimacy building
amid external and internal change. The pursuit of legitimacy described in
this chapter foregrounds the turbulence and ‘bubbling cauldron’ of new
ventures. It gives insight into, and I hope provokes further research on,
vastly understudied aspects of entrepreneurship such as the critical ?rst
phases of venturing and the everyday preoccupations and foci of found-
ers from the moment they seize on an idea. How founders succeed and
fail in the complex, constraining, and life-sustaining activity of legiti-
macy building is a story with much at stake for researchers as well as
entrepreneurs.
Table 5.1 Pentadic analysis of acts of legitimacy-building narratives
Narrative One: ‘Band together to get results’
Story: Our system will mobilize people with shared agendas.
Starting with opinion leaders, we will eventually
accumulate millions of users who will grow
exponentially through viral communication. We will
have so many users that advertisers will sustain us
Agents/Authors: Harry, Morgan, and Bart
Agency: The investment capital of personal friends, especially
dot.com millionaires
Purpose: Empower people, change the world
Scene: Internet boom
Narrative Two: Get the money to ful?l our vision
Problem with other story: Our vision will not pay for itself as we thought. We
can’t rely on viral communication and rapid growth.
The eyeballs model has been discredited
New story: Have two separate businesses: the original vision and
a moneymaker. The latter will be a product that we
sell to companies who want customer feedback
Agents/Authors: Howard and Harry
Agency: Investment capital of venture capitalists known by
our personal networks
Purpose: Make money and change the world at the same time
Scene: NASDAQ crashed. Short- and long-term views
highly uncertain. Will it rebound or not?
Narrative Three: Forget the vision, we need money
Problem with other story: We can’t even give this product away. Activists don’t
trust us because we’re a for-pro?t company.
Nonpro?ts accuse us of using them as guinea
pigs
Narrative, legitimacy building and venturing 123
Table 5.1 (continued)
New story: We are positioned in the corporate marketplace. Our
product replaces and outperforms all other CRM
products. We will solve customer service problems for
large to medium-sized companies
Agents/Authors: Howard and Bev
Agency: Mainstream venture capitalists
Purpose: Solve corporate problems and make money
Scene: Internet and high-tech bust
Narrative Four: Recoup our investment
Problem with other story: Investors and customers not coming in. Product does
not mesh with existing practices of CSRs. Many
companies want less, not more customer interaction
and fear that system will create more work. Most
companies already have a major investment in an
existing CRM product
New story: Sell the technology
Agents/Authors: Andy and Howard
Agency: Existing CRM companies
Purpose: Get our money back
Scene: The rubble heap
124 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
6. The devil is in the e-tale: forms and
structures in the entrepreneurial
narratives
Robert Smith and Alistair R. Anderson
INTRODUCTION
In this chapter we explore the genre of ‘Entrepreneurial Tales’, which we
refer to as e-tales. The title is an obvious parody of the proverb, ‘The devil
is in the detail’, and re?ects the power of entrepreneurial narratives, a power
that stems from the normative detail embedded in the moral content of the
e-tale. We use the term ‘tale’ in preference to other descriptors, as the word
tale is associated with imaginative creation and even ?ction, and also
because tales explain themselves. Tales encompass morality and immorality.
The purpose of the chapter is to show how moral details play an important
role in communicating values as a framework to entrepreneurial actions. We
demonstrate that morality is an important detail of e-tales and forms a
common master theme. The chapter explains what we mean by e-tales and
shows how they form narratives which exhort entrepreneurship. We attempt
to illustrate how they operate, essentially as instrumental examples – ways
of showing that entrepreneurship can be done. We also show how these
examples are set in a moral context, one which appears to promote an entre-
preneurial ethos replete with an underpinning of moral values.
To develop our argument the chapter opens with a section on narrative
as a cultural dialogue and how narrative provides a legitimizing frame of
reference which is both sensemaking and sensegiving. We then explore the
entrepreneurial narrative and show how e-tales con?rm the righteousness
of entrepreneurial actions by signifying a moral framework and a legitimiz-
ing context. E-tales are argued to promote entrepreneurship as practice by
emphasizing independence, perseverance and the value of success, espec-
ially in the face of adversity. They a?rm a ‘right’ way but, the devil in the
e-tale, also demonstrate the fall from grace when appropriate ethical
conduct is not maintained.
Several examples of narrative are then considered. First the classic hag-
iographic tales of Horatio Alger and Samuel Smiles and their historical
125
antecedents are presented as stereotypical examples of e-tales. Next we ?nd
con?rmation of the same elements in both biographies and novels about
entrepreneurs. We also note the similarities in academic commentaries
about the use of metaphor in narrative. Finally we explore personal e-tales
and distinguish between familial fables and memorial tales. We conclude
that e-tales have a de?nitive structure which emphasizes the twin virtues of
morality and success.
THE VALUE IN UNDERSTANDING
ENTREPRENEURIAL NARRATIVES
An understanding of entrepreneurial narratives is useful, not least because
they are a central means of communicating the entrepreneurial message. So
for many, narrative provides most of what they know about entrepreneur-
ship. This implies that from an academic perspective, understanding narra-
tive enables us to appreciate the social construction of enterprise. However,
what really intrigues us about the e-tales of entrepreneurial narrative is their
form and structure, how they share common patterns of structure and
content; how they carry a moral framework and how they espouse par-
ticular codes of action. They are not only ideological standard bearers for
entrepreneurship, but are lived examples, rich in metaphor and idealized
typi?cations. For us, this is the reason why e-tales are such e?ective ways of
explaining and communicating culture; they are ‘familiars’, so that we begin
to recognize them as well-known stories, we become comfortable with them.
The e-tale becomes naturalized, rather than being seen as contrived propa-
ganda. What is extraordinary about this process is that entrepreneurship
itself is extraordinary, because there is no formula for entrepreneurship and
there is no rule-book to follow. Each entrepreneur, by de?nition, is di?erent;
each entrepreneurial act is novel, yet the framework of the e-tale forms
entrepreneurship into a friendly face of capitalism. Moreover, they do so
with moral aforethought, they emphasize moral codes and debunk ideas of
freebooting amoral capitalism. Through e-tales, entrepreneurial narratives
have, arguably, become a discourse of dominant ideology.
We suggest that there is a primary relationship between storytelling and
entrepreneurship because the communication of value is obviously central to
the practice of entrepreneurship, because the entrepreneur ‘takes between’
creating and extracting the value of their product or service. Storytelling is
very similar, in that it recounts tales to communicate general values such as
the bene?ts of enterprise and speci?c values such as appropriate behaviours.
It does not seem coincidental that successful entrepreneurs such as Tony
O’Reilly have developed a reputation as being ‘raconteurs’ and ‘storytellers’,
126 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
indeed, Roddick (2000, p. 4) stressed that every entrepreneur is a ‘great story-
teller’. The operational link may be that entrepreneurial stories o?er both a
sensemaking and a sensegiving opportunity (Gioia and Chittipeddi, 1995).
Stories re-present (tell ‘about’ entrepreneurship in speci?c contexts) social
and entrepreneurial knowledge, so that stories can bridge the gap between
explicit and implicit knowledge. People willingly tell stories that re?ect their
basic values, norms, emotions and theories about how and why events take
place (Callahan and Elliot, 1996). Pitt (1998), for example, explains this is
why entrepreneurs are motivated to tell their stories. Such stories are e?ective
because the listener can identify with the components of the tale and can
engage with the enactment, so that storytelling is linked to subjective inter-
pretation (McKenna, 1999).
As sensemaking tools, e-tales provide a rational for the arguably irra-
tional risks of enterprising. Rae and Carswell (2000) propose the life story
narrative as a technique for entrepreneurial learning. Rae (2000) and Rae
and Carswell (2001) also suggest that the narrative can be a way of under-
standing the practice of entrepreneurship. In contrast, Fiet (2001) argues
that the particularity of storytelling cannot explain di?erent contingencies
and resources in entrepreneurship, so that ‘war stories’ can only lead to
average returns with the loss of any ?rst mover advantage. Nonetheless,
such war stories do provide instrumental examples of what can be done.
Importantly as Buckler and Zien (1996, p. 394) argue, stories also provide,
‘an elegant way of transmitting values’. Stories are, of course, only exam-
ples of narratives. However, narratives in more general terms have become
increasingly recognized as a mechanism for providing meaning. The follow-
ing section considers this broader role and moves to explore the speci?cs of
the entrepreneurial narrative, in particular the embedded sets of values.
Narratives
As an example of the wider role of narrative, Gergen (2001) notes how nar-
rative has shifted from a minor role in scholarly deliberation to a concate-
nation throughout the humanities and social science. Most recently it has
emerged within the study of management so that storytelling is now an
accepted method for communication (Collinson and Mackenzie, 1999;
Morgan and Dennehey, 1997; Buckler and Zien, 1996). Narrative is unique
because it provides a fundamental method of linking individual human
actions and events with interrelated aspects to gain an understanding of
outcomes. This means that it has the capacity to present the relatedness
between interdependencies. It works by creating individual stories and his-
tories and presenting them for direct observation. Narratives can include
personal and social histories, myths, fairy tales, novels or everyday stories
Forms and structures in the entrepreneurial narratives 127
that are used to explain or justify our own, or others, actions and behav-
iours. Such tales derive meaning by identifying how human actions and
events contribute to a particular outcome, components of the stories
con?gured to present a whole outcome (Agostino, 2002). According to
Barry and Elmes (1997, p. 3) narrative serves as a lens through which
‘apparently independent and disconnected elements of existence are seen
as related parts of a whole’.
Narrative cannot explain events under any set of scienti?c laws – instead
it seeks to explain by identifying the signi?cance of the events on the basis
of the outcome that has followed. We must accept that narrative rarely
allows us to prove anything. Rorty (1991b) discusses the subjective, shared
nature of truth to argue that we should shift from a rational, objective
notion towards notions of signi?cance and meaning. Moreover Etzioni
(1988) shows how value and non-rational considerations are most import-
ant in appreciating how concepts are signi?cant causes of behaviour.
Callahan and Elliot (1996) note how Bruner (1986, p. 12) emphasized nar-
rative as an alternative mode of thought from the logico-scienti?c. Instead
of being preoccupied with truth, we should be asking how we can endow
‘experience with meaning, which is the question that preoccupies the poet
and the story teller’. For Gergen (2001) truth and objectivity in the narra-
tive are not signi?cant. This is because ‘objective’ appraisal is a communal
achievement, the language of description does not mirror what is the case,
the language functions to index a state of a?airs for all practical purposes
within a given community. Accordingly, Steyaert and Bouwen (1997), argue
the epistemological support for entrepreneurial narrative lies in the contex-
tuality and meaning of entrepreneurial stories.
Bamberg (2002) claims that narratives con?gure space and time and
employ cohesive devices to create a relatedness of actions across scenes.
This point is similar to that made by Foss in Chapter 4 and Damgaard et
al. in Chapter 8 about the theatrical and the dramaturgical. Stories are a
natural vehicle for relating events (Buckler and Zien, 1996), creating themes
and plots and in so doing, make sense of themselves and social situations.
Narratives are ?exible and carry messages that anchor ‘reality’ in context.
Narratives require to be interpreted and the symbolism of stories allows an
interpretative understanding by the listener. Accordingly the complexity of
the entrepreneurial process is made simpler, more tangible for the listener
because it allows a selective interpretation around those elements with
which the listener is familiar. The listener’s role is not passive but active and
consequently a richer, shared learning experience. Robinson and Hawpe
(1986) see narrative as a cognitive process, a heuristic to organize percep-
tion and allow perceivers to generalize from one instance to another
(Callahan and Elliot, 1996).
128 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
Narrative is important as a regenerative mechanism and, as Fleming
(2001) notes, individuals and organizations must construct and reconstruct
meaning. Polkinghorne (1988) argues that as humans we are immersed in
narrative, which is the human activity of making meaning and narrative is
the primary form by which experience is made meaningful. For Sarbin
(1986), humans think, perceive, imagine and make moral choices accord-
ing to narrative structures. Narrative ?ction focuses on the motivation of a
central ?gure who harbours problematic yet achievable goals. In fact,
Campbell (1956) claims that there is but one, monomyth, that concerns the
hero who has been able to overcome personal and historical limitations.
Propp (2001) makes a similar point in his discussion on the classi?cation of
folktales. The components of one tale, he argues, can readily be transferred
to another. The functional aspects of tales are always similar, but the dra-
matic personae can have in?nite variety.
Gold and Watson (2001) show how narratives are shaped to ensure that
valued practices are given prominence. As Gergen (2001a, p. 7) points out,
narratives function both to re?ect and to create cultural values:
In establishing a given endpoint and endowing it with value, and in populating
the narrative with certain actors and certain facts as opposed to others, the nar-
rator enters the world of moral and political evaluation. Value is placed on
certain goals (e.g. winning, as opposed to non-competition) certain individuals
(heroes and villains as opposed to communities) and particular modes of descrip-
tion . . . the culture’s ontology and sense of values is a?rmed and sustained.
MacIntyre (1981) makes a similar point, when he argues that humans are
storytelling animals and that we make sense of our lives in narrative form.
Indeed the psychologist Bruner (1986) proposes that there is only narrative,
that there is no di?erence between life as lived and life as told. So narrative
o?ers both a method and a meaning system – stories tell. They tell about
events, instrumental examples, but also identify and promote speci?c
meaning systems, appropriate cultural norms or values. As Lodge (1992)
argues, a narrative holds the interest.
Entrepreneurial Narratives
Understanding of the entrepreneurial process, entreprenology if you like, is
an interpretative science. It must involve understanding the meanings that
subjects use. In turn, this calls for a commitment to the basic ontological and
epistemological assumptions of idealism, that the things that exist in our
entrepreneurial life world are de?ned by culture and language. Rae (1999)
suggests that entrepreneurship is a living theory, but one which can be
expressed and understood through personal narratives. In this section we
Forms and structures in the entrepreneurial narratives 129
therefore set out to explore the nature, content and purpose of the entrepre-
neurial narratives. We argue that because the concept of entrepreneurship is
nebulous, even obscure, narrative provides a heuristic method of reducing
complexity by illustration and example. Narrative produces an encapsulated
instance as an instrumental exemplar. By couching stories about the exotic
in a familiar context, narrative can bring distant things closer, make the
obscure clear and simplify the complex. This is essential, given that so few
members of society directly experience entrepreneurship. Thus the ‘entre-
preneurial spectacle’ is exotic because it is, of necessity, unfamiliar.
Although e-tales are often didactic in nature, narratives do not tell the
entrepreneurial story but relate an entrepreneurial tale. This is because,
almost by de?nition, each entrepreneurial event is novel, di?erent in some
particular from all that has gone before. Even entrepreneurs themselves, as
Hill and Levenhagen (1995) suggest, operate at the edge of what they do
not know. So narrative enables the ?lling in of details about this unknown.
In capturing the movements of entrepreneurship, narrative seizes essences,
con?ning them in a familiar form. Narrative thus acts as a creative carrier
of information and values between the sender and the receiver, hence nar-
rative, like entrepreneurship, is a boundary-spanning activity. The episte-
mological underpinning for narrative is that stories lie at the
epistemological boundary of entrepreneurial praxis. Entrepreneurship is
about creating value and new realities and narrative enables these values to
be transmitted and perhaps even to be transformed into new entrepreneu-
rial realities. Narrative provides form and substance to the essence of entre-
preneurship and there is an obvious circularity in the relationship between
the two. Traditional entrepreneurial narratives communicate a friendly
version of the entrepreneurial process, one rendered simpler and more
transparent. They often tell a tale of ‘Nice Entrepreneurship’ as suggested
by Rehn and Taalas (2002) in Chapter 7. Narratives thus perform the entre-
preneurial spectacle.
The Values Within the Entrepreneurial Narrative
The foregoing has shown how narrative upholds entrepreneurship as a valu-
able practice. Discourse itself is a mode of action, so that it does not simply
represent reality, but serves to construct versions of reality. In so doing the
entrepreneurial narrative con?rms and asserts the righteousness of entre-
preneurship. As a result of the Enterprise Culture (Cohen and Musson,
2000) the discourse of enterprise has achieved considerable currency as a
righteous practice. It is clear that the entrepreneurial narrative produces a
friendly face of individualized capitalism. We might speculate that this pro-
motion of enterprise results from a social and economic need for entrepre-
130 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
neurs. However, we cannot know the purpose of the entrepreneurial narra-
tive, because outside the limited notions of Parsonian functionalism, soci-
eties do not have needs and responses. However, agents within societies do
recognize needs and act to promote particular practices. Accordingly we can
see both a social and a personal rationale for propagating the e-tale.
This explanation accounts for the general promotion of e-tales, but
doesn’t explain why they have a moral loading. But MacIntyre (1981, p.
456) argues, ‘narrative requires an evaluative framework in which good or
bad character helps to produce unfortunate or happy outcomes’. Gergen
(2001) claims this requirement is in fact a demand for a valued endpoint in
narrative. Life is rarely composed of separable events, but in narrative the
end point and its value are determined by the teller of the tale. E-tales seem
to ?t this rather well, so much so that we want to argue that entrepreneu-
rial narratives can be understood as modern parables. Deacy (2002, p. 66)
describes biblical parables as ‘short ?ctional narratives to reveal religious
symbolic and transcendental truths and values about the human condition,
its aspirations and potentiality . . . the parable is meant to provoke us, chal-
lenge us, and transform us, reminding us of our limits and limitations, and
laying the groundwork for the possibility of transcendence’. E-tales cer-
tainly reveal these issues, but do more. They seem to o?er a particular moral
framework for entrepreneurial actions.
Morality is about the goodness or badness of character or behaviour.
Judgements about goodness or badness are necessarily subjective, but are
normally based on some generally socially acceptable norm. Values are the
underlying principles of morality, the personal judgements of what is
important and right or proper. In this sense morality is socially constructed
and consequently socially judged; values are more personal but inform
character and behaviour. Narrative, as we have seen, provides both a social
framework of morality and sets out values as speci?c commendable acts.
Thus narrative provides a legitimizing context, both personal and social for
entrepreneurship. Suchman (1995, p. 574) de?nes legitimacy as the ‘gener-
alized perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable,
proper, or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms,
values, beliefs and de?nitions’. What is signi?cant about e-tales is the way
that they legitimize entrepreneurial actions, because they are couched in a
moral framework, which espouses these ethical values.
DIFFERENT FORMS OF E-TALES
It appears that regardless of the form of narrative, personal, ?ctional, auto-
biographical even journalistic stories about entrepreneurship, there is a
Forms and structures in the entrepreneurial narratives 131
common moral theme presented. We see two elements within the theme,
?rst the social promotion of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship, with
overtones of independence, perseverance and success is promoted as a good
thing to do. The second theme is the promotion of values for entrepreneur-
ship, the detail. This secondary theme emphasizes how this entrepreneur-
ship should be ethical. It presents sets of personal values as appropriate
codes of behaviour, the right way. The sting in the ‘e-tale’ is usually about
hubris, the fall from grace if entrepreneurial conduct is not ethically main-
tained. To illustrate our argument we consider the historical antecedents of
the narrative and examine the classic hagiographic story, exempli?ed in the
tales by Horatio Alger. This is followed by an overview of recent examples
of entrepreneurial biographies and ?ction. Then we review e-tales in entre-
preneurial studies exploring metaphors, folklore, myths and fables. Finally
we review some personal e-tales, stories told by entrepreneurs about them-
selves. Although these are very di?erent mechanisms for narrating, they all
appear to share the common themes described above.
Hagiographies and the Historical Antecedents of this Classical E-tale
The classical hagiographic entrepreneurial narrative is a fusion of three
powerful complementary narrative components, ‘Morality’, ‘Success’ and
the ‘Entrepreneurial Dream’. This third component embodies success
within morality to present the end point. These pervasive and recurring
themes have become embedded in the texts. The moral aspect is to be
expected given that the entrepreneurial narrative was in?uenced by and
perhaps evolved from the genre of ‘Puritanical Goodly Books’ and the
writings of Benjamin Franklin. Indeed, religion was important to the evo-
lution of the entrepreneurial community. Religion also had a signi?cant
in?uence upon the formation of the entrepreneurial spirit, as Weber (1930)
explains in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber’s
account is particularly helpful in understanding the genesis of the e-tale
because, as he argues, the emergent form of Calvanistic capitalism was
highly individualistic. Rather than emphasizing a communitarian value set,
Calvanism supported a self-monitored code of ethics and appropriate
behaviours. In this way, morality became relatively detached from conform-
ing to the social codes of the social contract. It became individualized, lib-
eralized in the political economy sense that Adam Smith alludes to, and
embodied into individual action. Importantly, success took on a material,
rather than a spiritual form.
In the e-tale, ‘success’ is often portrayed as the poor boy making good,
but what di?erentiates this from simply achieving the archetypical ‘entrepre-
neurial dream’ is the overcoming of di?culties, disadvantage and obstacles,
132 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
usually by dint of e?ort and perseverance against adversity. Such entrepre-
neurial narratives commonly begin with examples of poverty and marginal-
ity heroically overcome in childhood. In this way the entrepreneurial dream
is realized. Thus we see the process and outcomes as discussed earlier; that
success is achieved in overcoming adversity, by dint of moral e?ort.
The classic Horatio Alger ‘rags to riches’ stories published by a number
of o?cial and uno?cial publishers (seehttp://www.washburn.edu/sobu/
broach/algerres.html for details) provide an excellent, and prototypical,
example of the form. Alger’s books sold over 200 million copies, so provid-
ing evidence of the pervasion of the theme. Kanfer (2000) notes how the
classic Alger plot seldom varied; a youth of humble origins makes his way
in the city by virtue of grit and toil. Luck usually plays its part, but to Alger,
fortune was something to be enticed and manipulated. In Alger’s view,
square dealing and independence formed the basis of the American experi-
ment and realized the American Dream. Kanfer comments on the cultural
underpinnings of this moralized individualism. He notes that Benjamin
Franklin wrote, ‘God helps those who help themselves’ and that Thomas
Paine observed, ‘ When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remem-
ber that virtue is not hereditary’. Similarly Abraham Lincoln stated that,
‘Truth is the best vindication against slander’ and Ralph Waldo Emerson
instructed, ‘Discontent is the want of self-reliance, it is in?rmity of will’.
Kanfer argues that Alger’s novels aimed to instil the idea behind those
phrases into America’s children. What is particularly interesting is the way
that these homespun stories encapsulate the American way of self-reliance
in a moral framework.
Sarachek (1990) examined the Horatio Alger myth and demonstrated
that the common formulaic storylines o?ered several variations on the ‘rags
to riches theme’. These included:
? The hero’s humble origins in urban or rural poverty;
? His status as an orphan, or perhaps the son of an invalid, or a poor
but honest hard-working father;
? Often native born and bred, although occasionally a hero of foreign
birth was allowed;
? Working-class extraction or alternatively the son of either an impov-
erished middle-class family or had been orphaned unknowingly from
a rich family;
? The in?uence of his parents as staunch upholders of the Protestant
Work Ethic;
? They were invariably forced to start work at an early age to be the
family breadwinners;
? The hero is often aided by an older well-intentioned male benefactor.
Forms and structures in the entrepreneurial narratives 133
Taken together we can see how these storylines create moral tales of over-
coming di?culties by hard work, by remaining decent in the face of adver-
sity and, most importantly, of achieving the American Dream of material
success. We see cause, hard work; we see process, overcoming obstacles, and
we see the outcome of success.
The historical British equivalent of Alger was Samuel Smiles, a Scot
whose works on self-help also achieved best-seller status. For Smiles, the
moral framework was self-reliance, industry, thrift and self-improvement.
Many of his works recounted famous entrepreneurial individuals who
achieved success by hard work and industry. Interestingly, whilst Smiles’
works focused on individual e?ort as the gateway to success, he placed less
emphasis on the ultimate ‘dream’, and was more concerned about the re-
alization of a fairer society based on these values.
Recent Entrepreneurial Biographies and Novels as E-tales
Having established the cultural roots of the e-tale, we now consider some
more recent manifestations of narratives. These examples are not compre-
hensive, but are o?ered as exemplars to illustrate our argument. Table 6.1,
below, provides an overview of some of the typical storylines in e-tales
identi?ed by Smith (2002). Smith reviewed biographies of entrepreneurs
and also novels in which the entrepreneur was the hero. As in the classic
tales discussed earlier, some common themes were discernible across both
literary genres. The biographies examined were those of Tony O’Reilly
(Fallon, 1994); Kjell Inge Rokke (Gibbs, 2001) and Sir Richard Branson
(Jackson, 1994). Tony O’Reilly is a legendary Irish entrepreneur whose
career spans the American Corporate Dream rising to become President of
Heinz. Kjell Inge Rokke is an incredible poor boy made good story of a
dyslexic youth who ran away to sea and rose to become a successful entre-
preneur in his native Scandinavia. The charismatic Sir Richard Branson
needs no introduction, being known worldwide. As can be seen from table
6.1, these themes were plotted onto the biographies of entrepreneurs.
Typical themes in biographies included:
? The entrepreneurial child prodigy ?gure;
? The classical narrative of the poor boy made good;
? The heroic entrepreneur;
? The villainous entrepreneur;
? The entrepreneur as an outsider;
? The entrepreneur legitimized;
? The entrepreneur castigated.
134 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
Table 6.1 Typical storylines in entrepreneurial narratives
Storyline Thematic Descriptions
The classical This category is central to the construction of
narrative of entrepreneurial narratives being rooted in reality. It is
the poor invoked with regularity (Fallon, 1994) (Tony O’Reilly, Kjell
boy made good Rokke). It involves the mythical element of the hegira – the
?ight from oppression in its many formats. A sub-theme is
serendipity. A dominant entrepreneurial paradigm.
The A dichotomous narrative in which the child is either blessed
entrepreneurial with a special gift (Tony O’Reilly) or conversely has to
child prodigy overcome learning di?culties (such as dyslexia – Richard
?gure Branson) or societal prejudices. Sub-themes include
overcoming marginality, poverty, race discrimination, etc. A
classic but optional entrepreneurial paradigm.
The heroic The entrepreneur eulogized. Sub-themes are the entrepreneur
entrepreneur succeeding against all odds, the entrepreneur taking on the
establishment (Richard Branson, Kjell Rokke), and the
development of hubris. During this stage the entrepreneur
creates new value or organizations. Sub-themes are empire
building and a change of stature from entrepreneur to baron,
tycoon, industrialist, mogul and oligarch. It has become a
dominant paradigm of mythical proportions.
The villainous This is the traditional narrative of the likeable rogue or rascal
entrepreneur (Richard Branson, Kjell Rokke). The entrepreneur is
frequently cast in this nefarious role and as such any success
is assumed to be the fruit of wickedness. Sub-themes include
wickedness, empire building and a change of stature to
criminal entrepreneur. An alternative entrepreneurial
paradigm.
The entrepreneur This narrative is invoked by entrepreneurs either at the
as an outsider beginning or end of their narratives, or even at both ends.
This category includes such demographic elements as class,
marginality, ethnicity, etc. It is the broad societal category for
di?erentiating all those entrepreneurs who do not achieve
legitimacy or heroic status. It includes the ethnic
entrepreneur, and the entrepreneur as an eccentric, and the
anti-establishment entrepreneur (Rokke, Branson). A classic
entrepreneurial paradigm.
The entrepreneur Sub-themes are – becoming immortalized, achieving a
legitimized change in stature to tycoon, magnate or baron (Rokke and
Branson); philanthropic acts (Branson and O’Reilly), societal
Forms and structures in the entrepreneurial narratives 135
Table 6.1 (continued)
Storyline Thematic Descriptions
recognition, for example, knighthoods (Branson) or
acceptance into fraternal orders, etc. The homecoming is also
part of this process. This dominant entrepreneurial paradigm
invariably involves a return to where it all began.
The entrepreneur This theme is discernible in most entrepreneur stories. Tony
castigated O’Reilly is castigated by the Irish people for being a
corporate émigré, whilst Richard Branson and Kjell Rokke
are castigated by their respective establishments as being
considered dangerous to the established business order. Sub-
themes are the humbling, hubristic payback, a general fall
from grace [the Icarus narrative], a descent into madness,
betrayal by signi?cant others or overstretching one’s
capabilities or a debilitating scandal. This theme is
particularly prevalent in novels. It is a peculiar form of
Schadenfreude – where the public takes pleasure in the
misfortune of others. This is a preferred paradigm.
Note: For further details on Tony O’Reilly, Kjell Rokke and Richard Branson, see Fallon
(1994), Gibbs (2001) and Jackson (1984) respectively.
Individual biographies and novels only use some of the themes, but
nonetheless create a heroic formulaic structure infused with moral under-
tones. The very words child, poor, good, heroic, villainous, outsider, legiti-
mized and castigated all have moral connotations. Moreover, when all the
themes are placed together in a framework, they create a very powerful nar-
rative pervaded by issues of morality.
Looking in detail at four novels, Millhauser (1988) Martin Dressler: The
Tale of an American Dreamer; Caldwell (1972) Captains and Kings; Fast
(1983) Max Britsky and Broat (1978) The Entrepreneur, we found that the
formulaic structure identi?ed in e-tales was similarly embedded in these
novels. The ?ctional entrepreneur was found to be a skewed construct gen-
erally portrayed in a historical, romanticized context, laden with myth.
Other themes in novels included empire building; an inability to form
meaningful relationships; overstretching credibility; overcoming educa-
tional disabilities; tutelage from mentor ?gures; a love-hate relationship
with a vengeful conspiring establishment; and personal human frailties.
However, the dominant themes are heroic struggles and morality.
These storylines of biographies and novels reiterate and contextualize
the same themes presented in the classic Alger tales. In the contextualiz-
136 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
ation, a typical entrepreneurial narrative may contain fairy-tale elements,
so the entrepreneur conforms to the basic tenets of a good story, that is, the
entrepreneur must be virtuous or villainous, and the story must have a
moral or a purpose. Accordingly the virtuous entrepreneur, having strug-
gled to achieve legitimacy, receives a knighthood, becomes a philanthropist
and endows the less enterprising amongst us with an institute of learning.
However, and this is the devil in the e-tale, since many entrepreneurs may
genuinely have a fatal ?aw in their basic human characteristics, or merely
because as readers we crave alternative endings, the outsider entrepreneur
must receive ‘hubristic payback’. The entrepreneur, who dares to be
Godlike and fails, has only one way to fall – downwards. Perhaps the years
of marginality and childhood privation have left a legacy of social coldness
on the adult persona, or perhaps he merely dreamed a dream too far and
thus overreached himself. In the hubristic ending, the devil in the e-tale, the
poor boy despite having made good may – lose his fortune and live in
penury; die of unrequited love; be exposed to treachery or chicanery from
trusted colleagues; or simply go insane. It is a familiar ‘old old’ story of
mythical proportions not least in its moral detail.
The E-tale in Entrepreneurial Studies
As evidence of the pervasionof these themes inthe narratives, Table 6.2 indi-
cates recent academic work exploring the role of metaphor, folklore, myth
and fable. These narrative formats are often interrelated with myth and fable
being regurgitated as metaphor. What is evident frommost of these studies
is the underpinning role of moral actions within entrepreneurship. This is
demonstrated most spectacularly in the ‘metaphor’ studies where newspaper
articles represented metaphors about entrepreneurs. Although a key theme
was the rags to riches transition, descriptive words like hero, giant, are fol-
lowed by Icarus, feet of clay and fallen heroes. Thus we see a di?erent poten-
tial outcome to the entrepreneurial process. If moral codes are ignored, the
sweetness of success is transformed into the bitterness of defeat.
These studies demonstrate how metaphors, as part of the entrepreneu-
rial narrative, often convey moralistic messages. A secondary theme is the
masculinity of the narrative; rarely do we ?nd the feminine aspects of the
entrepreneur promoted in the narrative. The accepted notion of morality
in entrepreneurial narratives is patently a ‘masculine’ gendered form.
Interestingly, Biddulph (1998) has questioned the macho structure of
manhood by challenging the ?ve central precepts of manhood: the notion
of the self-made man; action; competitiveness; the quest for approval [legit-
imacy]; and hard work. These structural elements echo the precepts of
e-tales, perhaps reinforcing the masculinity of entrepreneurial narratives.
Forms and structures in the entrepreneurial narratives 137
Table 6.2 Examples of the narrative approach in entrepreneurial studies
Author(s) – Year Title and brief description of the work
McClelland (1961) The seminal The Achieving Society contextualizes
achievement tales into formations for economic
development. In this instance, achievement is a metaphor
for entrepreneurial success with the tales possessing a
highly moral texture.
Casson (1982) Casson’s ?ctional fable of the heroic Jack Brash is an
instrumental and inspirational story. It dealt with some
important moral points about entrepreneurial character,
which were tackled by ?ctionalizing the hero. For instance,
Jack Brash was a black marketeer and a suspected arsonist.
Brockhaus (1987) This in?uential exploration of Entrepreneurial Folklore
considered entrepreneurial narratives as folklore. Folklore
traditionally has a high moral standpoint.
Koiranen (1995) Koiranen’s ‘North-European metaphors of
“Entrepreneurship” and “Entrepreneur”’ demonstrates the
social construction of entrepreneurial metaphors.
Hill and The study ‘Metaphors and mental models: sense making
Levenhaugh (1995) and sense giving in innovative and entrepreneurial
activities’ shows how entrepreneurs use metaphors to
develop and communicate mental models to make sense of
their experiences, perceptions and plans.
Cosgel (1996) ‘Metaphors, stories and the entrepreneur in economics’
discusses the exclusion of the entrepreneur from
neoclassical economics due to a mechanistic rhetoric.
Perren and Atkin ‘Women-manager’s discourse: the metaphors-in-use’
(1997) conducts a metaphor analysis to examine entrepreneurial
decision-making, noting that many metaphors in use are
masculine.
Steyaert and The seminal article ‘Telling stories of entrepreneurship’ is
Bouwen (1997) important because it demonstrates the importance of
storytelling and narrative to entrepreneurship, setting
metaphor in a wider context.
Hyrsky (1998) Hyrsky’s work on metaphor and entrepreneurship was
highly original. His works include ‘Persistent ?ghters and
ruthless speculators: entrepreneurs as expressed in
collocations’ and ‘Entrepreneurship: metaphors and related
concepts’. The study emphasizes the excitement associated
with entrepreneurship but highlights a prevalence of
138 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
Table 6.2 (continued)
Author(s) – Year Title and brief description of the work
immoral characteristics used as a descriptor of
entrepreneurial propensity.
Pitt (1998) ‘A tale of two gladiators: “Reading” entrepreneurs as texts’
examines metaphors used by entrepreneurs to make sense
of their roles.
Busenitz et al. ‘Country institutional pro?les: unlocking entrepreneurial
(2000) phenomena’ examines contextual di?erences in
entrepreneur metaphors across nationalities.
Koiranen and The study ‘Entrepreneurs as expressed in collocations: an
Hyrsky (2001) exploratory study’ examines words (including those with a
negative connotation) used in conjunction with the word
entrepreneur.
Ljunggren and Ljunggren and Alsos’ ‘Media expressions of entrepreneurs:
Alsos (2001) frequency, content and appearance of male and female
entrepreneurs’ demonstrates the bias towards the heroic
masculine imagery and metaphor associated with
entrepreneurship.
Nicolson (2001) This study ‘Modelling the evolution of entrepreneurial
mythology’ considers the entrepreneur as being
metaphorically possessed of feet of clay. The identi?cation
of numerous negative metaphors associated with
entrepreneurship reiterates the importance of morality to
the entrepreneurial construct.
Åkerberg (2002) ‘Changing identities in changing societies’ examines the
gender bias of entrepreneurial narrative.
de Koning and ‘Raising babies, ?ghting battles, winning races:
Drakopoulou-Dodd entrepreneurial metaphors in the media of 6 English-
(2002) speaking nations’ explores some negative aspects of
entrepreneurial metaphor, thus demonstrating that morality
permeates even entrepreneurial metaphors.
Personal E-tales
Thus far we have reviewed the presence of the e-tale in the historical ante-
cedents of the classic form, in biographies, in ?ction, and in academic work.
We have noted the similarity of the messages embodied in the di?erent nar-
rative forms. In this last section of examples of narrative forms we present
Forms and structures in the entrepreneurial narratives 139
the very personal narratives of entrepreneurs, not just stories they tell about
themselves but stories they tell about their inspirations. This was a study
conducted by the authors to establish if and how the entrepreneurial nar-
rative impacted upon their actions, and what if any narratives were used.
The data were collected by unstructured informal interviews with eight
businessmen known to the authors. We employed convenience sampling,
using respondents we already knew a little about. This had speci?c advan-
tages; we knew that they had stories to tell; we could augment and clarify
by our own knowledge of the respondent’s lifestyles and business practices
gained over time; and perhaps most importantly we knew that they would
be prepared to tell us about their life histories and what in?uenced them.
We make no claims of generalizability; these are only examples, but they
are very real and vivid examples of personalized e-tales.
General narratives, the parables, myths and stories found in the public
domain may ?nd their way to raise entrepreneurial awareness, but we found
that the personal e-tale acted as a directly inspirational and directive device.
A striking point emerging from this work was that although such personal
e-tales were inspirational, because they were so very personal, they were
also very limited in exposure. Respondents made comments such as, ‘I’ve
never actually told anyone about this before . . .’; ‘Only a few folks know
this about my father . . .’; ‘Actually, he kept this very quiet, he was a modest
man’. Nonetheless it was made clear to us that these e-tales had been very
in?uential in shaping conduct. In categorizing the content of these per-
sonal e-tales we found two types of e-tale and we identify these emergent
categories as the familial fable and the mentorial tale.
Familial fables
We categorized this group of e-tales as familial fables because these e-tales
embody the couthy wisdom which is shared in narrative about the family
and about business practices. More formally, we could de?ne them as ‘eulo-
gistic narratives about the exploits of a speci?c individual which act as a
role model, embodying the themes of success and morality to inspire other
family members to emulate them as role models’.
The originators of the familial fables were all charismatic, enterprising
individuals who generated stories in abundance. These personalized stories
frequently refer to success in the face of adversity and embody the twin
themes of success and morality. They were inspirational as role models but
also acted as dispensers of practical business advice. This advice was pack-
aged in the manner of moralistic ‘couthy, pithy wisdom’ or sensible folklore
– what MacIntyre (1981) refers to as ‘home-spun philosophy’. Examples of
the advice embodied in the narratives include ‘They don’t shoot you if you
go bust’; ‘Dinnae be a thief, but take your pro?t’, ‘Make a pro?t, everyone
140 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
expects it’. They inspired others by virtue of their basic honesty, character
and kindness, and propagate the work ethic by personal example. The
fables are replete with examples of stubborn pride, of hardship faced in the
early years, for example, of searching jacket pockets for money to pay bills
on time; of facing hunger rather than create the impression they could not
pay a bill; of overcoming ?nancial losses. They are tales of morality and
success. Their nuggets of advice are reminiscent of classical parables or
proverbs and are characterized by moral precepts. The essence of the famil-
ial fables lies in their power and ability to inspire others within the family
group.
Mentorial tales
We also found another mechanism for perpetuating and propagating entre-
preneurial ‘knowledge’ which we classi?ed as ‘memorial tales’. These di?er
from the family fables only because they were told outside the ties of family.
These stories were largely about encouraging, by actively mentoring, entre-
preneurship. They, like all the other narratives, espoused a moral frame-
work for action. Like the familial fables, these narratives are highly
personal, a one-to-one transference of lived experiences. We found two dra-
matic examples of the moral reward for good behaviour. In these cases
small businessmen, who, having no children to inherit the family business,
chose to practically gift their business, in a fairy-tale manner, to a compe-
tent favoured employee. Perhaps they did so because they were prevented
from perpetuating familial fable so instead engage in a process of benev-
olent entrepreneurial transference. Nonetheless, the e-tales show a direct
relationship between morality and reward.
What these current personal e-tales described have in common is that
they are cohesive devices (Bamberg, 2002) which make sense of entrepre-
neurial activities in particular circumstances. They also con?rm Sarbin’s
maxim (1986) that narrative in?uences moral choice. The personal e-tales
are nevertheless variations on the narrative theme identi?ed earlier. We
believe that these e-tales in?uenced, perhaps justi?ed, the entrepreneurs
who told us these stories. In the process of imaginative recreation of entre-
preneurial awareness, these stories were highly in?uential. Given that iden-
tity creation is often constructed via storytelling and the narratives we
create about ourselves, such e-tales establish the values that were important
to these entrepreneurs; they appeared to create new sets of entrepreneurial
dreams.
Forms and structures in the entrepreneurial narratives 141
CONCLUSIONS
The chapter demonstrated that entrepreneurial narratives have a de?nitive
form and structure that stresses the twin virtues of morality and success.
Thus the entrepreneurial spectacle is narrated to promote entrepreneurship
and to propagate speci?c moral frameworks. We have explored the relation-
ships between storytelling, communication and entrepreneurship. Our dis-
cussion described the important role of communication and storytelling in
shaping the entrepreneurial construct. It considered the nature, content
and purpose of the entrepreneurial narrative and focused upon narrative
sensemaking in the entrepreneurial process. We found that there are several
common themes in entrepreneurial narratives. These emphasize morality
and hard work and associate these as causal factors of success, irrespective
of whether couched as ?ction, biographies or personal stories. We sug-
gested that a purpose of entrepreneurial narrative was to make the complex
simpler and to particularize the general. Narrative seems uniquely able to
manage this process. This also seems to signal the power of the elements of
the narrative.
We are convinced that the imaginative recreation of entrepreneurial nar-
ratives ful?ls a secondary purpose beyond the espousal of entrepreneurial
attitudes. This is to reiterate and reinforce the importance of the moral pre-
cepts behind success and legitimacy. It appears necessary because these
rather nebulous concepts have to be renewed with each generation because
subjective interpretations may change over time and space, as, indeed, does
public perception and awareness of them. This process of perpetuation,
regeneration and consolidation requires constant renewal. Whilst the capi-
talist engine of growth is anonymous and amoral, entrepreneurship is per-
sonal and thus capable of moral and immoral action. This leads us to argue
that it is no coincidence that the basic linear formula of morality, success
and legitimacy occurs in that order and is so perpetuated in narrative. This
appears as a ‘necessary’ social formula for shaping authentic enterprise.
The moral message was ?rst perpetuated in a more generalized format as
proverbs and parables, and in time these became embedded in the narra-
tives described in this chapter. The Puritans had their ‘Goodly Books’ but
these have evolved into secular forms. Yet our ?ndings show that, irrespec-
tive of the form of narrative structure, these e-tales perpetuate the same
basic linear message of Hard Work + Morality = Success = Legitimacy.
This basic formula is open to criticism for its simplicity, but as we stated at
the beginning, tales have to tell themselves.
We suggest that narrative approaches can and should inform entrepre-
neurship research practices, because narrative permits the contextualiza-
tion of the general to the particular. Narratives allow subjective and
142 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
individualized knowledge to be transformed into generalized and objective
knowledge. Through listening to the narratives of entrepreneurs, we can
begin to grasp the enormity of entrepreneurship that has so far de?ed com-
plete explanation or de?nition. We can make sense of the entrepreneurial
process within narrative. Moreover in analysis we can observe the formulas
with which we can compare the actions and moralities embedded within the
story. Adoption of the narrative approach enables engagement in a rich and
thought-provoking process.
We conclude that there is a form and structure that permeates the many
variants of entrepreneurial stories. We suggest that regardless of their
origin or era, these narratives can be collectively referred to as e-tales
because this descriptor encompasses all forms of such tales expressly
designed to exhort the listener to emulate the heroic feats embedded in the
story. Although e-tales are arguably a variation of an old theme, repack-
aged under a new label, they appear to ful?l a social moral purpose. They
also serve to embody the imaginative re-creation and propagation of the
entrepreneurial narrative to a new generation. Inevitably, new e-tales will
emerge to accommodate emerging entrepreneurial typologies that are
perhaps more consistent with contemporary reality than of historical or
?ctional fantasy. It is a literary tradition that all good narratives end with
a moral; thus we end this one with the message implied in the title that the
devil is truly in the e-tale – morality is an inseparable component of authen-
tic entrepreneurship.
Forms and structures in the entrepreneurial narratives 143
7. Crime and assumptions in
entrepreneurship
Alf Rehn and Saara Taalas
INTRODUCTION
William Gartner (1988), in his in?uential ‘ “Who is an entrepreneur?” is the
wrong question’, has suggested that there is a simple de?nition of entre-
preneurship, namely ‘the creation of organizations’. Deftly arguing that
there can be no generic de?nition of an entrepreneur, as such a search for
traits common to entrepreneurs assumes an essentialism that is suspicious
both analytically and philosophically, he then suggests that studies of
entrepreneurship instead should focus on how organizations are created.
The notion would resolve the issues with knowing what the ?eld should
study, as the creation of organizations has been de?ned as the best way to
approach entrepreneurship. It corresponds well with the de?ning belief of
this text: that one has to, in order to understand a ?eld, look at what is
empirically studied within it. What is stated in the high theory of a ?eld is
less interesting, for on such levels of abstraction the very nature of the
studied will by necessity become subsumed into the greater project pursued
by the social scientist. In other words, a ?eld of inquiry is, for all intents and
purposes, created through inquiries in the ?eld. But if one looks at what
actually becomes studied in the ?eld, one will note certain tendencies
regarding the choice of subjects. One of the most widespread of these is one
almost never addressed, namely the bias towards judicial delimitation. It is
this unconscious legalism that is interesting here. And this is in no way
resolved by the suggestions of Gartner.
The grand project of William Gartner, that is, the creation of a valid and
encompassing de?nition of entrepreneurship, obviously cannot be reduced
to a single statement. He has duly noted the di?culty of such monolithic
notions and the discursive nature of such a project (Gartner 1990, 1993),
and further discussed the fact that entrepreneurship can be seen as a set of
behaviours and ways of world construction (Gartner et al., 1992). What is
interesting, however, is that Gartner’s view is so clearly ?xed on a particu-
lar segment of potential organizations/organizing(s) in the world. More to
144
the point, scholarship that purportedly studies entrepreneurship usually,
even in more re?ective moments, takes the law for granted, as a given rather
than as a contingent variable. For example, in an article with the promising
subtitle ‘Blind assumptions in theory development’, Gartner (2001) goes
very far indeed in analysing the wide areas over which entrepreneurship
theory has spread (and their incompatibilities), but never past the one
border that thus implicitly gets to de?ne the area, the letter of the law.
Illegal behaviour or, more generally, behaviour that does not fall within the
boundaries created through a ‘business mindset’ simply makes no appear-
ance in the overall theorizing of the ?eld (even though some have addressed
the issue, for example, Hobbs, 1988; Myers, 1992; Smith and Anderson,
2001). Even though an authority such as William Baumol (1990; 2002) has
shown that entrepreneurial activity can be identi?ed in a number of con-
texts and function in destructive and unproductive ways, the theoretical
development in the ?eld still seems to be de?ned through the nexus of law
and the market, even though neither can be viewed as necessary restrictions
on human (economic) behaviour.
The underlying discourse of the ?eld in general that posits that the think-
ing should deal with speci?c forms of legally delimited economic actors
(companies and corporations engaged in legal endeavours), is what we call
an unconscious legalism. However, this should not be seen as a concept that
only refers to legal boundaries and staying inside/outside these. In our use,
legalism refers to a set of ideas that spring from the ideology of capitalism
and the market economy, so that the letter of the law should be seen as
existing in and emerging out of speci?c ideological notions regarding eco-
nomic action. Unconscious legalism, as a concept, thus does not only blind
us to the entrepreneurial aspects of criminal endeavours, but also restricts
the ways in which more mundane and social settings can exhibit enterpris-
ing qualities. Succinctly put, when Gartner (1988) talks of emerging organ-
izations he does not talk of such in general. It is di?cult to ?t in, for
example, the ways in which working mothers arrange for a system of baby-
sitting or the arranging of a shoplifting-ring in such a theory. Likewise, it
is also impossible to sustain a theory of the market that would be based on
giving legal determinants an ontological status. Consequently, theories in
entrepreneurship normally exist within the ideologically delimited law/
market nexus, whereas entrepreneurial activity knows of no such purely
legal boundaries. Although entrepreneurship in part exists only through
our de?nitions thereof, this does not mean that we should accept it as per-
manently in ?ux. It is not a pure entity, existing in an outside world, com-
pletely outside of the researcher, but neither are we dealing with merely a
linguistic artefact. But we do not see this as a problem, for what we are
interested in here is the interplay between these two. Similarly, the market
Crime and assumptions in entrepreneurship 145
economy and the law within which it operates constitute each other, but not
in a way that would make social action outside the frameworks of these
impossible. This concern is primarily related to theory development and its
shortfalls. However, there are even more profound issues that are directly
linked to the ?eld of study, the phenomena it embraces, and to what rhe-
torical resources are employed in the making thereof.
Even though the suggestion that entrepreneurship is the creation of
organizations is pleasing in its simplicity and commonsensical discourse, it
is not very persuasive as a scienti?c argument. To begin with, it merely up-
streams the essentialistic notion from behaviours to organizations, for even
though the notion of emergent organization shies away from ?xed notions
of organizations as pre-existing entities (for example, Gartner et al., 1992),
it still views these organizations as describable through a ?xed set of char-
acteristics. Further still, it assumes, counter to arguments in modern organ-
ization theory (for example, Cooper, 1986; 1992), that we could identify
organizations as simple phenomena in the world. Even further, it confuses
analytical perspectives, as of course almost anything can be viewed as an
organization if one holds a su?ciently abstract level of analysis. By postu-
lating the existence of ‘organizations’ as a given in the social world, we miss
out on the nature of social phenomena as dynamic processes, and never
escape the essentialism that plagued the analysis of entrepreneurship as
virtue and trait. To be more precise, we oppose the notion that entrepren-
eurship studies by necessity should limit themselves to de?nite entities such
as entrepreneurs and organizations, and contend that Gartner’s de?nition
of emerging organizations is insu?cient to deal with phenomena such as
organizing. As an example, a network of friends helping each other out is
no organization, not even an emerging one, but a case of organizing, ?uid
and tentative. And as studies of entrepreneurship within the ?eld of eco-
nomic anthropology showed early on, in, for example, Finney’s article from
1968, ‘Big-fellow man belong business in New Guinea’, entrepreneurial
activity may well be more about advancing a system (of, for example,
kinship) than about the limited organization upon which the focus often
fallaciously is put. Likewise, by focusing on the modern notion of an organ-
ization, which is fundamentally a judicial notion (Marx, 1894/1974; Desai,
2002; Parker, 2002), one is unconsciously choosing to limit one’s analysis to
something as contingent as the letter of the law – and not only that, the
letter of the law as one knows it. As Salisbury (1973, pp. 90–91) states in his
anthropological critique of Barth’s de?nition of niches where entrepren-
eurship can develop (brokerage and conversion):
Entrepreneurship, in short, is an ability that is extremely widely dispersed and is
by no mean restricted to monetary societies or joint stock corporations. The
146 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
innovative organizer of production or distribution must adapt his enterprise to
his existing social milieu as much as to existing nonsocial resources, and what
one empirically ?nds is a wide range of organization forms.
Consequently entrepreneurship studies, as a discursive ?eld propagated in
journals and text books, is a ?eld de?ned not by an analytical category
named ‘entrepreneurship’ but by the textual replication of ideologically
founded ideas about what words such as ‘business’ and ‘organization’ means.
Viewed analytically, entrepreneurship, particularly if one can show that it
has ignored phenomena that are structurally identical to those one chooses
to discuss, is a form of writing that panegyrizes capitalism – that is, not
science but eulogistic punditry. As Marshall Sahlins (1976, pp. 166–204) has
observed, the Western mindset is quite capable of constructing mythologies
as intricate as those of primitive societies, whose stories of living gods and
transmogri?cations Westerners tend to ?nd amusing and non-rational. One
such mythological creature, popular in Western capitalist mythology, is ‘the
entrepreneur’. A vital part of the bourgeois notion of capitalism as a
dynamic and developing system, the entrepreneur stands as a powerful crea-
ture capable of summoning the energies of the market society through sheer
willpower, creating the magic of entrepreneurship. This is supposedly a good
thing, or at least highly encouraged. Obviously entrepreneurs as phenomena
do not merely produce a speci?c product or service, for then we would call
them ‘weavers’ or ‘entertainment purveyors’. Instead, entrepreneurs seem-
ingly do entrepreneurship. Depending on whomyou ask, particularly if your
sample is taken fromthose within the academic ?eld of entrepreneurship or
business studies, the answers as to what this means will range fromthe mini-
malist ‘start businesses’ via the moralist ‘create value’ all the way to the holis-
tic ‘make things happen’. Other possible answers could be ‘deploy their
creative energies in the market society’, ‘actively pursue business projects’,
or, succinctly, ‘enact entrepreneurship’. Seemingly nice things all. If we look
to entrepreneurship studies as a literary genre, it is a formof heroic drama,
where the protagonist is usually portrayed as a hero or a saint. We would
rather write a more twisted tale.
The aim of this text is thus to discuss the possibility of developing entre-
preneurship theory into a social science, unhindered by methodological
assumptions derived from a speci?c judicial and economic system. To do
this, we will address two cases that in di?ering ways exist outside of the
law/market nexus, and that still build on qualities such as those championed
within the ?eld. By doing this we strive to point to a theory of entrepreneur-
ship as the enactment of social networks, rather than as a set of pre-de?ned
actions within a framework of bourgeois capitalism. By ?rstly showing
some of the weaknesses in the assumptions of ‘normal’ entrepreneurship
Crime and assumptions in entrepreneurship 147
theory, and then presenting two cases which are di?cult to ?t into these
limited schemata, the chapter ends with some suggestions as to how entre-
preneurship theory can be developed beyond its present, legalistic, bound-
aries, and how a methodological step back to economic anthropology could
constitute a leap forward for entrepreneurship.
So what do we want? We would like to open up the discussion regarding
entrepreneurship as dealing not with an abstract ?eld but instead with dis-
tinctly observable phenomena. We intend to do this starting with the ques-
tion of what is needed for a ?eld to be, what the necessary ingredients for
this thing called entrepreneurship might be (for example, Gartner, 1988;
Cunningham and Lischeron, 1991; Ucbasaran et al., 2001; Grant and
Perren, 2002). So, we return to a consideration regarding the premises of
entrepreneurship: the motives for enterprising, the structures of markets
and the legitimacy of business. We are here not even trying to be abstract
and general, but explicitly speci?c. What can we say about whether entre-
preneurship was or wasn’t possible in the Soviet Union (even though the
very notion was illegal)? How is crime organized? Why not use the (ana-
lytic) possibilities of the drugs trade? Do we want a tidy ?eld of entrepren-
eurship or an expansive one? This text tries to deal with these questions. It
has two aims, even though these are interwoven throughout. Primarily, the
text discusses the moralizations inherent in entrepreneurship research as a
?eld of inquiry. Arguing that ordered and complex economic behaviour
exists in a wider domain than is usually analysed within this research com-
munity, and that the choice of research subjects has been arti?cially nar-
rowed, the text identi?es the ?eld of entrepreneurship studies as the
product of speci?c moralizations. Continuing from this, the text discusses
what happens with those cases that do not ?t into this morally delimited
?eld, speci?cally drawing upon cases which present entrepreneurial behav-
iour in criminal settings. Utilizing insights from such cases, the notion of
non-serious entrepreneurship is then expanded upon. This entails both
remarks on the way in which the word ‘entrepreneur’ is used to convey a
speci?c idea about how one wishes business and the world to be, and a dis-
cussion of the quagmire a limited use of this concept will lead into when
confronted with the multifaceted nature of economic activity (broadly
de?ned).
It is further argued that a more inclusive understanding of ‘entrepre-
neurialism’ can make the theory developed thereof applicable to a wider
array of problems. The theoretical contribution attempted here is thus
partly a critique of current preconceptions of what constitutes the studied
?eld, and in addition an attempt to outline the theoretical development
inherent in an extended perspective. Furthermore, the analysis into a set of
moralizations of the current ?eld of inquiry could be viewed as a contribu-
148 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
tion to the very de?nition of the ?eld of entrepreneurship studies in itself.
Here, we must pay heed to the fact that entrepreneurship might, in fact, be
a phenomenon that cannot be de?ned. We can describe it, on di?erent
levels, but as the discussion above goes some way towards showing, it is
extremely di?cult to create a de?nition that covers all of entrepreneurship
and still retains some analytic use. Rather we can talk about di?erent kinds
of actions in the world (descriptions) on one hand, and de?nitional state-
ments regarding the ?eld and the selection of research subject on the other.
Generally speaking, researchers in the ?eld of management and organ-
ization studies have been quite unwilling to study anything besides morally
acceptable forms of business. Although there have been studies of organ-
izational misbehaviour and unethical behaviour in organizations, illegal
business is largely ignored as a ?eld of inquiry (though there are exceptions,
for example, Volkov, 1999; Meirovich and Reichel, 2000; Fadahunsi and
Rosa, 2001; and the previously mentioned examples in entrepreneurship
theory). This is of course theoretically troublesome, as there is no evidence
to support the implied notion that, for example, entrepreneurial behaviour
among drug-dealers would be less analytically interesting or innovative
than the same in the production of knitwear. In fact, there is anecdotal evi-
dence, not to mention rich data from ?elds such as criminology and urban
sociology, to support the claim that economic and entrepreneurial behav-
iour in semi- or illegal activities will be more distinct than in more institu-
tionalized settings. Some might think this is due to crime being an easy way
out, a lazy solution. There is very little to support such claims. In fact, the
criminal life (for example, Scott, 1993; Sabbag, 2002), might very well be
far more demanding, not to mention far more dangerous, than that of the
lawful entrepreneur – who for instance is less likely to be beaten up and/or
killed. Anyway, there is a lack of analytical studies both of such a phenom-
enon and the bias towards ‘nice entrepreneurs’ in the study of the same.
This text seeks to combat this myopia. It is thus both a ‘thinkpiece’ on the
(often unexamined) moralizing basis of the ?eld and a theoretical contri-
bution regarding the extent of the same.
A broader theory of entrepreneurship would thus be one that replaces
the implicit notion of the law/market nexus as de?nitional with the more
general aspect of entrepreneurship as enacting social networks. While the
fact that market entrepreneurs ‘work’ their networks – both social and
material – in order to create value is well known, economic anthropology
has long shown that value-creation takes many forms, and that social
exchange in general is about the creation and upkeep of organizing, even
when aspects such as pro?t and pecuniary interest are missing. Whereas the
current state of the art in the ?eld of entrepreneurship is limited by the
ideological boundaries created by the market economy, we want to discuss
Crime and assumptions in entrepreneurship 149
the possibility of extending theorizing beyond such dependencies – towards
a social science of enterprising activity.
WERE THERE ENTREPRENEURS IN THE SOVIET
UNION?
The unconscious legalism that pervades the ?eld is troublesome for two
reasons. One, it confuses acceptable behaviour with behaviour that can be
studied, and thereby replaces analysis with moralization. Two, it makes
re?ection regarding the basic phenomena impossible, as these get inextri-
cably connected to the speci?c socio-cultural structure that the ?eld ema-
nates from (in this case, bourgeois capitalism). Let us continue with an
example, namely the blat. The blat is the name for an interwoven system of
in?uence and favours that existed in one form in Tsarist Russia, grew to
become an economy unto itself during the era of the Soviet Union and still
pervades most of Russian, Belo-Russian and Ukrainian economic life. The
term becomes central due to the rigidity of the planned Soviet economy,
forcing individuals to adapt to a system where o?cial channels might be
practically unusable (Ledeneva, 1998). Arguably, the Soviet Union was the
most entrepreneurial country and economy that the world has ever seen,
for the very structure of control and long-range planning (coupled with ter-
rible ine?ciencies due to informational asymmetry) forced the individual
Russian to enact an entrepreneurial mindset. To caricature the situation
only very slightly, every resident in the Soviet republics seems to have been
an entrepreneur, utilizing the niches and crevices of the state economy in
order to secure economic bene?ts. Barter, selling cigarettes by the railway
station, dealing in pickled herring at the market, trading in favours, enact-
ing ad hoc coalitions (to bid on products on the black market), et cetera, ad
absurdum. Looking at the actual economic life of the Soviet citizen one will
?nd an array of entrepreneurial behaviours (for the continuation of which,
in the market economy, see Randall, 2001). A crucial part of this system
even had a name, the aforementioned blat.
In one way, the blat is the art and structure of using personal in?uence
and networks in order to gain access to what otherwise is thought of as
public resources. As the Soviet economy viewed most resources as public,
all should have had similar access to them. Impossible even in theory, this
was subverted through the use of blat, so that the wiliest and most entre-
preneurial individuals (or the ones who happened to have political connec-
tions) could extract more out of the system than others (securing,
essentially, a pro?t). Formally subverting the ‘real’ economic system, the
blat still had its place in it, as it introduced e?ciencies unavailable in the
150 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
original system. In extension, this system grew into an economy unto itself.
Not quite a gift economy, but not a market economy either, the informal
use of social networks, barter and similar structures created a hybrid
economy with rich possibilities of ?nding ‘pro?table’ niches. But can we
call a particularly e?cient utilizer of the blat an entrepreneur? Granted, she
would not necessarily even see money in her dealings, as much could be
handled through the scope of social bonds and barter. Still, securing
resources by activating the possibilities allowed by the system does seem to
correspond well with what common usage refers to as ‘entrepreneurial’. For
instance, realizing that one has an alcoholic uncle that could access build-
ing materials (the example is made up, but veri?ed as possible and even
probable by a former Soviet citizen), a person could see to it that he got his
hands on these materials for a limited amount of vodka and hospitality.
These materials could then be traded at a fairly high pro?t, for example,
food, which might be the area of expertise of another blat-player. What is
important to note is that although our culture might look favourably, even
amusedly, upon such goings-on, this points to both a cultural bias and dis-
respect for the law. The blat might seem charming to us, as we are culturally
conditioned to approve of this kind of ‘smart behaviour’, but it was in fact
highly illegal. If we were to agree that a blat-exchange was entrepreneurial,
we at the same time would agree to a view of entrepreneurship that is not
limited by legal boundaries – as this was a phenomenon in the Soviet Union
(and that this, lest we forget, was accepted by the world community as an
independent nation), and therefore subject to Soviet law. But if we don’t see
this as entrepreneurial behaviour, we cannot explain the development of an
e?cient economy within the framework of entrepreneurship studies, and
thereby hamper the ?eld by making a moral standpoint as to what should
be allowed as a ?eld of legitimate studies. A scholar in the ?eld might
answer that we, in fact, don’t need to explain it, but this is an ideological
standpoint – and particularly dangerous if it is done in an insu?ciently
re?exive manner. To ignore systems like this is to willingly ignore the
makings of markets and the basis of opportunity formulation. Incidentally,
the blat has been seriously studied by anthropologists and Slavists, never
(to our knowledge) by business scholars. (Note, however, that the similar
phenomenon of guanxi in China has received some interest.)
To viewthis as entrepreneurial behaviour takes away one more dimension
that normally exists as an implied essential aspect of entrepreneurialism –
the money motive. Although there have been studies of similar phenomena
in ?elds such as non-pro?t organizations, and although all cases of
‘intrapreneurs’ by no means have a pro?t-hungry individual in the main role,
entrepreneurship is quite de?nitely tied to the notion of the market economy
and/or bourgeois capitalism. Other, more ‘primitive’ economic systems
Crime and assumptions in entrepreneurship 151
assumedly have no entrepreneurs, or if they do, that is because these indi-
viduals have ‘developed’ into economic actors (Graeber, 2001). Note that we
are not here referring to archaic societies, or an imagined aboriginal and iso-
lated tribe. As shown by Yang (2000) and Gibson-Graham (1996), for
example, the myth of capitalism as total hegemony is untenable, and we in
fact operate with a number of economic orders. In the case of the blat, where
an informal economy of favours complements the formal economy of plans,
we are presented with a case where the analytic notion of a distinctly market-
oriented network society (Castells, 1996) is perverted through the incursion
of gift-giving as a fundamental aspect of human nature.
The way in which the blat-players enact their networks in order to enjoy
material or social bene?ts thus resembles entrepreneurship greatly (Rehn
and Taalas, 2004), and it is only through a speci?c delimitation that one can
disregard it. If we postulate that abiding by the law and having a clearly
(legally) constituted institutional organization is a requirement for entre-
preneurship, then the blat can be ignored. But, in presenting such a limita-
tion, we have thereby made explicit the fact that we are not interested in
empirical phenomena in general, but only in those who ?t our ideologically
created preconceptions. In other words, we have stated that entrepreneur-
ship is not a scienti?c endeavour, but a tool of a speci?c ideology. However,
if we do not postulate such blinders, a number of paths towards the study
of entrepreneurial activity open up.
BAD BOYS INC.
The blat is interesting since it exists in a borderland between legal business
and crime. Most would not de?ne it as explicitly illegal, mainly since it took
place within the mundane setting of everyday life. Still, it was not a legal
endeavour, and could result in repercussions. It also existed within a wider
range of activities, ranging from relatively minor misdemeanours such as
the blat and pilferage through small-scale pro?teering and the black market
all the way to the vory v zakonye (thieves-within-law) and the Ma?ya. The
borderland between legal business and criminal endeavour is thus not a
clear-cut one. Still, it can be fruitful to compare the blat with more expli-
citly illegal behaviour.
James Morton, in his voluminous Gangland International (1999, pp.
412–13), tells the tale of Butch Jones and Raymond Peoples, speci?cally
their venture into the drug business. Forming what was to be known as
‘Young Boys Inc.’ on Detroit’s West Side in the late 1970s, these two are seen
as early role models for the more business-minded drug dealer. Eschewing
traditional setups, they re-arranged the retail sale of heroin extensively, and
152 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
are best known for their successful emulation of best business practices
from the outside, ‘legit’ world. Introducing salary structures, career paths
and bonus systems were less radical moves, even though the added security
and perceived fairness of these probably bolstered motivation in the organ-
ization. More original was their approach to marketing, complete with
modern notions such as branding, with drugs marketed under names such
as ‘Bad News’, ‘Atomic Dog’, ‘Whipcracker’ and ‘Freak of the Week’, and
sales promotion. Remarkably, they also saw the business acumen in using
children (who are less vulnerable to being targeted by police and often
shielded from prosecution) of age ten and upwards for their workforce. By
introducing such structures Young Boys Inc. became a major force in the
heroin trade of Detroit, and Morton writes (ibid. p. 412):
Although granted they killed people, they put drug dealing on rational business
terms and wound up controlling the heroin market throughout the city.
Subsequent organizations did the same, but YBI were the role models to be emu-
lated.
Obviously this is not a story with a moral. The good guys did not live
happily ever after, and quite a number of bad guys lived merry, while some-
times short, lives. But it might be a tale that can teach us something about
business. Simply put, it shows that in unorganized areas with business
potential a little business knowledge goes a long way. In this sense it could
be seen as a business case for teaching entrepreneurship and/or manage-
ment. In an environment where chaos reigns, where if any few institutional
economical barriers exist in the market, there obviously is room for organ-
ization and (if one likes to call it that) improvement. Just as in ‘normal’,
‘vanilla’ entrepreneurship, one localizes a segment of the market that has
hitherto not been utilized optimally, and goes on to extract a pro?t from
this discrepancy.
If we look at crimes such as drug dealing, we can thus ?nd that they in fact
are more conducive to entrepreneurial behaviour than many legitimate
markets. There are no real economical barriers to market entry, once one has
got holdof abulksupplier of narcotics –the market demands nocerti?cations
or other documentation for dealing. Although the institutional restrictions
can be severe and physical in the formof police and the legal system(lengthy
terms in prison if caught and convicted), there are few threats outside the
market actors themselves. Aggressive business tactics are de rigueur and
almost any means (as long as one doesn’t get caught) are feasible, including
literally killing the competition. Inother words, there is ample roomfor trying
out newthings. Historically, newentrepreneurs have hadgreat success withall
of the following business practices: competitive pricing, ?nding newmarkets
(for example, selling ecstasy to rave goers), monopolistic behaviour (such as
Crime and assumptions in entrepreneurship 153
wholesale elimination of rivals, for example, the Jamaican posses), branding
(particularly sointhe marijuana trade), the introductionof newproducts (for
example, crack cocaine) and many more.
And it is not that the notion of crime as a business is unknown. Popular
notions of organized crime have created a belief in the existence of an oli-
gopoly of crime, with a limited amount of global players: the Colombian
cartels, the Cosa Nostra/Ma?a, the Chinese triads, the Japanese Yakuza
and the Russian Ma?ya/Organizatsiya, to mention those with the highest
brand recognition. Such a view, crime being controlled by huge central
agencies, would argue against the notion of the criminal underworld as fun-
damentally entrepreneurial, and instead view it as a mixed system of oli-
garchs and minor upstarts.
But, as James Woodiwiss (2001) has shown, this popular view is simply
wrong. By analysing historical patterns in, for example, the drug business,
Woodiwiss shows that organized crime is both less organized and less
enveloping than is popularly thought. For instance, the price of cocaine has
in fact dropped steadily since the 1970s, a fact that can be attributed to the
high degree of competition and low degree of cartels in this ?eld. However,
we will not further bore the reader with a plethora of cases regarding the
ways in which entrepreneurialism can be found in criminal undertakings (as
this is, mainly, a conceptual piece), and instead refer the interested reader
to the extensive literature on, for example, drug dealing (an easy starting
point is the biographical Snowblind by Robert Sabbag, 2002).
So, to return to the question: where is entrepreneurship possible? Was it
possible in the Soviet Union – where it, obviously, was less of a crime than
drug dealing, but a serious crime nevertheless? Was it possible in the heroin
trade in Detroit – where one at least could be wildly successful by emulat-
ing it? In other words, if it looks like entrepreneurship, and it sounds like
entrepreneurship – could it possibly even be entrepreneurship? But again,
we must return to the issue outlined at the beginning of this text, namely
the formation of the ?eld by what is studied. So what does an entrepreneur
look like?
The reader should note that it is of little consequence merely to claim
that a particular phenomenon exists in several ?elds on inquiry, even if the
fact that it can exist in ?elds that are usually seen as each other’s opposite
– communism vs. capitalism, legal vs. criminal – is empirically rather inter-
esting. But it is the way in which this detail plays out in the discussion of
the phenomenon that is of interest here, the way in which it can a?ect the
study of entrepreneurship. In other words, how can we talk about our
shared phenomenon if it refuses to stay con?ned to those areas within
which we wish to ?nd it? A simple way out would be the pragmatic turn. If
we can ?nd ways to improve legal entrepreneurship by studying the illegal
154 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
variety, then we need no other arguments. Unfortunately, we do not claim
to be able to make such a contribution. Another possible way out of this
conundrum would be to state that by expanding the area of inquiry one can
create a more suitable de?nition of what entrepreneurship is, and it is to this
we will turn.
ENTREPRENEURSHIP AS AN ETHICS AND AS
DISEQUILIBRIA
What is central here is not the crime itself. We all know how morbidly fas-
cinated our society is with crime. What is far more interesting here is that
the organized crime is not as organized as one should think. Our crime
?ction is much more organized, developed and versatile. What we can see
looking at the not-so-legitimate business venturing is twofold. First, entre-
preneurship sprouts where there is some market opportunity, demand and
possibility for providing a supply. Whether there is a structural, legitimate
or proper market as we know from our textbooks in business studies is
merely scenic, not essentially something that needs to be. Since we have
studied hardly anything of the ‘not-so-morally-right’ ?elds of entrepren-
eurship, we have no way of knowing if our normal, non-criminal entrepren-
eurs are in fact operating on ?elds that hold actual market opportunity or
if such ‘opportunity’ in legal markets simply consist of ?ctional construc-
tions providedbypolicymakers andscientists (cf. Baumol, 1990). Rhetorical
construction of such kind is no problem for us, as such. The last decades of
the previous century should have taught us that much, if nothing more. But
this leads to a much bigger problem from our point of view. The second
problem is something that cannot be waved away simply by referring to a
moral backbone or general ignorance. What we can see here is that moral
judgments regarding our ?eld of inquiry are blocking our view of what we
pursue. And this is always a problem of the most important kind to a
researcher. Note that we are not talking about a pure analytics, nor are we
trying to create a new kind of dogma. What we are talking about is the need
for scholars, even in entrepreneurship study, to critically and in a re?exive
manner evaluate the moral standpoints behind the choices made in
research. To stick one’s neck out is a political movement, and we know we
are making such statements here, but so is blissful ignorance, the choice not
to take research further, not to deterritorialize.
Crime and the blat – both analysable as entrepreneurial, and largely
ignored by entrepreneurship as an academic ?eld of study. What unites them
is that they represent law-breaking, activities undertaken in a ?eld outside
of the legally delimited. What further makes the blat stand out is that it can
Crime and assumptions in entrepreneurship 155
be understood as a variant of the archetypal ‘gift economy’ (Mauss, [1924]
1990; Berking, 1999) insofar as it does not function through the easy mech-
anisms of the market economy (for a critique, though, see Gell, 1992). Also,
they both function through disequilibria. The honour economy of the blat
is dependent on the existence of hierarchy and will cease to operate if par-
ticipants stop returning favours – that is, the relations are kept unbalanced,
with someone always left ‘holding the bag’ or put in a position where honour
demands them to reciprocate. In crime another disequilibria exists, so that
participants always try to get more out of the exchange than they are ‘owed’
– market economy gone haywire. It is in fact the case that entrepreneurship
in both these cases is based on the possibility for disequilibrium, a space
where an additional favour can be gained. In much the same way . . . nay, in
exactly the same way as an entrepreneur on the market ?nds possibilities to
pro?t from unful?lled needs or underutilized resources, the actors in these
cases have found ways to create e?ciencies based on the speci?c institu-
tional, social and/or technical context within which they operate.
The blat players found ways to enact entrepreneurship in the space
between enforced plans and social networks and criminals can ?nd ways to
pro?t from the discrepancy between what people want and what they are
allowed to get. What one has to keep in mind – and this can be seen as the
main theoretical point of this text – is that we do not propose to derive nor-
mative models from these cases. Instead, we wish to show that there are a
number of ways in which entrepreneurial activity can take place, and that
the social barrier of law does not restrict this in any way. We do not wish to
argue that drug dealing or misappropriation of state property are good
things, things to be emulated, quite the contrary. What we do wish to argue
is that they are existing phenomena, and that there is no logical reason to
ignore them only because they are morally reprehensible. Furthermore,
they represent successful systems, particularly if we keep in mind the cul-
tural speci?cities of their internal workings. One might say that it is con-
venient (and thus logical) to ignore them, since they might be troublesome
to study, even dangerous, but this is a statement about laziness among
researchers, and convenience is hardly a valid argument for the limitation
of a ?eld of research. And if such an argument is used, there are a number
of other things that one could ignore on similar premises: gendered groups,
other ethnicities, diverging cultures and groups, microbusinesses, etc.
All this has led us to formulate a tentative ?eld for the study of entrepren-
eurship, one that is not restricted by attachment to an ideology.
Entrepreneurship, as has been approached in this text, can now be seen in
terms of: the intentional utilization of system disequilibria, regardless of
system makeup (cf. Kirzner, 1989). This can further be explicated through
viewing entrepreneurship as the enactment of social networks, networks
156 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
that take di?erent shapes in di?erent systems. This is not presented as a
de?nition, mind you, but as a way to think about the ?eld. Note the absence
of individual aims. Although our modern thinking is mired in the belief that
everything in the world happens due to individual desires or goals, there is
little to say that this would be anything besides a local fact, applicable in
(sizeable) parts of the Western economic sphere. There is nothing to say that
this would be a necessary universal case. Further, note that ‘utilization’ can
mean a number of things, and to fully comprehend this in speci?c cases one
is required to understand the logic of the local system – for example, the blat
players, for whom it is fully rational to utilize in?uence networks maximally
in order to gain access to that which should be common property. Crime,
which can be de?ned as ‘business without restraints’, will of course utilize
the discrepancies between what is possible and what is allowed, all in order
to gain pro?ts. These cases represent di?ering logics, sometimes even incom-
mensurable logics, but they do not represent ungraspable phenomena.
As William Baumol (1990) has shown in his historical piece ‘Entrepre-
neurship: productive, unproductive, and destructive’, the di?erence between
the supply of entrepreneurship in a society and the allocation of the ener-
gies represented by this supply is often ignored. Since the writing of entre-
preneurship as heroic tales is more in line with the genre of business writing,
the very possibility of individuals allocating their entrepreneurial energies
to unacceptable ?elds has been ignored by the rhetoric device of limiting the
analysis to those modes of allocation that are in line with policy. This,
speci?cally, makes entrepreneurship a literary genre, as it retells the world
only insofar as the phenomena therein can be ?tted into the literary rules of
the ?eld. As Fadahunsi and Rosa (2001), for example, have shown in their
study of Nigerian cross-border trade, economic actors in the real world will
ignore such discursive borders, and instead navigate a wide spectrum of eco-
nomic possibility. A trader will target business opportunities according to a
complex set of negotiations where the legality of goods is only of partial
interest and easily ignorable if pro?t margins are high enough. Whether this
behaviour will make it into the heroic epics presented in entrepreneurship
journals is of no interest to them at all. (An ironic and quite amusing result
of the study by Fadahunsi and Rosa is that illegal trade had created both
hundreds of jobs and a stable working environment for the traders, making
the moral justi?cation of economic bene?ts for studying only legal business
somewhat problematic.)
In part, this is in harmony with the thinking about exchange between
di?erent economic and social spheres as has been developed by Fredrik
Barth (1963; 1967), but in a way that radicalizes which spheres are taken into
account. In the case of drug dealing, we have legal and illegal spheres, and
an economic sphere that overlaps both. In the case of the blat, economic and
Crime and assumptions in entrepreneurship 157
social spheres overlap, as do political and everyday ones. From the perspec-
tive of these two cases, entrepreneurship in business spheres is not a major
phenomenon, but a similar case that belongs under the more general notion
of ‘getting by and doing stu?’. A developed ?eld would in this perspective
look to enterprising activity regardless of the ?eld, be it legal or illegal,
driven by social or monetary sentiments, be it laissez faire or highly politi-
cal. At the moment, entrepreneurship is legitimized through the bene?ts the
entrepreneur brings to the market economy (Machan, 1999). While we do
not wish to argue against this, we ?nd it insu?cient as a general methodo-
logical starting point. While entrepreneurs, de?ned in a particular way, may
bene?t the system of capitalism, de?ned in a particular way, this is not
enough to develop a theory of entrepreneurship in general. What such an
assumption does is de?ne the subject within one system, that of the market
(further delimited by the law), after which the rhetoric is ?xed in a way that
writes entrepreneurship as a moral tale. We will not here go further into the
tangled issue of how economic and legal systems are embedded in ethical
systems and cultures, and only wish to note that theoretically the view in
which a particular brand of entrepreneurship would be a natural phenom-
enon of economy is seriously ?awed. However, it may be important to note
that the common entrepreneurial discourse is as morally loaded as it is.
Our alternative tale can thus be seen as the extension of the notion of
entrepreneurship beyond the mythology of Western bourgeois capitalism,
beyond the image of the entrepreneur as a ?xed economic actor with a most
amiable character. It could be a step back towards the anthropology of
entrepreneurship, a ?eld of study that will not force speci?c and context-
bound rationalities upon the ?gure of the entrepreneur. In addition, this
would make the production of cookie-cutter models and normative state-
ments regarding, for example, ‘best practice’ in entrepreneurship impossible,
and to us this would be a good thing. By approaching entrepreneurship in
this way, objectively and without an ethical bias, one could make far more
interesting observations than by reifying the doctrines of capitalist ideology
– where entrepreneurs always have to be true, good, and just.
But one has to be wary of making the same mistake one attributes to
others. Where our contention is that Gartner (1988) tries to introduce ana-
lytic stability by moving essentialism from organizational actors to some
imagined de?nable entity named ‘organization’, and that ‘common’ entre-
preneurship studies try to discursively stabilize the ?eld by delimiting it
according to moral preference, we might be caught in another act of essen-
tializing writing. We try to claim that the narrations of entrepreneurship
studies have been tainted by the myths of bourgeois capitalism, but what is
our own ethical standpoint? Are we, in fact, claiming to be able to escape
the moralization we ascribe to others? Are we essentializing any form of
158 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
economic action as a valid area of inquiry for entrepreneurship studies,
thus e?ectively undermining the very possibility of a discipline? No, at least
we do not think so. What we have tried to show is that there is a need for
an anthropological sensitivity when studying economic behaviour. Even if
this produces uncomfortable results, and slightly more twisted tales. And
even if the entrepreneurs one writes of do not come out as heroes and
saints.
Crime and assumptions in entrepreneurship 159
8. The dramas of consulting and
counselling the entrepreneur
Torben Damgaard, Jesper Piihl and Kim Klyver
INTRODUCTION
It was late afternoon at campus. Everyone had left for the weekend, except
three persons sneaking into a meeting room. In a plastic bag they carried a
few beers, which they had de?ned as ‘instruments aiding data creation’.
Once they were seated one of them brought out a tape recorder and they
agreed on who should perform which role. One had to perform the role of
a consultant named Claus. Another should perform the role of Ernest – an
entrepreneur, while the last one should perform the role of Ralph, who was
a researcher. They imagined that they were guests at a wedding party and
were seated around the same table – and otherwise had never met before.
When the tape recorder was turned on, they slowly started to small-talk –
but after a while the discussions heated up.
After a while there was a knock on the door. A watchman opened it and
looked into the room. ‘Are you allowed to be here?’ he asked harshly. ‘Yes!’
one of the three replied. ‘You are actually disturbing us in the middle of a
research process – we are performing a drama!’ he continued as if it was the
most natural thing for a researcher to do at campus a late Friday afternoon.
The watchman seemed confused, and determined by his facial expression
the scenery he witnessed didn’t quite ?t into his expectations concerning the
content of a serious research process.
The chapter you are now reading is one of the outcomes of the strange
events that afternoon. Looking back, we ?nd it reasonable to see these
events as a ?re fuelled by three wells. First, we have participated in several
research activities involving entrepreneurs and consultants making use of
di?erent types of more traditional research methodologies. At that time we
drew our attention to the more tacit understanding we felt we had built up
as participants in many meetings, business planning activities and discus-
sions of daily-recognized problems faced by the entrepreneurs, we found it
di?cult to bene?t from this valuable insight through these methodologies.
Second, post-modern thinking argues that it is impossible to represent
160
reality through texts. Instead of interpreting this as an argument for stop-
ping the production of research texts, we see it as an opening for construct-
ing other kinds of texts. Furthermore Phillips (1995) encourages us to use
novels, plays, poems and other kinds of ?ction within the study of manage-
ment and organization – and then why not do the same within the study of
entrepreneurship? The word ‘drama’ in the topic is an indication of this
interest in what we could call ‘serious ?ction’: a research text as a piece of
serious ?ction rather than a mirror of reality, and the use of other genres
of serious ?ction within research processes. The third well fuelling the
events that afternoon is a fascination for the idea of forum theatre.
45
Forum
theatre is sometimes used as a way of counselling within business, and one
of the authors of this chapter got an opportunity to follow a Danish per-
formance group performing in a major Danish company facing a restruc-
turing. Asked how it was possible for the actors to improvise and act out
situations based on inputs from the audience, one of the actors gave the
simple answer: ‘we know our roles thoroughly!’
The title of this chapter ‘The dramas of consulting and counselling the
entrepreneur’ indicates both the two ambitions and the main structure of
the text. Under the heading ‘The drama of consulting the entrepreneur’, the
primary ambition is to present how we have worked with the use of drama
– that is serious ?ction in the form of an improvised play – within a research
process within entrepreneurship as an alternative way of bringing the voice
of the entrepreneurs into a process of theory development. Our use of
serious ?ction is illustrated – or rather performed – by means of an ‘embed-
ded article’ called ‘The drama of counselling the entrepreneur’. ‘The drama
of counselling the entrepreneur’ is a short article in its own right discussing
di?erent relations between entrepreneurs and consultants. The section ‘The
drama of consulting the entrepreneur – revisited’ closes the article by indi-
cating the di?erent roles of drama in research texts.
THE DRAMA OF CONSULTING THE
ENTREPRENEUR
Before we illustrate the use of drama in an entrepreneurial setting through
the embedded article, we shall present how we have worked with drama in
a speci?c research process. We have found it meaningful to represent our
work process through a three-phase model. The three phases are illustrated
in Figure 8.1 and then brie?y described. It should be noticed that the model
re?ects our work with the genre ‘improvised play’ – but we believe it would
be the same overarching process if we had also chosen other genres of
serious ?ction.
The dramas of consulting and counselling the entrepreneur 161
Starting with the ?rst phase, the process described here relates to work
we have done on the theme of ‘entrepreneurial change processes’. This
theme was rooted in di?erent research perspectives and activities. As
researchers our experiences and interests inevitably in?uence the research
themes we develop. Based on our experience of projects involving interac-
tion among researchers, consultants and entrepreneurs, and the fascination
with forum theatre we decided to develop our serious ?ction as an impro-
vised play. Furthermore we decided that the roles to be performed in the
play should be the roles of a researcher, a consultant and an entrepreneur.
To improvise a trustworthy play it is necessary – as a professional actor
told us – to ‘know the roles thoroughly’. As our aim is to contribute to dis-
cussions of research practices within entrepreneurship studies, we empha-
size both our ?eld experience from di?erent projects as well as our reading
of others’ research texts as our background for ‘knowing the roles’.
Furthermore in a more detailed preparation for the improvisation, we
rehearsed through making up a stock of characteristic lines for each role
that could be drawn on when improvising the play. The play was then
improvised, tape-recorded and transcribed. But the play is not ?nalized
after these procedures. We think it would be naïve to believe that we really
did ‘know our roles thoroughly’. Therefore we entered a sub-phase of
re?ection. The re?ection element involved partly a critical reading of the
raw material by us and partly a critical reading by colleagues and by other
162 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
Phase 1
Constructing
basic play
Phase 2
Developing
specific paper
Phase 3
Finalizing
specific paper
Theme
Improvised
play
Reflection
Selection of
play sequences
Final play
Use:
Pedagogy
Ambiance
Method
Data
Audience
Basic play
Play
sequence
Figure 8.1 The 3-phase model
persons involved in the empirical arena, in this case a few consultants
involved in counselling Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) and
entrepreneurs. For practical reasons we did not get comments from entre-
preneurs although we surely would have bene?ted from it.
An example of a comment we received was that the researcher acted as
if all the truths were on his side. Furthermore, we received comments on
the lines of the consultant in relation to what a consultant would and would
not say in certain passages of the drama. These comments and re?ections
led to a rework of the raw material into that which in the ?gure above is
termed Basic play.
The second phase involves the analyses and theory developments aimed
at a speci?c paper. In this phase sequences of the basic play were selected
according to the concrete focus of a speci?c paper in question. In this way
the basic play can result in di?erent papers with di?erent angles and
di?erent theoretical ambitions, but it is obvious that these papers have to
be related to the theme of the basic play. The double-arrow between selec-
tion of play sequences and use in Phase 2 illustrates a dialectic relationship
between on the one hand the selection of sequences and perhaps minor
modi?cations to ?t a speci?c purpose, and on the other hand the use of the
play in analyses which might call for modi?cations or reselections of
sequences from the basic play. This process can be thought of as a parallel
to analyses from qualitative data.
In the third phase the play has to be put into the context of a publishable
research paper and ?nalized according to the content and the audience of
the paper. In the embedded article below – ‘The drama of counselling the
entrepreneur’ – the main purpose is theory development. Therefore the
‘text’ consists of a state-of-the-art of the literature on the subject, more
speci?c theories attached to the play and ?nally the theoretical considera-
tions developed.
WHY USE SERIOUS FICTION INSTEAD OF
TRADITIONAL RESEARCH PROCEDURES?
Above we have discussed the di?erent phases in our work with an improvised
play, but the question why we should use drama instead of interviews, obser-
vations or other established research procedures remains unanswered. First
of all it should be noted that we consider drama as complementary to other
qualitative research activities. One of the forces is communication; in a nar-
rative language it brings visibility to voices and to social processes.
Furthermore it is ameans toshift betweenempathyanddistance inaresearch
process, a way to shift between the interpretation based on theory and more
The dramas of consulting and counselling the entrepreneur 163
intuitive and spontaneous re?ection. Secondly the use of drama is a way to
give voice to experiences gained from ?eldwork which fromtraditional data
collection methods and scienti?c criteria might seem unstructured and
random– but nevertheless in?uences our way of thinking about our subject.
Searching for a way out of the traditional dichotomy of reductionistic
generalizations vs. sensitivity to local complexities, the ultimate goal in our
case is not the improvised play in itself, but the play as a means to develop
abstracted concepts. That is, concepts which are abstracted – or detached,
so to speak – from the local complexities that provoked them, believing that
abstracted concepts travel more easily to bene?t other situations than the
situation studied. But abstracted concepts are not generalizations in a
‘theory as mirror’ perspective, but rather concepts that somebody might
?nd useful in making sense of his or her local situation.
The article embedded below illustrates the use of drama in developing
abstracted concepts. We present this embedded article to give a more
precise image of the contribution of drama to entrepreneurship research.
The theme of this article is ‘counselling the entrepreneur’. This part is
written as a piece of research in its own right, in a way that could be read
separately from the rest of this article.
THE DRAMA OF COUNSELLING THE
ENTREPRENEUR
In many countries much money is allocated to counselling entrepreneurs.
America has the Small Business Development Center Program, the United
Kingdom has the Small Firm Counselling Service, and Denmark has the
Free Consultative Programme, and so on in lots of countries in the western
part of the world.
This area is interesting from di?erent perspectives. First of all it is inter-
esting to investigate if society gets value for money. From the perspective of
the entrepreneur it is interesting as it can enable him to make better (not nec-
essarily more) use of counselling. From the perspective of the counselling
profession research on the topic might again help to develop their services.
The literature about counselling entrepreneurs is rather scarce and
focuses predominantly on the e?ect of counselling on either societal or indi-
vidual level (for example, Atherton et al., 1997; Chrisman and Katrishen,
1995; Chrisman et al., 1987; Chrisman, 1989; Chrisman, 1999; Nahavandi
and Chesteen, 1988; Robinson, 1982). All in all, the main conclusion, espe-
cially from American literature, is that counselling is important for both the
performance of the entrepreneur and the economic growth and develop-
ment of society. European literature is on the other hand more sceptical and
164 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
more focused on the content of counselling or the context in which it takes
place (Elkjær and Lysgaard, 1998; Johansson, 1997; 1999; Mønsted, 1985a,
1985b; Storey, 1994). Still, the current literature does not pay much atten-
tion to the process of counselling – the interaction between the consultant
and the entrepreneur at the ‘moment of truth’ (Norman, 1991). To increase
the understanding of the interaction between the consultant and the entre-
preneur we have used the methodological procedures described in ‘the sur-
rounding article’.
The play
At a wedding party Ernest, Claus and Ralph have been placed at the same
table. The planner might have expected that they would have something in
common to talk about, though they have never met before. Ernest is an
entrepreneur starting a new venture. Claus is a management consultant
entering the market of counselling entrepreneurs. Ralph is a researcher
within the area of organizing and entrepreneurship.
Ernest: You tell me that you are a consultant advising entrepreneurs.
That sounds pretty trendy . . . but what can you do for an entre-
preneur like me?
Claus: Well, mostly I help entrepreneurs to develop a healthy business
plan – a business plan strong enough to survive the thunder-
storms of the marketplace.
Ralph: Fair enough . . . but how come that you are in a position to tell
an entrepreneur what to do . . . I mean, it’s his ideas and dreams
that are at stake here . . .
Claus: Yes exactly, and that is why he often needs some advice. You see,
?rst of all I’m not involved in the ideas and dreams related to any
new venture, therefore, I’m in a better position to evaluate
realism. Secondly, I have a formal education within business
areas as well as considerable experience in these matters.
Ernest: (. . . get o? the high horse, Mr Over-smart . . .) Yeah well, the
other day, I talked to a woman starting a venture – she went to
one of your colleagues and all she got was a so-called business
plan printed on nice paper and wrapped in cellophane – the next
day she got an opportunity to deliver a special variant of her ser-
vices to a huge company, and once and for all the expensive paper
of the business plan was as relevant for her venture as the ashes
from her cigarette. The lesson I learned from this is that you
should only consult a consultant if you have a very speci?c
problem . . .
The dramas of consulting and counselling the entrepreneur 165
Ralph: . . . and if you go to a consultant without a concrete problem, the
consultant will soon give you one – and of course one that he can
solve . . .
Claus: Hey . . . this is unfair . . . what do you mean by that?
Ernest: I agree with Claus that it’s a real researcher comment – detached
from real life . . .
Ralph: Hmm, what do I actually mean? First of all it was intended as a
joke – but anyway . . . sometimes I actually doubt if consultants
help their clients . . . how should I put it . . . when an entrepre-
neur goes to a consultant, then the consultant has all kinds of
questions. And each question creates a new room furnished with
potential problems demanding solutions. Problems and solu-
tions that might have been forever irrelevant if the room had
never been created in the ?rst place . . . (I bet that they wonder
why I don’t talk about rooms to which a door is simply opened
– but that’s a philosophical discussion, which will miss its point
here . . .)
Claus: Okay, but as long as we are talking new venture creation, then the
door necessarily has to be opened to some of these rooms (I
wonder why Ralph talks about creation of rooms, but like other
researchers he surely has some irrelevant philosophical argu-
ments). Some problems and potential solutions have to be faced
in order to create a vigorous venture with the potential of
growing into a large-scale economic success.
Ernest: Large-scale economic success . . .? Of course that’ll be nice – who
wouldn’t agree on that one – but on the other hand I don’t want
to end up as CEO wearing suit and tie all day and only touch the
products through the mediation of sales statistics and accounting
numbers – no; I start this venture to ful?l a dream of creating, to
ful?l a dream of a life where I get an opportunity to be involved
in every activity from order to delivery, to ful?l a dream of a life
where I really see the di?erences that I make . . .
Ralph: To change the subject slightly, I have noticed that some consul-
tants ride a wave of narratives and storytelling . . .
Claus: Yes, that’s right. But that’s not really my business. I’m more in the
business of concrete advice on the business plan and the areas
that are included in this plan, like strategy, marketing, product
development, production processes, ?nance, etc.
Ralph: Well, I think of narratives and storytelling in broader terms.
Narratives are not just like fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm or
Hans Christian Andersen. No, narratives are means for people to
ascribe sense to unfolding events. Let’s take this particular event
166 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
as an example . . . at this particular moment we are sitting three
men around a table placed in a huge room. Around us there are
more people. And that’s it!!! But to ascribe sense to this strange
event, we write it – so to speak – into a narrative of a wedding
party. This wedding-party narrative places this particular event of
three men around a table into a story of love, trust and future for
the two people in strange clothes up there . . .
In the same way new venture creation can be thought of as the
construction of a narrative. And here I talk about the construc-
tion of a narrative, as the narrative of new venture creation
has not necessarily as many standard plots as a wedding-party
narrative . . .
Ernest: Please . . . stop voodooing . . . What does that mean to me and
my reality?
Ralph: You see, in relation to venture creation at least two di?erent nar-
ratives with di?erent plots sometimes collide. And our authors
have actually made us illustrate this point through our discus-
sions up to this point. First of all there is what could be called
a managerial narrative. A narrative with plots like growth,
pro?t, e?ciency, planning, etc. This narrative is brought into the
scene by, for example, the business plan and the standard plots
or solutions that’ll survive the ‘thunderstorms of the market-
place’ as Claus ?guratively phrased it. Secondly, there is what
could be termed an entrepreneurial narrative. A narrative with
plots around creation, playfulness, curiosity and experiential
learning.
Here we have two di?erent narratives available to ascribe
meaning to the events of new venture creation. Two di?erent nar-
ratives that point towards di?erent actions, emotions and out-
comes . . . or to phrase in another way: we have two sets of plots
available to write and live the unique narrative of your venture,
Ernest.
RE-DEVELOPING A TYPOLOGY OF CONSULTANT-
ENTREPRENEUR SITUATIONS
The intention of this ‘article in an article’ is to contribute to the very scarce
– or virtually nonexistent – literature on the relationship between consul-
tants and entrepreneurs. As point of departure for the journey into this new
area a safe and known harbour is chosen in Johansson’s work on the rela-
tionship between consultants and SMEs (Johansson, 1997; 1999).
The dramas of consulting and counselling the entrepreneur 167
Although, Johansson in his work on the relation between the consultant
and the client refers to a small-business owner, and we in our research are
focused on the entrepreneur, we will anyway elaborate on his model.
Looking into the literature, especially through the 1990s, there seem to be
signi?cant di?erences between what constitutes a small-business manager
and what constitutes an entrepreneur. The entrepreneurs are often labelled
as being driven by opportunity, being growth-oriented, having high self-
e?cacy in innovation and risk-taking, and as being especially creative. But
these di?erences are not important in relation to Johansson’s model. The
signi?cant points in Johansson’s model are the relationship between con-
sultant and client and the level of complexity in the advice situation.
Therefore, the model easily ‘travels’ to inform other kinds of counselling
situations.
Johansson constructs a two-by-two matrix based on the dimensions:
degree of complexity in the subject under consideration in the advice situ-
ation, and the degree of asymmetry between consultant and client.
As examples of the ?rst type – professional knowledge transfer – where
there is a low degree of complexity and a high degree of asymmetry,
Johansson (1999) provides the example of tax advising while Johansson
(1997) gives the example of advice concerning owner structure of a
company. As an example of exchange of experience, he points towards a
manager asking a colleague to share his experience of using maintenance
suppliers for a certain machine. The type called dialogue is exempli?ed by
a well-educated small-business manager meeting a consultant experienced
in counselling small businesses and with a re?ective distance to his own
professional claims. The last type – high degree of complexity and high
168 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
Table 8.1 Types of advising
The complexity
in the advising
situation
The client-
consultant Low degree of High degree of
relation complexity complexity
High degree of asymmetry 1) Professional knowledge 4) Manipulation
transfer
Low degree of asymmetry 2) Exchange of experience 3) Dialogue
Source: Johansson (1999).
degree of asymmetry – is exempli?ed by a well-educated consultant pre-
senting himself to a self-educated small-business manager as an expert in
strategic planning and company turnarounds. This situation is labelled
manipulation.
In the following sections, this typology is developed and translated into
the area of consultant-entrepreneur relationships through discussing the
two dimensions. The ?rst step is to re?ect upon the level of complexity
dimension in discussing the sources of complexity in new venture creation
and to discuss how di?erent ideologies/narratives simultaneously hide and
ascribe sense to the complexity. The second step is to develop the asym-
metry dimension. Johansson focuses on the level of education as source of
asymmetry. This perspective is developed through combining it with his
own discussion of di?erent client identities.
Rethinking Complexity
Some situations can be thought of like a game of chess. The goal and the
boundaries are clear: to capture the opponent’s king on the battle?eld of
8?8 squares. Cause and e?ect relationships are clear too: every chessman
can make certain moves known in advance. Situations like this are low-
complexity situations. The goal is clear and unambiguous and cause-e?ect
relationships are known. But characterizing such situations as low-com-
plexity situations is not the same as saying that they are easy to see through.
Some people will – due to experience, formal education, position in net-
works, etc. – be in a position to see further into the game and therefore be
in a position to advise others.
Other situations are not that clear-cut but rather characterized by ambi-
guity. Following McCaskey (1982) ambiguous situations are characterized
by unclear, or multiple and con?icting goals or even that the nature of the
problem itself is in question. Furthermore ambiguity is characterized by a
lack of or poor understanding of cause-e?ect relationships. In a critique of
operational research, Acko? characterizes managerial situations as messes
and states that:
Managers are not confronted with problems that are independent of each
other, but with dynamic situations that consist of complex systems of chang-
ing problems that interact with each other. I call such situations messes (Acko?,
1979).
According to Acko? problems are abstractions extracted from messes by
analysis, rather than something obvious and inherent in the situations. And
following Weick (1979; 1995) ambiguity is an occasion for sensemaking. But
how are problems extracted from messes or how does one make sense of
The dramas of consulting and counselling the entrepreneur 169
ambiguity? Without going into details here, Weick (1995) argues that a piece
of sense is created based on a cue related to an existing frame of reference.
Referring to the play, Ralph exempli?es this point through the situation in
which the three men found themselves. Pointing towards the ‘physical
appearances’ around them, he extracts the cues of a huge room and people
around them – and two people in di?erent clothes – and relates these cues
to a narrative of a ‘traditional wedding party’ as frame of reference.
Looking at entrepreneurship the question then arises which existing
frames of references are dominant? By taking small-business research as
point of departure once again, Johannisson (1999) argues that three
di?erent ideologies intersect in the medium-sized family business: an entre-
preneurial, a managerial and a family ideology. For the purpose of this
chapter we can consider such an ideology as a narrative with legitimated
plots and as frames of reference to which cues can be related. Focusing on
the entrepreneurial and managerial ideologies – or narratives – the entre-
preneurial is a narrative with plots around creation, playfulness, curiosity
and experiential learning, while the managerial ideology contains plots like
growth, pro?t, e?ciency, planning, etc. The family dimension is left out
here, as Johannisson’s model is concerned with family businesses where
certain issues can be raised as family members have certain roles in the
organization which may raise issues concerning prioritizing between family
values and managerial values, for instance in relation to promotions, etc.
These issues are not yet that relevant as long as the focus is on entrepre-
neurship rather than management.
The point here is that the same cues, the same mess, the same ambiguity
take on di?erent clothing when they are inscribed into di?erent narratives.
We prefer to think of these frames of reference as narratives, as a constitut-
ing feature of a narrative is concern for sequentiality (Bruner, 1990).
Relating a single event to a narrative, places a single event into a stream of
events, a stream of events that relates the current event to past events and
– of key importance here – relates the current event to future events.
Relating an event of venture creation to a managerial narrative may relate
it to future events of increased economic wealth while relating the same
event to an entrepreneurial narrative may point towards increased freedom
and playfulness.
Looking at the high degree of complexity column in Johansson’s model,
it can now be summarized to consist of situations where there are no clear
goals or where the problem itself is at stake and where there are no clear or
known cause and e?ect relationships. In these messy or ambiguous situ-
ations, sense is not inherent or obvious within the situations, but rather
created through relating cues to existing frames, and there is a risk that a
consultant – especially if there is a high degree of asymmetry – does violence
170 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
to or manipulates the entrepreneur’s narrative. Looking at the play, di?erent
or con?icting frames of references, or narratives, became visible where
Ernest did not necessarily agree that the ultimate goal of his venture crea-
tion was to turn it into a large-scale economic success, as suggested by Claus.
Following this way of developing Johansson’s level of complexity dimen-
sion in his typology of advice situations, the low complexity column can be
thought of as a result of one dominating narrative to make sense of cues,
a narrative so dominating that it is (almost) impossible to question it, and
this in itself is the reason why the situation is experienced as a low-complex-
ity situation.
Rethinking Asymmetry
In discussing the vertical dimension in his typology of advising situations,
Johansson, places great emphasis on formal education. But this dimension
can be developed further if it is related to his identi?cation of di?erent
client identities. The idea is that the level of asymmetry is not something
built into a relationship as something natural, but rather something per-
formed, or enacted, as the relation unfolds.
Through interviews with nine SME managers, Johansson (1997)
identi?es three client identities. The ?rst identity is labelled anti-client and
characterizes a client who considers advice taking as disqualifying the
manager as a manager – especially if the advice is o?ered by a consultant.
The second identity is labelled consultant-modi?er. To the consultant-
modi?er, it is important to maintain an impression of control over the con-
sultant rather than the opposite. The last identity he identi?es is labelled
ideal-client. An ideal-client is a client who acknowledges that he is in need
of counselling and accepts that the consultant is an expert, whose advice is
worth adhering to.
Linking these identities to the degree of asymmetry dimension in the
initial typology opens for the idea that the client identity in?uences the level
of asymmetry performed in a consultant-entrepreneur relationship. If the
entrepreneur is an anti-client, the level of asymmetry is non-existent, as the
relationship will never be established in the ?rst place. On the other hand,
the ideal-client identity constructs a high degree of asymmetry in the very
way it enters the relationship. Last, the consultant-modi?er is likely to
perform a low degree of asymmetry no matter the level of education of the
consultant.
From a ‘level of education’ point of view, the relationships at stake in the
play are likely to suggest high levels of asymmetries. First a high level of
asymmetry between the researcher, Ralph, and the consultant, Claus,
second between Claus and Ernest and then of course between Ralph and
The dramas of consulting and counselling the entrepreneur 171
Ernest. But the way these relationships are performed indicates that the
persons ‘lowest’ in the level of education hierarchy perform something
resembling consultant-modi?er identities – sometimes akin to anti-client
identities. For instance, Ernest asks Ralph and Claus to stop ‘voodooing’,
and Claus gives his own thoughts concerning Ralph’s tendency to philo-
sophical mumbo-jumbo.
Rethinking Counselling the Entrepreneur
Returning to Johansson’s typology and now focusing on both dimensions
simultaneously, several points are developed through these discussions.
These points are illustrated in Table 8.2 and explained in more detail in the
following.
First the complexity dimension was developed to be a result of the nar-
ratives at stake in the relation between a consultant and an entrepreneur.
Somesituations resembleagameof chess whileothers aremessyandambigu-
ous, characterized by acknowledging that the goal or the way the problem
is de?ned is negotiable and by unclear cause-e?ect relationships. In these
situations, narratives are important in order to place events into streams of
experiences making sense of the past and pointing towards future actions.
Furthermore it was suggested that situations might be characterized as low-
complexity situations as an e?ect of the presence of only one (practically
unquestionable) narrative in the relationship. In the table, this point is
172 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
Table 8.2 Johansson’s typology revisited
The complexity
in the advising
situation Low degree of High degree of
The client- complexity complexity
consultant – One dominant – More competing
relation narrative narratives
High degree of asymmetry 1) Professional knowledge 4) Manipulation
– Ideal-client identities 1) transfer
performed
Low degree of asymmetry 2) Exchange of experience 3) Dialogue
– Consultant modi?er
identities performed
Source: Based, in part, on Johansson (1999).
shown by emphasizing that the degree of complexity is a result of the nar-
ratives at stake in a given situation. If there is only one dominant narrative
at stake, the situation is likely to be performed as a low-complexity situation
and the contrary if more narratives are at stake.
The level of asymmetry dimension was developed by suggesting that
asymmetry is something performed, or enacted, rather than something
inherent in the situation based on di?erences in educational background.
In Table 8.2 this is indicated by adding client identities performed in a given
relation to the degree of the asymmetry dimension.
By combining these two ‘rethinkings’ of the dimensions, it can be sug-
gested that consultant modi?ers will most likely perform situations of high
complexity since they will insist on introducing narratives competing with
the consultant’s narratives. On the other hand, ideal-clients might be more
likely to produce low-complexity situations, as they are more ready to
accept the consultant’s interpretations of the situations.
At a meeting for consultants advising entrepreneurs during the startup
process, one of the authors was invited to discuss the role of the consultant,
and presented some of the ideas of this chapter. The presentation inspired
primarily two responses. First, they did not agree that they had manipu-
lated the entrepreneurs – the primary argument was that they did not have
any economic reasons for doing so since they were publicly funded. But one
in the audience raised the point that they did not necessarily manipulate on
purpose, and that the e?ect seen from the entrepreneur’s point of view was
the same regardless whether the manipulation was intended or grounded in
lack of empathy. This indicates that situations of high complexity and
high asymmetry are not necessarily performed as manipulation, but that
manipulation may be hidden from both participants in situations per-
formed as something else.
Another reaction brought forward at that meeting was a consultant who,
in one of the breaks, argued that entrepreneurs are most likely to think they
bene?t most from situations like professional knowledge transfer. ‘They
often want to be manipulated; they do not want to pay for a dialogue.’ This
suggests that instances of manipulation from time to time might be per-
formed under the guise of professional knowledge transfer – and probably
to the great satisfaction of the ‘manipulated’ entrepreneur!
Therefore, looking at the situation of high degree of complexity and high
degree of asymmetry (manipulation) in Johansson’s typology these devel-
opments taken together suggest that this situation will either be performed
as an instance of professional knowledge transfer or be performed as a dia-
logue. If the client is an ideal-client, he or she may acknowledge the con-
sultant as an expert and accept the advice given without ever considering
the possibility of being manipulated, and just accept that the narratives are
The dramas of consulting and counselling the entrepreneur 173
placed in the background. If, on the other hand, the client performs a con-
sultant-modi?er identity, he or she will engage in a dialogue without
accepting that the consultant could be more right based only on the con-
sultant’s experience and formal education. In the table, the arrows pointing
from the manipulation box towards either professional knowledge transfer
or dialogue indicate these moves.
The key lessons suggested by these theory developments are that both the
consultant and the entrepreneur should be aware of the levels of asymme-
tries performed. Especially in situations with high degrees of asymmetry
and complexity there should be an awareness concerning these issues to
prevent the consultant violating, or manipulating, the entrepreneur’s
reasons for starting a new venture which might risk killing the engagement
necessary to being successful – according to whichever narrative success is
determined.
Returning to the play in the beginning, the situations and relationships
at stake are not likely to turn into situations of manipulation – that means
the situations are not likely to be performed as instances of professional
knowledge transfer as more narratives are brought forth and none of the
actors seems to perform ideal-client identities. Instead the relations hope-
fully turn into dialogues of mutual bene?t among men of equal status.
Returning to the existing literature on counselling entrepreneurs, it is
revealed that it is dominated by a managerial ideology in searching for
e?ects of counselling on performance measures, which the arguments of
this chapter indicates is not necessarily what is at stake for the individual
entrepreneur.
THE DRAMA OF CONSULTING THE
ENTREPRENEUR – REVISITED
Through this chapter, we have suggested the use of drama – that is serious
?ction – as a bridge giving more informal experiences gained from ?eld
studies – or, as Van Maanen (1988) phrases it, experiences that are ‘unlikely
to be found in the daily records’ – a shortcut for entering theory develop-
ments. These points have been illustrated through an embedded article
titled ‘The drama of counselling the entrepreneur’. In this embedded
article, a drama consisting of a dialogue between a researcher, a consultant
and an entrepreneur gave the authors’ informal experiences from working
with entrepreneurs and consultants a role to play in theory development.
Concluding the chapter, this section points out four roles which we see
drama can play in research processes within entrepreneurship – and of
course other areas.
174 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
Drama to Give Visibility to Everyday Life
On its own, drama can contribute to insight into the entrepreneurial situa-
tion. Through a recognizable story people without a conceptual under-
standing of entrepreneurship and narrative research can obtain insight
without actually using theoretical concepts. The drama gives visibility to
everyday life. The drama dialogue in this chapter contains a debate between
a consultant, a researcher and an entrepreneur on how consultants can con-
tribute to entrepreneurs. This can for example give entrepreneurs a more
tangible idea about what to expect from a consultant and give them some
insight into a potential pitfall in a relationship – namely the risk of di?erent
perspectives concerning a new venture.
Drama to Inject Life into Theoretical Concepts
In drama the researcher, Ralph, describes the wedding party in which the
three partake as an example of saying something about the relationship
between pure events and narratives to make sense of events. Abstract con-
cepts as ‘event’ and ‘narratives’ can be given life through the use of the
drama. It gives another meaning to the concepts than a de?nition. Through
a recognizable situation the concepts become livelier for the readers. In this
way the use of drama can have a pedagogical ambition – for example in
relation to university classes or counselling situations.
Drama to Provoke Theory Development
Through drama we get new ideas to the critics of existing theories. As a
researcher you can ?nd new arguments for or against concepts and theories
in the literature. In the article on counselling the entrepreneur, the use of
drama in theory development is emphasized. Rethinking the dimensions in
Johansson’s matrix illustrates how drama can be helpful in developing and
deepening theoretical concepts – in this case the concepts of asymmetry
and complexity.
Drama to Help Evaluating New Theories
In the introduction, it was argued that we distance our approach to theory
development from approaches seeking ultimate truths. But that does not
mean that we argue for a kind of ‘anything goes’ approach to drama in the
sense that any drama will do, as it is the reader’s responsibility to make use
of it in relation to his or her projects. Rather, a heavy burden is placed on the
shoulders of researchers using drama, as we have to convince an audience
The dramas of consulting and counselling the entrepreneur 175
that our theories are useful – and it is not possible to refer to the idea that
they are useful because they are well grounded in data and substance. They
are useful if the audience ?nds themso. Inthis way, ‘anything does absolutely
not go’. To evaluate newtheories we emphasize that drama is a construction
made in a way that makes theory evaluation possible.
176 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
9. Masculine entrepreneurship – the
Gnosjö discourse in a feminist
perspective
Katarina Pettersson
INTRODUCTION
Entrepreneurs are commonly stereotyped as men, in general, and in partic-
ular in research on entrepreneurship (Sundin, 1988; Sundin and Holmquist,
1989; Holmquist, 1997; Gunnerud Berg, 1997; Lindgren, 2000; Ahl, 2002).
It is argued that mainstream entrepreneurship research and writings on
entrepreneurship in general have a male bias. In this chapter I show that this
is true for texts – both research texts and others – concerning entrepreneurs
and entrepreneurship in Gnosjö, Sweden.
Gnosjö is a place in Sweden which is commonly associated with prosper-
ous entrepreneurship and a large number of self-employed. The entrepre-
neur in Gnosjö is most often represented as a man, dressed in a blue
working out?t with a tool in his hand. This is the case even though 33 per
cent of the entrepreneurs in this municipality are women.
46
The purpose of
this chapter is to apply a feminist perspective and critically examine how
gender is implied in the Gnosjö discourse, particularly in the context of
entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs.
47
I see the texts, which I analyse in this chapter, as making up the Gnosjö
discourse. The concept of discourse implies a strong association between
power and knowledge (Foucault, 1977; Foucault, 1993). The masculine bias
of the Gnosjö discourse can be seen as a product of constructions of gender
embedded within power relations. Even though women entrepreneurs in
Gnosjö are seldom mentioned in the discourse on Gnosjö, the discourse is
still perceived of as interesting and accurate knowledge about, for example,
how entrepreneurship is created and sustained, and who has the drive of
becoming an entrepreneur. Gnosjö is both seen as an ‘atypical’ place, since
it is perceived of as ‘more entrepreneurial’ than many other places in
Sweden, and it is seen as a role model that other places should try to copy,
in order to enhance or create economic growth. In both cases the knowledge
created is regarded as exhaustive and proper. This is highly questionable
177
since the ‘knowledge’ created is masculinist. What is perceived of as knowl-
edge only includes knowledge about male entrepreneurs and excludes testi-
monies on one third of the entrepreneurs – the women.
According to Spilling and Gunnerud Berg (2000) there are few studies
examining female, or female versus male entrepreneurship, even though the
number has increased over the last years. The studies carried out have in
many cases taken a quantitative approach, simply documenting di?erences
and similarities between men and women as entrepreneurs (cf. Gatewood
et al., 2003). Ahl (2002) argues that a large number of these kinds of arti-
cles overestimate the di?erences between men and women. The authors
thereby ‘make a mountain out of a molehill’, as they stress small di?erences
while ignoring similarities between men and women entrepreneurs. There
is hence a need to use a feminist perspective in order to examine the gen-
dering of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs, and not simply regard
gender as a variable in quantitative investigations.
Feminist researchers of entrepreneurship have for the last 15 years paid
attention to, and criticized, the invisibility of women entrepreneurs
(Sundin, 1988; Sundin and Holmquist (eds), 2002). They emphasize that
women entrepreneurs are invisible in academic research on entrepreneurs
and entrepreneurship (Ahl, 2002), as well as in statistics and among busi-
ness advisers (Sundin and Holmquist, 1989).
A feminist perspective is thus necessary in studies on entrepreneurship in
order to avoid taking a prevalent masculine norm for granted and to be able
to make women entrepreneurs visible. Applying a feminist perspective
implies problematizing constructions and representations of gender in, for
example, texts, research and practices concerning entrepreneurs and entre-
preneurship. This not only implies an attempt to question the marginal
position of female entrepreneurs, but also to question and problematize the
superior position of male entrepreneurs.
Holmquist (2002) argues that questions concerning what and who within
the entrepreneurial ?eld are of importance to avoid making women entre-
preneurs invisible. She also argues that there is a need to critically examine
existing theories on entrepreneurship, in order to integrate gender theories
with them.
The contribution of this chapter is to apply a feminist perspective and
critically analyse how research – and other texts on entrepreneurs and
entrepreneurship in Gnosjö – are gendered. In other words it implies
making the implicit gender perspective of the Gnosjö discourse explicit.
Who is seen as a Gnosjö entrepreneur and how are the entrepreneurial
activities in Gnosjö characterized from a feminist standpoint?
By pursuing this aimI questionhowGnosjöis put forwardas a role model,
for example in mainstreamstudies on regional and economic development,
178 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
since women’s contribution to this region’s prosperity and economic growth
is erased and thereby not examined. The importance of the women entre-
preneurs is thus probably underestimated. One can hence question the accu-
racy of the explanations and experiences drawn in male-biased studies on
Gnosjö. The women entrepreneurs are perhaps a forgotten or hidden expla-
nation to Gnosjö’s economic prosperity.
The chapter begins with a brief description of Gnosjö. Then follows a
discussion of the theoretical perspectives adopted. I de?ne the concept dis-
course and ground it in one possible interpretation of the Foucauldian tra-
dition as tightly associated to knowledge and power. I understand this as a
way of analysing and discussing the discursive limits to what is and is not
said about Gnosjö. The discourse on Gnosjö has its own logic concerning
what is included or excluded. And even though the discourse about Gnosjö,
from a feminist perspective, focuses on entrepreneurs who are men, it is
generally regarded as proper and exhaustive knowledge.
In the following sections of the chapter I outline the outcomes of the
analysis of the Gnosjö discourse. The material analysed consists of around
65 media reports published between 1978 and 2000, and around 25 studies
on Gnosjö published between 1912 and 2000.
48
Entrepreneurs and entre-
preneurship are the main denominations of the discourse, and entrepren-
eurs are primarily represented as men. Even though women make up one
third of the entrepreneurs in Gnosjö they are not seen as such and in the
last section of the chapter I demonstrate how women are constructed as
‘helpmates’ and wives of entrepreneurs.
A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO GNOSJÖ
Gnosjö is often used as a metaphor of successful entrepreneurship by
other places and regions, since its name has strong positive connotations
and is widely recognized. Despite the fact that Gnosjö is a quite small
municipality with around 10 000 inhabitants (in the county of Småland in
the south of Sweden), it is discursively produced as a prime example to be
‘imitated’ by other places. Places like Stockholm and Taiwan are in this
vein said to ‘be Gnosjö’ (10 May 1983, Svenska Dagbladet; 2 October 1996,
A?ärsvärlden).
Gnosjö is sometimes represented as the ‘most industrialized’ municipal-
ity in Sweden, since there are many persons employed in the manufactur-
ing industry and since a large proportion of the inhabitants are
self-employed. There are around 350 active enterprises in Gnosjö. The
manufacturing industry dominates both among the ?rms in Gnosjö and
on the labour market. It is often said that the industry has long-standing
The Gnosjö discourse in a feminist perspective 179
traditions and that it is rooted in metal wire-drawing and metal wire pro-
duction of things like hooks and eyes, nails and knitting needles.
Typical things produced today, in the often small and medium-sized
manufacturing enterprises in Gnosjö, are products made of metal wire
and/or plastic: wire-netting, shopping trolleys, nuts and bolts, and clothes-
hangers (Ridderberg, 1994; Made in Gnosjö, 2003). Around 65 per cent of
the workforce are working in the manufacturing industry, and of these
nearly one third are women (12 February, 2001, www.gnosjo.se). Both these
?gures represent larger proportions than the ?gures for Sweden as a whole.
In Sweden less than 20 per cent of the workforce is employed in the manu-
facturing industry (2 December, 2001, www.gnosjo.se) and women make up
around 25 per cent of them (Statistiska centralbyrån, 2000). The unem-
ployment ?gures for Gnosjö are extremely low with a proportion of 1–2 per
cent of the working force, compared to Sweden’s unemployment of 5–6 per
cent (12 February, 2001, www.gnosjo.se).
Since Gnosjö has low unemployment rates as well as a large number of
small and medium-sized enterprises, other places, municipalities and
regions with high unemployment ?gures or poorly developed entrepreneur-
ship are sometimes said to lack the entrepreneurial spirit – the Gnosjö spirit
– which is seen as the explanation of Gnosjö’s success. Gnosjö is thus often
put forward as the role model of successful economic and regional devel-
opment. The Gnosjö region is seen as providing the answer to questions
like: How is Sweden and its regions going to maintain or create economic
growth? How can problems of unemployment be solved? The answer that
Gnosjö provides is that there should be a large number of small enterprises,
and that traditional manufacturing industry is a possible way in which to
generate economic growth.
THE GNOSJÖ DISCOURSE
There is a plethora of texts constituting the Gnosjö discourse. The dis-
course is thus produced and reproduced in di?erent genres: media reports,
entrepreneurial research, economic research, regional development discus-
sions, and regional policy-making. The fact that there are many and diverse
sources producing the discourse on Gnosjö means that it is well established
and widely dispersed in the Swedish context. One example of this is that the
expression Gnosjö spirit, which is said to explain Gnosjö’s successfulness,
has become an entry in the encyclopaedia of Sweden.
Gnosjö spirit, name for entrepreneurial spirit which prevails in the municipality
of Gnosjö in Småland and its neighbour municipalities. Self-employment is the
180 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
way of life which dominates society; this implies, for example, that the munici-
pal administration, banks and unions adapt their working patterns to the enter-
prises. The district has a unique portion of employment in the industrial sector
for Sweden and a low unemployment rate (Nationalencyklopedin, 1992, Vol. 7,
p. 539, my translation).
Despite some di?erences between the texts they all deal with entrepreneurs
and entrepreneurship in one way or another. The di?erences for example
concern from what ideological perspective they are written, as some of
them are arguing for what is seen as better political conditions for ?rms in
a neo-liberal sense. Other texts are primarily concerned with what charac-
terizes the entrepreneurs as individuals and as a network in Gnosjö. The
statements and arguments brought forth in the texts are, however, from a
feminist perspective, relatively unanimous. I therefore conceive of the texts
as ‘threads intertwined into a weave’, which in other words can be called
the Gnosjö discourse. A discourse is according to Gregory (2000) de?ned
as: ‘A speci?c series of representations, practices and performances through
which meanings are produced, connected into networks and legitimised’
(Gregory, 2000, p. 180). And this is the de?nition adopted in this text.
According to Foucault (1977, 1993) the production of power and knowl-
edge is intertwined. What is considered as knowledge is associated to
power, and this means that there are discursive limits to what one can and
cannot say. There are di?erent ‘procedures of exclusion’ which character-
ize the production of discourses. The procedures which Foucault (1993)
discusses are the prohibition, the oppositions between the true and the
false, and reason and madness. Certain discourses are thus regarded as true
and reasonable, and they are therefore separated from the false and what is
prohibited to say.
The Gnosjö discourse can in this vein be seen as constructing limits for
what is conceived of as important, interesting and relevant knowledge, and
what is not. Power is also expressed in the sense that the discourse has its
own logic concerning what is true and false, and thereby what is included
or excluded. The knowledge produced in the discourse about Gnosjö is
regarded as proper and exhaustive, even though it, from a feminist perspec-
tive, focuses on entrepreneurs who are men, while women entrepreneurs are
largely invisible. The production of the Gnosjö discourse is thus embedded
in gendered power relations, and it produces a speci?c knowledge about
Gnosjö which is characterized by a masculine bias.
However, within the discourse the successful picture of Gnosjö is chal-
lenged by a handful of researchers using a gender perspective. One of these
is Forsberg (1997) and she indicates that women have had to pay a high
price for the successful development and that the Gnosjö region is charac-
terized by a traditional ‘gender contract’. This conceptualization implies
The Gnosjö discourse in a feminist perspective 181
that the gender relations are relatively unequal in Gnosjö in comparison to
the rest of Sweden. According to Forsberg the municipality, compared to
Sweden, has the lowest share of women in the local political assembly, the
greatest gender segregation on the labour market, the largest gender wage
gap, and the lowest proportion of children in public-sector child care.
In discursive terms Forsberg’s picture of Gnosjö can be seen as a move
away from the mainstream picture. The discourse is thus heterogeneous (cf.
Gregory, 2000), which means that there is space for a feminist analysis of
Gnosjö (developed in Wendeberg, 1982; Hedlund, 1997; Hedlund, 1998;
Johansson, 2000). Interestingly enough, however, these feminist texts are
largely excluded fromthe rest of the texts producing the discourse.
Wendeberg (1982) has carried out a large number of interviews with entre-
preneurs in Gnosjö. In one chapter of her book she problematizes that the
concept of entrepreneur primarily signi?es men, even though women to her
seem to have contributed greatly to the establishment of many of the ?rms
in Gnosjö. Meanwhile interviewing the entrepreneurial men, Wendeberg
realizedthat their wives were of great importance tothe building-upof many
of the enterprises. The conclusion that Wendeberg draws is that women as
entrepreneurs are invisible. Wendeberg’s book is cited in some of the texts
producing the Gnosjö discourse (see Andersson et al., 1984; Edmundsson,
1986; Kolsgård et al., 1987; Sollbe, (ed.) 1988; Örjasaeter, 1989a; Örjasaeter,
1989b; Gummesson, 1997; Berggren et al., 1998; Fölster, 2000). None of
these mentions Wendeberg’s discussion on the male bias of the concept of
entrepreneur, eventhougha handful brie?y comment that the wives of entre-
preneurs are important, but often invisible. These comments are, however,
not grounded in a feminist discussion, nor do these statements further
in?uence the texts or the usage of the termentrepreneur. One explanation to
this exclusion of Wendeberg’s feminist discussion is that it is not seen as
interesting knowledge about Gnosjö.
The dominating impression of the analysis of the discourse on Gnosjö
is not greatly challenged by the feminist studies on Gnosjö. Entrepreneurs
are still represented primarily as men on a general level and women are
largely invisible. It is also worth pointing out that the researchers using a
gender perspective have not analysed the male norm in the discourse on
Gnosjö. There is thus a need to, from a feminist perspective, go more into
detail on how the discourse is produced. The results from my analysis of
the Gnosjö discourse are discussed in the following sections, but ?rst I
outline the feminist perspective applied.
182 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONS OF GENDER
I view gender as a social construction, and this means that gender is a his-
torically, geographically and discursively speci?c construct. What is seen as
typically masculine or feminine traits, behaviours or activities hence vary
between di?erent times, places and discourses. Perceiving of gender as a
social construction also means applying a non-essentialist perspective. The
construction of gender is, in my perspective, characterized by the separa-
tion between, and categorization of one masculine and one feminine part.
At the same time as this can be perceived of as a hierarchization between
the masculine and the feminine, men and women are constructed in rela-
tion, or by association, to each other (cf. Hirdman, 1988; Hirdman, 2001).
Holgersson states that the relational construction implies that at the same
time as women are largely invisible, they function as a ‘necessary periphery’
(Holgersson, 1998) for the construction of men.
This de?nition of gender implies the simultaneous construction of the
masculine and the feminine. The masculine is hence the opposite of the
feminine, and the marginalization of the feminine is a prerequisite for
making the masculine superior. Millard (1989) describes woman as a kind
of ‘mirror’ for man, in line with such an argument. This mirroring is neces-
sary in order to construct a male identity. Millard writes ‘. . . woman is
man’s “specularised Other”, her function to re?ect back man’s meaning to
himself, becoming the negative of this re?ection. Woman is thereby forced
into a subjectless position by the patriarchal “logic of the same”.’ (Millard,
1989, p. 159).
The concepts of separation, categorization, hierarchization and associ-
ation also work as analytical concepts in this study of the Gnosjö discourse.
They are used to analyse for example who is associated with the concept of
entrepreneur and who is not. The production of the Gnosjö discourse – and
hence what is seen as interesting and accurate knowledge – is embedded
within gendered power relations. The discourse on Gnosjö can according
to this be seen as being created in a masculinist perspective. A masculinist
perspective is de?ned by Rose (1993) as ‘. . . work which, while claiming to
be exhaustive, forgets about women’s existence and concerns itself only
with the position of men.’ (Rose, 1993, p. 4). According to Haraway (1991),
a masculinist perspective can also be conceptualized as a ‘god trick’ since
it implies a gaze from nowhere, which sees everything. Haraway’s alterna-
tive to the god trick is the embodied creation of situated knowledge. This
means that knowledge is always actively constructed by way of using
certain perspectives and making certain interpretations of what is seen.
This also implies that knowledge is partial.
The Gnosjö discourse in a feminist perspective 183
ENTREPRENEURS AS MEN
The construction of the success image of Gnosjö, created in the context of
discussions and research concerning regional development, has a male bias
since gender is not discussed in the texts. There is also evidence of a separ-
ation between a productive and reproductive sphere, with the productive
sphere in a superior position. The separation between these spheres has for
a long time been criticized by feminist researchers, since what takes place
in the private sphere of reproduction is closely related to the organization
of production (MacKenzie and Rose, 1983).
The explanations of the success of Gnosjö in terms of economic and
regional development pay a lot of attention to the fact that people work
together as a collective or in networks. People are seen as sharing common
values and knowledge, which in turn leads to a successful entrepreneurship,
which then again is seen as a hotbed for new entrepreneurs. It is not every-
day people that these texts have in mind; instead, the persons who are dis-
tinguished in the discourse are the male entrepreneurs.
‘The entrepreneur of Gnosjö loves his business more than his wife and
likes to hear the noise of the machinery. He participates in everything that
takes place in the ?rm where he takes on di?erent roles – from manager to
delivery boy’ (Svenska Dagbladet, 3 October 1996, my translation).
Entrepreneurshipis one of the most obvious denominations of the discourse
on Gnosjö. This quotation takes for granted the masculinity of the entre-
preneur. This is also true for the discourse in general where entrepreneurs,
the members of family businesses and ‘family trees’ are represented as men.
Another example, where entrepreneurs are represented as men, is a text
about an excursion through Gnosjö, which is described as ‘A tour of entre-
preneurial Sweden in two and a half hours’. Forty-four di?erent ?rms are
described in terms of ownership and succession between generations.
Thirty-three men – grandfathers, fathers, sons and sons-in-law – are men-
tioned. In the following quotation some examples of the representations of
family trees consisting of male members are obvious:
The next stop is Bårebo where Malcolm Johansson-Baureus created Bårebo
Industrifabrik in 1883, which later on became Bårebo Metallvarufabrik, one of
the earliest and most important companies in the region. In Bårebo there is also a
?rmcalledSveicowhichwas startedupby SvenJohanssononhis father’s landand
further a?eld there is Davids Metallfabrik AB, grounded by MalcolmJohansson-
Baureus’ son-in-law(24 August 1996, Svenska Dagbladet, my translation).
Even in the discussions on family businesses in the discourse on Gnosjö,
the focus is placed on the sole male entrepreneur. And the family is seen as
a kind of appendage, or extension, to the male head of the family, who is
184 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
regarded as the entrepreneur (developed in Holmquist, 2000). This in turn
constructs family businesses as masculine, since masculinity is associated
with business and femininity with family.
The construction of entrepreneurs as men is also evident in the Gnosjö
discourse when the theme of Gnosjö in historical times and its industrial
development over time is brought forward. In the discourse Gnosjö’s
history and tradition in producing metal wire are central explanations of
the successful entrepreneurship in Gnosjö at present. The weight put on the
history and propositions concerning ‘once upon a time . . .’ serves to
provide the success image of Gnosjö, and Gnosjö as a regional role model,
with authenticity and trustworthiness. The historical ‘roots’ of Gnosjö’s
current success is often represented in the form of a factual text, at the side
of the main text. One example is the following quote:
Already in the beginning of the 18th century sons of farmers from Gnosjö learnt
industrial work in the arms factory in Jönköping. The stony allotments at home
could not feed them, but there was a boom in the arms industry because of the
wars during the reign of Karl XII. The factory, which later became Huskvarna
Arms Factory, needed a workforce. There people from Gnosjö were taught to
become barrel makers, musket makers, bayonet smiths and thread makers. When
the king was shot and the wars ?nally ended many became unemployed. It was
then that smithies, thread makers’ workshops and all sorts of workshops were
built around the farms in Gnosjö. The ?rst spin-o? had taken place. The people
living in Gnosjö became experts on producing metal thread from iron bars which
was carried from the iron factories through the forests by iron movers. From the
iron thread the small business pioneers produced hooks and eyes, hairpins and
hatpins, pins and sewing needles as well as a lot of other things (12 January 1997,
Dagens Nyheter, my translation).
Even though mainly men are represented as promoters of industrial
development in Gnosjö, some women who were active in the production of
metal thread and metal thread products, like hooks and eyes, are visible in
the historical representations of Gnosjö (Eneström, 1912; Johansson,
1972). However, the authors who mention women are not focusing on
them. And the historical theme in the discourse is most often constructed
currently (see Rydén, 1987; Gummesson, 1997). The construction of
Gnosjö’s history is thus as masculinist as are the representations of entre-
preneurs as men.
ENTREPRENEUR – A MASCULINE LABEL
The question is why it seems obvious to represent entrepreneurs in
Gnosjö as men, when statistics indicate that 33 per cent of entrepreneurs
The Gnosjö discourse in a feminist perspective 185
in Gnosjö are women. In real ?gures 165 women are self-employed out of
a total of 500 (2 December 2001, www.gnosjo.se).
49
One of the reasons for
representing entrepreneurs as men is that the concept entrepreneur has
masculine connotations (Sundin, 1988; Sundin and Holmquist, 1989;
Holmquist, 1996; Ahl, 2002). The same goes for phrases like businessman
and small-business owner. The word entrepreneur is a word borrowed from
French, and it has a masculine ending. The feminine ending, –euse, is
seldom, if ever, used in English (or Swedish) (Javefors Grauers, 2000). The
symbolic representation of an entrepreneur is thus a man (Sundin, 1988),
most often running a business in the manufacturing industry (Danilda,
2001). But, at the same time the expression male, masculine or man entre-
preneur is never used. If gender is mentioned in relation to entrepreneurs
or entrepreneurship it concerns women (Javefors Grauers, 2002).
According to Gunnerud Berg (1997) theory and research on entrepre-
neurship are characterized by a ‘gender blindness’, as they have focused on
male-owned enterprises and the male entrepreneur. Empirical studies on
entrepreneurship centred on men have focused on men in an unre?ective
way, which in turn means that theories on entrepreneurship are constructed
in the same vein (Mulholland, 1996, Javefors Grauers, 2000).
This is comparable to Baker et al. (1997), who say that women business
owners are invisible in mass media and scholarly journals in the USA, even
though they have experienced spectacular progress. This is according to
Baker et al. due to androcentrism, which is de?ned as ‘. . . the taken for
granted notion that the traditional male-centered business model is the
“neutral” or “normal” model’ (Baker et al., 1997, p. 222). Another asso-
ciated explanation of why entrepreneurs are represented as men is that male
academics see men and write about them (Sundin and Holmquist, 1989;
Gunnerud Berg, 1997; Lindgren, 2000; Ahl, 2002).
The explanations of why entrepreneurs are primarily seen as men will be
elaborated further, with a discussion concerning entrepreneurship research
stemming from a neo-classical economical perspective. But in the next
section I will discuss how a particular entrepreneurial masculinity is pro-
duced in the Gnosjö discourse.
SELF-MADE MEN
Not only are the entrepreneurs on Gnosjö represented as men in the main-
stream discourse on Gnosjö, but entrepreneurship as practice is also con-
structedas a masculine activity (cf. Attwood, 1995; GreenandCohen, 1995;
Karlsson Stider, 2000). Ahl (2002) argues that the pronoun used to describe
the entrepreneur, in theories on entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship, is
186 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
male. Besides, the way the entrepreneur is described also leads one to think
of a man.
The construction of entrepreneurship as an activity in the Gnosjö dis-
course can thus be said to create a speci?c entrepreneurial masculinity. By
analysing the production of this masculinity I address a signi?cant lacuna
in the literature, namely to make ‘. . . an explicit attempt to develop a gen-
dered analysis of men and their economic class position’ (Hearn and
Collinson, 1994, p. 100).
Characteristics of the entrepreneurs in Gnosjö that frequently occur in
the discourse are a drive for independence, expressed as ‘working for
oneself’, ‘being one’s own employer’ and a drive to be self-employed. This
is also sometimes expressed in terms of being ‘a master of his own’, where
the gender of the entrepreneur is clearly masculine. The nature of entrepren-
eurship in Gnosjö is often described as marked by small-scale enterprise,
slow – but steady – growth, freedom, excitement and hard work. The con-
struction of entrepreneurship as masculine is evident in the following quote:
‘Here [in Gnosjö] there was a chance for the little man to take a step forward,
despite the fact that he came from a so-called poor background. Here, drive,
work and endurance su?ced’ (Wendeberg, 1982, p. 95, my translation).
The aim of masculinity research is to problematize men and masculinities
in order to emphasize that man and men are not gender-neutral concepts
(Connell, 1996). What is constructed as masculine traits ‘in men’ is the focus
of analysis. Research on masculinities generally emphasizes di?erences
between men and masculinities. Holmquist (1997) characterizes research on
female entrepreneurship as still marginal, even though it has attracted more
interest in the last few decades. This is to my understanding also true for the
topic of masculinity and entrepreneurship. Even though the largest part of
research on entrepreneurship is conducted on men, by men as Lindgren
(2000) notes, there is still a lack of studies that make explicit the maleness
of the entrepreneur and the masculinity of entrepreneurship.
One exception is Mulholland (1996) who examines two di?erent entre-
preneurial masculinities: the ‘company man’ and the ‘takeover man’, in the
context of the richest entrepreneurial families in a Midlands county of
England (see also Reed, 1996). The company man is the representation of
an approach to wealth creation which focuses on technical expertise, pride
in the product and company, internal growth, and a low interest in ?nancial
management. The takeover man represents an approach to wealth creation
which emphasizes quick pro?ts achieved through ?nancial manipulation,
and where growth is made possible by way of takeovers. Mulholland com-
pares two entrepreneurs she has interviewed, which represent the two
approaches towards entrepreneurship. One of them is ‘Mr M’, represent-
ing the company man. ‘In some ways Mr M conforms to the model of the
The Gnosjö discourse in a feminist perspective 187
‘self-made’, self-educated, ‘hands-on’ practical man of the post-war indus-
trial sector, whose prior commitment is to product development as opposed
to quick pro?ts’ (Mulholland, 1996).
The entrepreneurial masculinity constructed in the discourse on Gnosjö
is comparable to the concept of the ‘company man’ coined by Mulholland
as it emphasizes slow growth, pride in the company and technical, practi-
cal skills. And the entrepreneur is thus imagined as a ‘self-educated’ and
‘self-made’ man. The construction of entrepreneurship as a way of becom-
ing a ‘self-made’ man is particularly obvious where discussions on employ-
ees who start their own businesses as ‘spin-o?s’ take place in the Gnosjö
discourse, and it is emphasized by the use of terms like ‘self-employment’
and ‘being one’s own boss’. One example of this discursive construction is
a young male entrepreneur who is quoted as saying: ‘I want to build this
[?rm] on my own and not be helped by anyone. It is a lifetime achievement
that I will create’ (25 October 1996, Svenska Dagbladet, my translation).
In Gnosjö the manufacturing industry with production of basic plastic
and metal products dominates. This is a sector of industry traditionally
associated with men (Holmquist, 1996), technical knowledge and skills,
which in turn have masculine connotations (Sundin and Berner 1996;
Mellström, 1999). Hard work and long working hours, which are described
as characteristics of entrepreneurship in Gnosjö, are also associated with
an authentic masculinity, characterized by working away from the private
sphere of the home (Mulholland, 1996; Sundin, 2002).
In the Gnosjö discourse emphasis is also placed on entrepreneurship as a
collective, describedinterms of a network(see JohannissonandGustafsson,
1984; Hjorth and Johannisson, 1998). However, this does not challenge the
interpretation of entrepreneurship as masculine in the discourse, since this
collective is represented as all male. This is explicit in the following quote,
whereas the collective of entrepreneurs is signi?edas a‘unique brotherhood’:
Researcher on networks believes in the unique brotherhood of the district
[Headline]. . . . The vitality of the region of Gnosjö is not to be found in indi-
vidual ?rms, is not explained by solely economic and technical skills, he [Bengt
Johannisson] says. It is entrepreneurship as a collective, also embedded in a par-
ticular life form, which is the explanation (1 October 1996, Svenska Dagbladet,
my translation).
WOMEN – WIVES AND HELPMATES?
The women who are entrepreneurs in Gnosjö are to a large extent invisible
in the Gnosjö discourse. Women are very seldomcalled entrepreneurs, or the
like, in the material analysed. Instead they are called wives of entrepreneurs/
188 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
self-employed, or ‘helpmates’. This is evident in the following quote: ‘But a
range of people have been crucial in the industrial history of the county:
founders of businesses and – managers, innovators and constructors, skilled
workers and employees aiming at opening up their own businesses – and not
the least women as supporters and helpmates in the family-owned busi-
nesses’ (Rydén, 1992, p. 340, my translation). At the same time it is reported
that women work in the ?rms in Gnosjö, both in the production on the shop
?oors as well as with administrative tasks (Wendeberg, 1982).
The women entrepreneurs in Gnosjö are hence invisible in the discourse.
This is a common feature in other contexts as well. Sundin and Holmquist
(1989) argue that women entrepreneurs are invisible. They, in their pioneer
study on women entrepreneurs, say that women who are entrepreneurs are
not a homogenous group, contrary to popular belief. Sundin and
Holmquist therefore conclude that women entrepreneurs are invisible,
varied and adaptive.
A representation of entrepreneurs as men, which in turn makes women
entrepreneurs invisible, can lead to problems for the women in practice.
They can, for instance, be treated in a cavalier and dismissive way and
sectors of business where it is more common for women to have ?rms are
often perceived of as less important and less valuable than ‘male’ industries
like manufacturing (Holmquist, 1996). Mulholland (1996) also notes that
the maleness of the entrepreneur in practice means that the wives of male
entrepreneurs perform unpaid housework as well as direct, but invisible,
labour in the businesses.
MASCULINIST DISCOURSES ON ECONOMY AND
ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Women entrepreneurs in Gnosjö are invisible in the Gnosjö discourse. The
question is why the label entrepreneur has masculine connotations and why
it is primarily associated with men. The answer is the construction of the
entrepreneur as a man, and entrepreneurship as a masculine activity, is
grounded in an economic discourse, which is both scienti?c and more
general. Particularly the scienti?c economic discourse is created within a
neo-classical tradition.
The economic discourse is constructed as what is imagined to be the
economy – production for exchange on a market – and what is not consid-
ered to be part of the economy. McDowell (2000) argues that the economy
is de?ned as what men do, and have traditionally been doing, and that the
economic actor – economic man – from the outset is constructed as mas-
culine. McDowell also states that economic theory is built upon a scienti?c
The Gnosjö discourse in a feminist perspective 189
ideal, which embraces rationality, objectivity and truth. Pålsson Syll
(2002), in a discussion concerning feminist economics, states that econom-
ics has been one of the most male-dominated ?elds of study at the univer-
sities. A male bias has characterized the practitioners as well as the research
interests. Neo-classical economic thought is by feminist economists
described as an expression of a masculine perspective with focus on indi-
viduality, atomism and goal orientation.
According to McDowell: ‘The discursive construction of “the eco-
nomic”, like that of labour power, as neutral, rational, instrumental, and
above all able to be valued in monetary terms, permeates economists’
and economic geographers’ conceptualisations of economic processes’
(McDowell, 2000, p. 236). This construction of the economy, which consti-
tutes the foundation of economic research, implies a dichotomization
between, among other things, public and private, market and non-market,
as McDowell makes explicit (see also Nelson, 1993): ‘This devaluation of
the feminine and the valorisation of the masculine attributes lies behind the
social construction of economics . . .’ (McDowell, 2000, p. 499). These
dualisms are hence not gender neutral, but express what is considered to be
masculine or feminine.
The dichotomization between the masculine and feminine and the con-
struction of these hierarchical dualisms have deeply rooted traditions.
Nelson (1996) also argues that what is de?ned as economics is associated
with masculinity, and this is due to the fact that economics is de?ned as
‘science’, which in turn is considered as masculine. The masculine side of
the gendered dichotomy, associated with science, is constructed as reason
or mind, while the feminine side is de?ned as nature and body.
The construction of this dichotomous view of science and nature, mas-
culine and feminine, is rooted in the formation of the ideals of Western
modern science which arose during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The de?nition of economics is thus embedded in an ideal view of modern
science where reason is seen as separated from non-reason, and mind from
nature and body. The dichotomization between two poles, and the domina-
tion of the masculine over the feminine, is thus the foundation of the con-
struction of economics. In this vein Lloyd (1993) states that it is possible to
argue that the construction of the economy as masculine is made in asso-
ciation with the construction of Western reason as masculine, and in con-
nection with: ‘. . . the maleness of the man of reason’ (Lloyd, 1993, p. xviii).
In this perspective reason, and hence economics, is de?ned in opposition to
what is perceived of as feminine.
In the economic discourse economic man is regarded as the prototype of
economic behaviour. The economic man is thus an ideal which lies implicitly
in the construction of entrepreneurs and small-business owners. The focus
190 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
of entrepreneurial research is, according to Holmquist (2002), the entre-
preneur as an individual, as well as this individual’s qualities. Individuality
is one of the traits typical of economic man, along with autonomy. And
according to Nelson (1996) economic man is imagined as acting individu-
ally and rationally so as to be pro?t-maximizing and competitive. She also
states that individuality, activity and competition are characteristics
identi?ed with masculinity.
The entrepreneurs in the discourse on Gnosjö cannot be seen as con-
structed in direct relation to the ideal of economic man, but nevertheless
entrepreneurs are constructed as men engaged in masculine activities. This
is due to the associations between the ideal of the economic man in an eco-
nomic discourse and a ‘discourse on entrepreneurship’ .
The association between the economic discourse and an ‘entrepreneurial
discourse’ is emphasized by Ahl (2002, p. 34), Landström (2000), Lindgren
(2000, p. 79) and in the introduction to The Blackwell Handbook of
Entrepreneurship (Sexton and Landström, 2000). They all point to the fact
that the term entrepreneur was coined by the French economist Cantillon
who de?ned the entrepreneur as ‘. . . someone who engages in exchanges for
pro?t and exercises business judgment in the face of uncertainty’ (Ahl, 2002,
p. 34).
Hjorth (2001) argues that during the 1990s there has been a shift in the
discussions on entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship, because the interest in
these subjects has increased signi?cantly. The entrepreneur constructed in
what Hjorth terms the enterprise discourse is associated with economic
man, since interest is taken to rule over passion. Economic man thus
‘crowds out’ other forms of humans. Hjorth cites Du Gay: ‘For many com-
mentators, the growing dominance of the discourse of enterprise heralds
the return of Adam Smith’s famous homo oeconomicus or “economic
man”at the centre stage of history’ (Hjorth, 2001, p. 54, cites Du Gay, 1997,
p. 301).
Thus there are strong, but often implicit, connections between the mas-
culine ideal-type economic man and the construction of entrepreneurs as
men. This is also one of the reasons why entrepreneurs in the discourse
on Gnosjö are represented as men and why entrepreneurship is con-
structed as a speci?c formof masculinity in the discourse. Amore general
and popular view of the entrepreneur as man, which cannot be seen as
directly mirroring the scienti?c discourse but focusing on men all the
same, is also one explanation of the construction of a masculinist dis-
course on Gnosjö.
The Gnosjö discourse in a feminist perspective 191
CONCLUSIONS
The purpose of this chapter has been to apply a feminist perspective and
critically examine how gender is represented in the Gnosjö discourse. I have
through this analysis made the implicit gendered perspective of the Gnosjö
discourse explicit. Gender is, in the discourse on Gnosjö, represented
through a separation between and categorization of one feminine and one
masculine part. This gender construction also entails a hierarchization
between the masculine and feminine, men and women, which at the same
time means that the masculine and feminine are constructed in relations to
each other. I have in the analysis of the Gnosjö discourse exposed the fact
that men are put in a superior position, primarily through representing
entrepreneurs as men. The categories men and women are thereby separ-
ated. Men are categorized as entrepreneurs, while women are categorized
as wives of entrepreneurs or ‘helpmates’. This also implies that women
function as a necessary periphery or mirror for the hierarchization of men,
put in a superior position.
I have discussed how discourses are related to power, and the analysis
demonstrates that power works through constructing a masculinist dis-
course. The discourse on Gnosjö is hence from a feminist perspective mas-
culinist since it makes women invisible. The discourse has a certain logic for
what is included – and seen as interesting and important knowledge – and
what is excluded. I question the fact that the discourse is commonly
regarded as accurate and exhaustive knowledge about entrepreneurs and
entrepreneurship in Gnosjö, since it excludes statements on one third of the
entrepreneurs – women.
Through drawing attention to the construction of entrepreneurs as men
in the Gnosjö discourse I also question how Gnosjö is put forward as a role
model for other Swedish regions and municipalities, since the contribution
of women entrepreneurs to the region’s prosperity and economic growth is
to a large extent excluded. The accuracy of the explanations and experi-
ences drawn on studies on Gnosjö are thus highly questionable.
Through the critical feminist examination of the Gnosjö discourse I have
contributed to the discursive move away from the mainstream, masculinist
image of Gnosjö (see also Wendeberg, 1982; Hedlund, 1997; Forsberg,
1997; Hedlund 1998; Johansson, 2000). The research ?ndings in this
chapter point to the fact that a feminist perspective is necessary in studies
on entrepreneurship in order to avoid taking a male norm for granted and
in order to make women entrepreneurs visible. A feminist perspective is also
of importance in order to critically examine the masculine norm in detail.
This conclusion parallels what Calás and Smircich (1996) argue concern-
ing organization studies. They write: ‘. . . by using feminist theories as con-
192 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
ceptual lenses, we believe a [sic] more inclusive organization studies can be
created’ (Calás and Smircich, 1996, p. 218).
This implies more than ‘add women and stir’ according to Pringle (1989)
and Nelson (1993), since it demands a challenge of the existing framework
of organization studies and economics. It is thus not primarily a question
of adding women as a category in quantitative investigations which is
sought for, but rather a qualitative shift away from a masculinist discourse
in research on entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship.
The Gnosjö discourse in a feminist perspective 193
10. Quilting a feminist map to guide
the study of women entrepreneurs
Kathryn Campbell
INTRODUCTION
The motive for metaphor, according to Wallace Stevens, is a desire to associate,
and ?nally to identify, the human mind with what goes on outside it, because the
only genuine joy you can have is in those rare moments when you feel that
although we may know in part, as Paul says, we are also a part of what we know
(Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination, 1963, p. 11).
Metaphors alter and expand our frame of reference. Metaphors oblige us
to shift from the ‘language of practical skills or knowledge’ (Frye, 1963, p.
16) to the ‘language of imagination . . . [that has] . . . the power of construct-
ing possible models of human experience’ (Frye, 1963, p. 5). And, as
alluded to in the opening quotation, the language of imagination ‘leads us
toward the regaining of identity’ (Frye, 1963, p. 21). Metaphors, therefore,
are ideally suited to the study of women entrepreneurs, a lightly charted
research terrain with much to be discovered and recovered.
At best, women entrepreneurs have been treated as a minority,
50
special-
interest topic. In a survey of the period 1977 to 1989, Candida Brush ‘found
only 45 articles published about women small-business owners/entrepre-
neurs’, with 13 of those published in professional journals (Moore et al.,
1992, pp. 102–103). More recently, a 2001 survey of seven leading entre-
preneurship journals, covering the period 1980 to 2000, reported equally
dismal results: 1624 articles were reviewed of which a mere 79 (4.9%) could
be classi?ed as ‘gender/minority conversations’ (Meeks et al., 2001). The
?eld of economics is deeply complicit in this misdirection.
51
Through the
arbitrary de?nition of labour as ‘only those activities that produce surplus
value’ (Waring, 1990, p. 27), domestic and subsistence labour are discred-
ited (Boserup, [1960] 1989; Nelson, 1996). This macroeconomic value judg-
ment points the ?eld of entrepreneurship towards the study of full time,
growth-oriented technology-based global enterprises, a research bias that
excludes many entrepreneurial women who operate in other areas of the
economy (Campbell, 1994).
194
At worst, women’s entrepreneurial voices have been drowned out by the
dominant, ‘male-stream’ (O’Brien, 1976) narrative. For years, feminist
scholars in many academic disciplines have worked to deconstruct these
‘Master Narratives . . . [which] . . . seek to preserve the social order while
obscuring the privileged stances/investments of writers’ (Fine, 1994, p. 73).
Exposing/deconstructing these ‘Master Narratives’ reveals their protective
defences, a tightly woven constellation of self-reinforcing philosophies,
ontologies and ‘isms’
52
buttressed by claims to ‘scienti?c neutrality, univer-
sal truths and researcher dispassion’ (Fine, 1994, p. 71). Feminists are not
alone in their struggle to break free of these ‘Master Narratives’. In his rev-
olutionary treatise, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire counsels class
resistance to a ‘thematic universe . . . [which is] . . . a complex of ideas,
hopes, doubts, values and challenges in dialectical interaction with their
opposites’ (Freire, 1968, pp. 91–92). Indigenous peoples also struggle
against ‘the Western discourse about the Other . . . to ensure that research
with indigenous peoples can be more respectful, ethical, sympathetic and
useful’ (Smith, 1999, pp. 2 and 9). Smith advocates for the millions of indig-
enous peoples who are working ‘to claim a space in which to develop a sense
of authentic humanity’ (Smith, 1999, p. 23). By comparison, the Western
feminist agenda of inclusion may seem a modest struggle but it shares the
same core goals of identity, respect and self-representation.
As a ?rst step towards emancipation of entrepreneurship research,
Kuhnian ‘normal science’ is set as a proxy for these ‘Master Narratives’ and
a critique of Kuhn’s workuncloaks some of the mythology surrounding con-
ventional scholarly activity. Then, metaphor or the ‘language of imagina-
tion’ is introduced to showhowwe might access our powers to vision what is
possible. In particular, quilts and quilting are used in various direct and
metaphorical constructs tothinkabout what is neededinthe study of women
entrepreneurs. Quilter and successful entrepreneur Wendy Lewington
Coulter views her work and her life in just such metaphorical terms:
I see the quilt as a metaphor for the creative resourcefulness necessary to survive
as a woman in a patriarchal system. In quiltmaking, as in our lives, we are piecing
together fragments and remnants in an attempt to form an integrated whole.
(Wendy Lewington Coulter, in Hunt, 1996, p. 18).
Here quilting is interpreted as a rebuilding, restorative process for
women as we learn to ‘talk back’ (hooks, 1989) and to ‘research back’
(Smith, 1999, p. 7). Throughout the chapter various interpretative frame-
works will emerge: quilts as artistic expression for silenced women; quilts
as maps; quilting as social protest; and quilting as community building for
women. In all these incarnations, quilts and the process of their creation are
intimately linked with women’s work and women’s self-representation.
Quilting a feminist map 195
To extend the emancipation project, the merits of paradigm pluralism
and gender-sensitive rhetorical methodologies are discussed. Freed from
the normative constraints of the ‘Master Narratives’, we can more fully
understand and appropriately document the substantial contributions of
entrepreneurial women. To ground the ensuing discussion, the working
de?nition of feminism adopted in the chapter is brie?y explicated.
A BRIEF COMMENT ABOUT FEMINISM
I myself have never been able to ?nd out precisely what feminism is: I only know
that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that di?erentiate me
from a doormat (Rebecca West, Clarion, 14 November 1913 in Foss et al. (1999),
p. 2).
Feminism de?es easy de?nition as it is ‘not a monolithic ideology’ (Tong,
1998, p. 1) and readily embraces a multiplicity of views. In 1983 Alison
Jaggar discussed four feminist philosophies: liberal, traditional Marxist,
radical, and socialist. The debates have ?ourished and, more recently,
Rosemarie Tong (1998) delineated 12 distinct categories of feminist
thought: liberal, radical-libertarian, radical-cultural, Marxist, socialist,
psychoanalytic, existential, postmodern, gender, multicultural, global, and
eco-feminism. Such diversity and its attendant controversies are both
healthy and confusing. As we craft multiple narratives about women’s work
experiences there might be some risk of self-destructive factionalism. In
fact, a shared value system connects these many feminisms.
Gloria Anzaldua looks beyond the innumerable di?erences of women’s
experiences and sees healing at the heart of feminist initiatives. ‘Though the
particulars of each woman’s responding di?er, though their values, political
views, and color of their skins di?er, though some pull in di?erent direc-
tions, there is a common movement: The reaching out to heal’ [sic] (Foss et
al., 1999, p. 111). Virginia Olesen recognizes that need for healing and
stresses the importance of action to change the power structure. For her the
di?erent feminisms ‘share the outlook that it is important to center and
make problematic women’s diverse situations and the institutions and
frames that in?uence those situations, and then to refer the examination of
that problematic to theoretical, policy, or action frameworks in the interest
of realizing social justice for women’ (Olesen, 1994, p. 158). Accordingly I
propose that feminism is rooted in three beliefs: the right of each and every
woman to full humanity (the refusal to be a doormat); a commitment to act
for oneself and for all women (an obligation to the collective); and the goal
of social justice (action for healing/systemic change). From those core prin-
ciples, the various feminist groups work in distinct, but organically con-
196 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
nected ways, to accomplish collective bene?t for all women. However, when
we try to integrate those fundamental feminist beliefs into ‘male-stream’
research, we are confounded by a system of largely unexplained values,
known now to feminists as the ‘Master Narratives’ and represented here by
Kuhn’s ‘normal science’.
DECONSTRUCTING ‘NORMAL SCIENCE’
Deconstruction of the culture and assumptions of ‘normal science’ and its
companion ‘isms’ is therefore pivotal to the enfranchisement of feminist
knowledge and to a full and comprehensive writing of women’s entrepre-
neurial history. Although Thomas Kuhn does not bear personal or exclu-
sive culpability for the pervasiveness of the ‘male-stream’ worldview, his
much quoted text The Structure of Scienti?c Revolutions idealizes ‘normal
science’. He dichotomizes the research world
53
so that ‘normal science’ is
ascribed valued attributes and all other scholarly disciplines are devalued.
Entrepreneurship research is particularly vulnerable as it strains against its
ancestral roots in economics, psychology and sociology and tries to estab-
lish its own scholarly credentials. The apparent legitimacy of ‘normal
science’ is quite seductive for this young discipline.
However, despite its self-ascribed designation, ‘normal science’ is far from
normal. It is a narrowly circumscribed worldview, endorsed by a very small
cadre of self-selecting individuals, concerned with matters entirely of their
own devising, accountable only to their peers. ‘Normal science’ exists in the
arcane realmof laboratory experiments, of dissection and measurement, of
prediction and hypothesis testing. ‘Normal science’ depends upon quantita-
tive research in which methods of knowledge accumulation are codi?ed and
rigidly monitored. Large sample sizes, quantitative data sets, and complex
statistical analyses are assumed to be rational and bias-free. Social and cul-
tural contexts are stripped away and ignored in search of scienti?c objectiv-
ity. Data irregularities are statistically smoothed to facilitate comparability
across studies; emergent trends and radical outliers are eliminated in this
homogenization process. In ‘normal science’, knowledge, once validated by
the academic community, is elevated to sacred text, literally and metaphori-
cally. Then there follows a radical inversion of arti?ce and reality, in which
‘normal science’ becomes reality and nature the threat. Divergent ideas,
which challenge the sacred text, are aggressively discredited until such time
as there is a ‘revolutionary’ change that overthrows the oldparadigm. At that
point all ‘true’ scientists move to the new paradigm; the community closes
inward on the study of ‘esoteric’ problems emerging fromthe newparadigm;
and the cycle begins anewas the systemonce again goes into defensive mode.
Quilting a feminist map 197
From a feminist research perspective, it is dangerous to aspire to paradig-
matic or pre-paradigm stature for entrepreneurship research if such a stance
presumes an unquestioning acceptance of all the underlying assump-
tions/values and techniques of ‘normal science’. As well, espousing one
ordained entrepreneurship paradigm is a regressive move entirely unaccept-
able to feminist researchers who are already deeply concerned about the lack
of relevant data about women entrepreneurs. Jesse Bernard urges us to resist
the alienating ‘machismo element’
54
endemic in ‘agentic research’ and rec-
ommends instead a ‘communal approach’ (Bernard, [1973] 1998, p. 1 l). In
fact, many aspects of ‘normal science’ are antithetical to the feminist
research agenda and the so-called ‘scienti?c revolutions’ via ‘paradigm
shifts’ are not su?ciently revolutionary to ensure the admission of more
woman-centred, gender-sensitive research. Instead, feminist researchers rec-
ommend paradigm pluralism as a sympathetic enactment of feminist prin-
ciples. This recommendation honours the heritage of women’s work as
portrayed in quilts and its attendant quilting culture.
SOME THOUGHTS ON QUILTS AND QUILTING
Every great quilt, whether it be a patchwork, appliqué, or strip quilt, is a poten-
tial Rosetta stone. Quilts represent one of the most highly evolved systems of
writing in the New World. Every combination of colors, every juxtaposition or
intersection of line and form, every pattern, traditional or idiosyncratic, con-
tains data that can be imparted in some form or another to anyone (Tobin and
Dobard, 2000, pp. 8–9, quoting Bill Arnett).
Quilts have a long and storied history
55
in many cultures. One thread of the
North American story has its origin in Africa. Early African textile works
were used to encode cultural knowledge; history, religious beliefs and cul-
tural a?airs were chronicled through abstract, ?gurative and geometric
designs that became a complex visual language (Tobin and Dobard, 2000).
Textiles were a ‘fabric griot’.
56
When the Black slaves were transported to
the New World, they adapted the quilting medium to carry a new cultural
message, overt incitement to covert resistance. Patterns and colours and
stitching were messages and maps to communicate plans for escape from
enslavement. These messages, stitched into everyday objects so famil-
iar/homely that they were rendered invisible to the slave owners, were rou-
tinely ‘hidden in plain view’, that is, hung out on the line for all to see! The
quilt thus became a ‘visual metaphor for perseverance and continuity’
(Tobin and Dobard, 2000, p. 159).
The creative power of the arts continues to play a crucial role in identity
formation and self-expression for groups outside the mainstream. Closely
198 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
mirroring Frye’s ?ne theorizing about the language of imagination, Black
feminist bell hooks agrees that ‘art occupies a radical place in the freedom
struggle precisely because it provides a means for imagining new possibili-
ties; it serves as the foundation for emerging visions’ (Foss et al., 1999, p.
90). And other oppressed groups share this tradition of education, cultural
cohesion and resistance through art. Alice Olsen Williams, an Aboriginal
artist of some renown, comments that quilting has become for her a multi-
dimensional project: ‘I could use quilting as a way of teaching our lan-
guage, have it as a credit course, and at the same time use it as a medium
for political analysis and social awareness, where women get together and
talk about what we can do about the inequities of this society’ (Hunt, 1996,
p. 209).
Denied access to educational and scholarly opportunities, women have
historically used the arts as a venue through which to challenge their intel-
lectual and rhetorical alienation (Foss et al., 1999; Tong, 1998).
Women’s literary voices, successfully marginalized and trivialized by the domi-
nant male establishment, nevertheless survived. The voices of anonymous
women were present as a steady undercurrent in the oral tradition, in folksong
and nursery rhymes, tales of powerful witches and good fairies. In stitchery,
embroidery, and quilting women’s artistic creativity expressed an alternate
vision. In letters, diaries, prayers, and songs the symbol-making force of
women’s creativity pulsed and persisted (Lerner, 1986, p. 226).
And the quilt holds a special place in this unconventional rhetorical tra-
dition. Simple in concept but complex in application, a quilt is de?ned by
three essential elements: a decorative surface comprised of many small
pieces of fabric; an interior warmth-creating batting/wadding; and a stitch-
ing plan to hold all the parts together. These elements, individually and
jointly, model the attributes of good feminist research.
The invisible portion of the quilt, the batting, determines its ultimate
utility. A quilt with good batting will keep the user warm and, accordingly,
will be much treasured by present and future owners. As discussed, femi-
nism is infused with core values that guide the research agenda. These
values help to ensure that feminist research, like a good quilt, serves a life-
a?rming, life-enhancing purpose. The decorative quilt top honours kal-
eidoscopic pluralism, a metaphor that parallels Rosemarie Tong’s thesis
of kaleidoscopic feminism
57
(Tong, 1998). Each quilt top is an amalgam of
many small, colourful pieces, and no two quilts are the same. Artistic tra-
ditions may in?uence the design of an individual quilt but, ?nally, all quilts
are original and are valued for that originality. The various feminist move-
ments – colourful, distinctive and ever-changing – collectively delineate a
richly patterned quilt top. Stitching holds the quilt components together
Quilting a feminist map 199
and, in that joining, creates joint and shared meaning. The overt/covert
messages of the Black American slaves are a poignant example of that
meaning/messaging power. Around the world women’s groups quilt mes-
sages of protest against abuse and poverty, against loneliness and isolation,
and against environmental degradation. Quilts are tangible forms of resis-
tance against racism, sexism and misogyny and the quilting process is a
structured site of resistance as women come together in common cause. Yet
quilting is simultaneously a celebration of life, of artistry, of beauty, of
caring and of possibility.
Quilting is most often a communal, non-competitive process. It is a
respectful culture that fosters inclusivity and egalitarianism; the skilled
craftswoman guides and assists the novice. In Canada, pioneer women met
together in ‘quilting bees’, ostensibly to share in and expedite the substan-
tial labour necessary to complete a quilt. That tradition continues, testa-
ment to the pleasure derived from a shared work experience and, in the
context of the protest quilt, con?rmation of the courage and determination
that grows out of collective engagement.
Quilting embodies the art and science of synthesis. Hundreds of small
pieces of cloth are joined by millions of tiny stitches, a process akin to the
ecofeminist project of ‘reweaving of the world’ (Mies and Shiva, 1993, p.
6). As well, the synthesis of quilting is an organic process that transforms
‘simple substances into complex materials’ (Montagu, 1999, p. 143), a
process facilitated by the mutuality and interdependence of multivariate
elements. Quilting achieves synthesis on many planes: the joining of many
small, fragile pieces of material; the ecological reuse of old materials; the
complex harmony of the many elements; the blending of function and
beauty; the tenacious strength and durability of multi-layered work; the
stitching of a passionate symbolic language system; and the celebration of
collective e?ort for communal gain. The shifting kaleidoscope pieces
suggest an in?nite number of possible patterns, all radiant with possibility,
which brings us to the crux of the dispute between ‘normal science’ and
feminist philosophy. What kind of truth are we seeking?
ONE TRUTH OR MULTIPLE TRUTHS: THE MERITS
OF PARADIGM PLURALISM
Although devoted to scienti?c rationality and objectivity, Kuhn’s paradig-
matic ‘normal science’ does not actually promise a ?xed, universal truth.
58
Explicitly, Kuhn theorizes sustained community consensus around one
agreed truth which reigns supreme until overthrown by a new agreed truth,
in other words individual sequential truths. The truth of the prevailing
200 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
paradigm is validated by hierarchical supremacy; inherent merit alone is
not su?cient.
If there is no ?xed, universal truth, an alternative model of paradigm
pluralism, that is, the non-hierarchical co-existence of multiple truths at
any one time, is as legitimate as Kuhn’s thesis of sequential truths. Having
su?ered under patriarchal hierarchies, feminist researchers repudiate
systems that require a transcendent authority (Reinharz, 1992), striving
instead for an egalitarian world that respects evolutionary intellectual bio-
diversity. Feminism ‘is rooted in choice and self-determination and does
not prescribe one “o?cial” position that feminists must hold. Feminism
also is an evolving process that necessarily changes as conditions in the
world change and as feminists develop new understandings’ (Foss et al.,
1999, p. 3). Paradigm pluralism honours this worldview.
There is much value in pluralism. Intense creativity is generated in the
transcendence of di?erences (Mies and Shiva, 1993). Thought processes
are altered. A ‘pluralistic mode . . . [shifts us]. . out of habitual formations;
from convergent thinking, analytical reasoning that tends to use rational-
ity to move toward a single goal (a Western mode), to divergent thinking,
characterized by movement away from set patterns and goals and toward a
more whole perspective, one that includes rather than excludes’ (Foss et al.,
1999, p. l 14 quoting Anzaldua (1990) Making Face, p. 379).
Women and other ‘minorities’ who live on the margins of patriarchal
society have a unique capacity to develop a pluralistic research agenda, a
capacity beautifully articulated by Black feminist bell hooks (hooks, 1984).
hooks inverts the stereotypical weaknesses of the marginalized, arguing
that those deemed to be at the margin of society have an integral and privi-
leged perspective on their own existence, a ‘passion of experience’ (Foss et
al., 1999, p. 83) and radical insights about those at the centre. Discourse
from the margins can instruct and illuminate. In fact, with improved knowl-
edge about women and other ‘minority’ entrepreneurs, the ?eld of entre-
preneurship research, may experience multiple ‘paradigm shifts’, a prospect
facilitated by recent research developments.
MULTIPLE FEMINIST RESEARCH
METHODOLOGIES: PARADIGM PLURALISM IN
ACTION
The convergence of two discrete research events o?ers timely momentum
in the study of women entrepreneurs. The growing appreciation for a diver-
sity of feminist philosophies, energized by an expanding roster of innova-
tive research methods, promises both scholarly rigour and intricate texture,
Quilting a feminist map 201
rather like the steadying warp threads and the patterning woof threads of
woven material.
59
Egon Guba and Yvonna Lincoln (1994) delineate a con-
tinuum of methodologies [positivism . . . post-positivism . . . critical theory
. . . constructivism] that serve as warp threads upon which can be woven
various feminist patterns to capture the many facets of entrepreneurial
women. To illustrate some of these multiple truths, the basic elements of
three feminisms–empiricist (status quo), standpoint (radical) and ecofem-
inist (revolutionary) – are brie?y described and their relevance to particu-
lar entrepreneurial agendas discussed.
Feminist Empiricism
Much of the 1960s writing of the ‘second-wave’ feminist movement in
North America was of the revisionist, ‘add women and stir’ variety (Olesen,
1994, p. 159), situated within the liberal feminist and early feminist empiri-
cist tradition. These feminists wrote within the positivist tradition, advo-
cating mainly for adjustments to the legal and educational systems to
eliminate sex discrimination. They were ‘reformists rather than revolution-
aries: male was the paradigm of human nature: their concern was to dem-
onstrate that women were as fully human as men’ (Calás and Smircich,
1996, p. 222). Today, ‘empiricist feminists are aligned with a postpositivist
language of validity, reliability, [and] credibility’ (Denzin and Lincoln,
1994b, p. 101). The ‘add women and stir’ campaign, which has been domi-
nated by middle-class white women, is credited with consciousness-raising
and structural accommodation and it continues as a research orientation
for feminist researchers who advocate the bene?ts of structural adjustment.
Entrepreneurship research using a feminist empiricist methodology typi-
cally will choose to replicate prevailing/sanctioned research topics and will
use quantitative techniques in order to facilitate comparative analyses and
policy development. Large sample sizes and standardized methodologies
lend weight and credibility to policy formulations and the ensuing work has
made valuable contributions topublic awareness of women’s entrepreneurial
achievements. Generally, their work has brought much-respected scholarly
rigour to the study of women entrepreneurs. Working within mainstream
parameters, feminist empiricists have secured an important beachhead and,
from that vantage point, they are well positioned to press for more institu-
tional support for gender-inclusive research.
Feminist Standpoint
Canadian sociologist Dorothy Smith de?nitively endorsed paradigm plu-
ralism with her 1979 theorizing of the ‘feminist standpoint’. Renouncing
202 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
the canons of positivism, standpoint feminism valorizes the lived experi-
ence of every woman and privileges each woman as rhetor of her own expe-
riences. In this construct, knowledge is situated and contextualized. And as
argued by bell hooks in her margin-and-centre analogy, feminist stand-
point knowledge will provide ‘the basis for a more comprehensive represen-
tation of reality than the standpoint of men’ (Jaggar, 1983,p. 385).
The articulation of feminist standpoint knowledge works with a new
de?nition of rhetoric and the rhetorical process. Instead of the classical
rhetorical attributes of public persuasion via formal declamation, feminist
rhetorical theory recognizes ‘rhetoric as any kind of human symbol use
that functions in any realm’, enacted by anyone, for the purpose not of per-
suasion but of understanding (Foss et al., 1999, pp. 6–7). The everyday
quality and accessibility of feminist standpoint research are in marked
contrast to Kuhn’s enthusiasm for the ‘esoteric’.
60
Here, a quilt is not just
a metaphor for protest but may itself be a rhetorical protest (Williams,
1994).
Entrepreneurship research developed upon this foundation will be
radical in its rejection of grand theories in favour of particularized and
idiosyncratic knowing. Standpoint feminism provides welcome space for
all manner of entrepreneurial diversities. Yet those diversities exist respect-
fully, with a tolerance forged in their common ancestry of exclusion from
the mainstream (Smith, 1979). Additionally, every entrepreneurial woman
has knowledge about entrepreneurship and is accorded the stature of
rhetor of her knowledge. Thus, the researcher and researched are brought
together as the form and substance of the emergent knowledge are con-
trolled by the woman entrepreneur rather than the researcher.
Ecofeminism
Ecofeminism is a comparatively new movement made powerful by its blend-
ing of multiple social action agendas. It operates at the intersection of
‘spheres of feminism, indigenous knowledge, and appropriate science,
development, and technology’ (Wells and Wirth, 1997, p. 304). Ecofeminism
is ‘a vision of an alternative society, based not on the model of growth-ori-
ented industrialism and consumerism but close to what we call the subsis-
tence perspective’ (Mies and Shiva, 1993, p. 4). It rejects the Western
Enlightenment philosophy that ‘Man’s freedom and happiness depend on an
ongoing process of emancipation from nature, on independence from, and
dominance over natural processes by the power of reason and rationality’
(Mies and Shiva, 1993, p. 6). Of all the feminisms, ecofeminism is the most
deeply critical of ‘normal science’ and of the capitalist economic system
with their shared agenda of subordinating nature to ‘man’s’ will.
Quilting a feminist map 203
Adoption of the ecofeminist perspective, which ‘locates production and
consumption within the context of regeneration’ (Shiva, 1993, p. 33),
requires a reconceptualization of entrepreneurship and economic innova-
tion. Ecofeminist entrepreneurship is therefore revolutionary in its import.
Here, entrepreneurship is aligned with life, regeneration and coexistence
with nature. The burgeoning interest in microenterprise and sustainable
enterprise supports this new conceptualization of entrepreneurship. But
ecofeminism’s revolutionary potential implicates more than knowledge
de?nition; the very institutional processes of knowledge accreditation and
the legitimacy of conventional disciplinary boundaries are called into ques-
tion. Although historically marginalized fromformal knowledge structures,
women have invaluable indigenous knowledge to o?er to a sustainable entre-
preneurial worldview (Mies and Shiva, 1993), knowledge derived from our
multiple roles as primary food producers, health care providers, shelter
builders, managers of subsistence activities and ‘petty traders’ (Boserup,
[1960] 1989).
Freed from the constraints of ‘normal science’, the creative possibilities
of these various feminist philosophies can begin to ?ourish. To further the
development of woman-centred entrepreneurship research, critical atten-
tion now turns to the role of rhetoric in scholarly discourse.
TRANSFORMATIVE RHETORICAL STRATEGIES TO
CRAFT RESEARCH SYMPATHETIC TO WOMAN
ENTREPRENEURS
As noted earlier, the reformulation of rhetoric and rhetorical processes
creates intellectual and emotional space within which new theory can
emerge and some recommended strategies are brie?y discussed.
Emotion and Spirituality
Classical rhetorical narratives are expected to be formal and dispassion-
ate, ?at and utilitarian, wedded to a ‘language of practical sense’ (Frye,
1963, p. 16). With information dispersion and persuasion as key rhetorical
functions, the maintenance of prevailing power hierarchies takes prece-
dence over emotional and spiritual connection. As such, arti?ce denies
reality. Entrepreneurs are driven by a legion of emotions but conventional
entrepreneurship research lacks emotional ballast. Cartesian dualism,
mind over emotions, has stripped entrepreneurial research of an essential
element/ingredient. Self-authored and/or verbatim documentation can
help to restore entrepreneurial passion and energy to the research record
204 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
thereby better pro?ling the entrepreneurial spirit that has been neutered/
eviscerated by the ‘chaste passion’ (Mies, 1993, p. 45) of ‘normal science’.
As well, inspiration can be drawn from the action research of Aboriginal
peoples as they work to deconstruct the adverse e?ects of colonialism and
reinscribe spirituality into their history. In the ‘rewriting and rerighting’ of
Aboriginal history (Smith, 1999, p. 28), the community expects the
researcher to have a spiritual perspective, asking of the researcher, ‘Who
owns the research? Whose interests does it serve? Is her spirit clear? Does
she have a good heart?’ (Smith, 1999, p. 10). Spirituality is integral to the
ecofeminist worldview; it ‘lies in the rediscovery of the sacredness of life
. . . [it is a quality] . . . in everyday life, in our work, in the things that sur-
round us’ (Mies and Shiva, 1993, pp. 17–18). The inclusion of emotional-
ity and spirituality in entrepreneurship research begins the recovery of
authenticity of voice.
Authentic Voice
When an interview is conducted as an unstructured, non-judgmental, col-
laborative dialogue, the interviewee is accorded the respect mandated by
the feminist standpoint methodology. The purpose of such an interview is
to document the woman’s knowledge, in her words, with careful note of the
context in which she lives. Data accumulation, rather than theory formula-
tion/con?rmation, is the primary task, with the epistemological goal of
learning from the interviewee. In fact, when the interviewer strives for egali-
tarian connectedness rather than control, the prospects of hearing orig-
inal data and of fostering unbidden theory formation are considerably
enhanced. The ideal outcome is a unique, handwoven story.
The feminist oral history has a larger scope than the standard interview
and invites a woman to re?ect upon her life and to o?er her perspective on
historical events. As women have seldom had the opportunity for ?rst-
person narratives, we may employ stories, apparent digressions and non-
chronological anecdotes to make sense of our experiences. While the oral
traditions of Aboriginal peoples are now carefully studied, women’s story-
telling is more often devalued as gossip. Biographies and autobiographies
are, therefore, critical to the rebuilding of the historical record as written
a?rmation of our place in history. The popularity of mini-biographies of
women entrepreneurs may re?ect women’s inexperience in re?ecting at
length about our work or it might signal the researcher’s lack of skill at
asking insightful ‘non-questions’. These works are nonetheless useful ?rst
steps in the recovery of women entrepreneurs into the written record
because, in both formats, a woman is the rhetor of her own experience and
she is made visible by documenting her voice and her ideas. These methods
Quilting a feminist map 205
adhere to the feminist standpoint principle of research for women rather
than study of women and meet the spiritual/ethical standard promoted by
Aboriginal action research.
Asking ‘Non-Questions’
The odd but enlightening rhetorical strategy of asking ‘non-questions’ can
assist the researcher in narrative development. ‘Non-questions are those
which so fundamentally challenge or question the philosophical structure
of a society or civilization (in this case of patriarchy) that they cannot be
understood as questions at all by those who work entirely within an estab-
lished tradition of thought’ (Vickers, 1989, p. 38).
In a recent conference paper titled, ‘Where are all the mother/daughter
business partnerships?’, I posed a non-question as the line of inquiry
exposed the inadequacy of conventional entrepreneurship research and
proposed the accumulation of qualitative data of marginal interest to the
scholarly elite (Campbell, 2001). To recover women’s entrepreneurial
accomplishments into economic history, research agendas must do more
than simply replicate standardized topics and methods since the
identi?cation of ‘exclusions, erasures, and missing information’ (Reinharz,
1992, p. 162) requires the asking of previously unasked questions. A new
sociological specialty, the ‘sociology of the lack of knowledge’,
61
(Reinharz, 1992, p. 248) can be helpful in this process. The words used to
phrase these ‘non-questions’ also merit attention.
New Words and New Meanings
Mary Daly’s work exempli?es another empowering rhetorical option, ‘the
power to name’ (Daly, 1973, p. 8), the right we all have to create the
symbols/words through which we name our experience. She makes up new
words and reunites words with their ancient meanings; she bundles words
together to clarify/expand their meaning; she uses irregular capitalization
of words to alter thinking patterns; she changes the spelling/shape of words
to reveal their old and/or new meanings; she engages in ‘Grammar/Sin-
Tactics’ (Daly and Caputi, 1987, p. 29) to challenge the authority of rule-
makers. She shows that words can be powerful tools in our hands as we
rebuild our world. And just as importantly, she shows that words need not
cause pain but can be a source of great delight.
Wording is expression of shape-shifting powers, weaving meanings and rhythms,
unleashing Original forces/sources. Arranging words to convey their Archaic
meanings, Websters release them from cells of conventional senses. Releasing
206 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
words to race together, Websters become Muses. We do not use Words; we Muse
words. Metapatterning women and words have magical powers, opening door-
ways of memories transforming spaces and places (Daly, 1973, p. xxxv).
Entrepreneurship research could bene?t from some wordsmithing.
Feminists struggle with the connotations in words such as power and
success which already do not have consistent meaning for all entrepreneurs;
new words and/or multiple, alternative interpretations are required. Is there
an agreed meaning for the adjective sustainable when it is applied to the
entrepreneurial process? Given its origin and historical usage, can the
descriptor entrepreneur be truly gender inclusive? Perhaps what we really
need is radical research, research which ‘goes to the root or is fundamental
or advocates fundamental changes in the social or economic structures’
(Gage, 1967, p. 909). While we might not be as bold as Mary Daly, we can
certainly become a little more daring in our crafting and choice of words.
‘Language of Imagination’
Metaphors are really powerful words. Metaphors are central to the ‘lan-
guage of imagination’ (Frye, 1963) and can creatively reshape our theorizing
capacity. The quilt is a recurring metaphor in feminist writings, as
exempli?ed in the subversive rhetorical theory of the protest quilt (Williams,
1994) and in the transmutation of disciplinary theory via ‘the quilt of eco-
logical feminism’ (Warren, 1990, p. 139). Ecofeminists also use a weaving
metaphor (Diamond and Orenstein, 1990), to model cross-disciplinary
theory formation. Building on that tradition, this chapter invites considera-
tion of quilting as a visioning process for innovative research about women’s
entrepreneurial accomplishments. Machine and military metaphors have
too long dominated the language of business. What might gardening or
cooking or music help us to say about entrepreneurship? Years ago Paul
Hawken(Hawken, 1987) drewthoughtful analogies betweenentrepreneurial
development and gardening. In a senior business class, in response to the
standard, de?ne-an-entrepreneur assignment, a student wrote me a recipe
for baking anentrepreneur, replete withall the ?ourishes andcraft andsecret
ingredients of a great chef. Traditionally taboo areas of domestic/private
activity can o?er radical new insights into the entrepreneurial process,
thereby according to women stature as knowledgeable model builders.
Giant ‘Small Steps’
Mary Daly is a courageous Muse and she has followed her own, outrageous
advice throughout an illustrious scholarly career. For the more cautious,
Quilting a feminist map 207
Shulamit Reinharz o?ers more pragmatic advice. She suggests that we refer
to scholars by their full name rather than the convention of ‘vague, imper-
sonal, masculinist surnames’; that we use metaphors from female experi-
ence and that we avoid military language and masculinist terms (Reinharz,
1992, p. 16). Luce Irigaray urges ‘women to ?nd the courage to speak in the
active voice, avoiding at all costs the false security, and ultimate inauthen-
ticity, of the passive voice’ (Tong, 1998, p. 203). Any of these rhetorical
strategies will help to give the story of women entrepreneurs a look and a
sound that resonates with our lived experiences thereby working towards
our research goals of identity, respect and self representation.
THINKING WITH METAPHORS
Resistance to change in a person, according to Anzaldua, is in direct proportion
to the number of dead metaphors that person carries . . . Shifting metaphors
means changing perspectives – making new connections and seeing in new ways
– through the creative use of language . . . (Foss et al., 1999, p. 115).
As proposed throughout the chapter, the work of emancipatory research
becomes lighter when we jettison the baggage of ‘normal science’ including
all its ‘dead metaphors’. Courage comes through accessing ‘the power to
disbelieve . . . [which is] . . . the refusal to accept the de?nition of oneself
that is put forward by the powerful’ (Janeway, 1980, p. 167). In this chapter
the ideology of ‘normal science’ and its attendant machine metaphor have
been disbelieved/found to be inadequate. To imagine better theories for
women entrepreneurs our symbolic repertoire has been augmented with the
quilt and quilting metaphors which invite radical insights into the entrepre-
neurial process. What patterns do these metaphors teach us to look for?
What values do they represent? What language expresses their culture?
The quilt top is beautiful and functional, public yet private, familiar but
unique, harmonious and bold. Individually each attribute is re?ective of
some aspect of the entrepreneurial venture; jointly they dispute the rigidi-
ties of the dualistic worldview. Ignoring the limitations of either-or theo-
ries, quilts encourage us to see the merits of the both-and approach (Tong,
1998, p. 93). Entrepreneurs and the enterprises that they build are as
colourful and complex as a quilt top.
The warmth-creating batting is invisible but integral to the design and
functioning of the quilt. Just as feminist research is shaped and warmed by
its shared values, so might we come to see that the entrepreneurial enter-
prise is inspired and constrained by the emotions of its participants. An
entrepreneur without emotions is rather like a quilt without its batting.
Technically, the stitching joins the top of the quilt to the plain backing
208 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
but the manner in which the stitches are completed give voice to the story
of the quilt. Large, rough stitches speak of urgency and an emphasis on
function. Decorative and invisible stitches ful?l contrasting purposes of
public discourse and private connection. Perseverance and attention to
detail, measured in hundreds of tiny, precise stitches, speak a language of
durability and extended life. Quilt stitching is a narrative form that is simul-
taneously communication and connection, an interesting way to think
about entrepreneurial processes.
The act of quilting, when communal and cooperative, brings women
together and honours their collective e?ort. Instructing a novice in the art
of quilting is conducted with pride and humility. The process is as valued
as the ?nal product. Cooperation bestows a survival bene?t (Montagu,
[1953] 1999), behaviour well understood by successful entrepreneurs.
The metaphors of quilts and the quilting culture are much more than
suggestive of insights into patterns, values and language sympathetic to the
study of women entrepreneurs; they are rich with possible interpretative
power. Baby quilts. Dowry quilts. Memory quilts. Teaching quilts. Protest
quilts. Heritage quilts. Crazy quilts. Thinking with metaphors has much to
o?er.
Quilting a feminist map 209
11. Towards genealogic storytelling in
entrepreneurship
Daniel Hjorth
As a reader of this book, I think the di?erent contributions form a speci?c
opportunity for entrepreneurship studies. That is, I believe any student of
entrepreneurship – perhaps especially when studying entrepreneurship as
organizational creativity – interested in discourse and narrative can in their
crossing ?nd a way to make space for writing stories of entrepreneurship
previously lacking within this ?eld of research. I will proceed towards such
an aim following this structure. First, I will initiate the discussion of the
archaeological and the genealogical in Foucault’s use of discourse.
Secondly, I take a step back, together with Foucault, to acquaint us with his
history of language becoming discourse. In the third section I discuss dis-
cursive approaches in order to arrive at genealogic storytelling. The fourth
section deals with this way of writing entrepreneurship. In the ?fth section,
I ?nish with referencing entrepreneurship studies – including what we have
read in this book – so as to try out this way of writing entrepreneurship.
THE ARCHEOLOGICAL AND GENEALOGICAL
Let us introduce ourselves to an overview of the archaeological and the
genealogical in Foucault’s work. I will give one reading of Foucault’s pres-
entation of language becoming discourse in Western Culture (see section
2). This presentation takes place in his book The Order of Things (Les Mots
et Les Choses, 1966, transl. 1966/1970) which refers to the time in his work
when he operated within an archaeological approach. This is described (in
The Order of Things) as operating on the level of what makes situations
possible. At the time of Foucault’s earlier work, structuralism was highly
in?uential in intellectual France. Structuralism – leaning on the Swiss
linguist Ferdinand de Saussure’s theories – held the distinction between
individual speech acts, that is, how language was spoken/arranged by in-
dividuals, what they called parole, distinct from the underlying and basic
social and linguistic structure governing what can be said, what they called
210
langue. Without restricting himself to the langue/parole distinction, the
archaeological method still shares similarities with a structuralist analysis
in that it operates with text and objects without author or subject, that is,
langue is the analyst’s tool. Knowledge and objects are discursive in that
they depend on certain conditions of articulation. I believe Kendall and
Wickham’s (1999, p. 26) concluding description of the archaeological
approach adds important elements to our brief introduction here: ‘1) In
seeking to provide no more than a description of regularities, di?erences,
transformations, and so on, archaeological research is non-interpretive. 2)
In eschewing the search for authors and concentrating on statements (and
visibilities), archaeological research is non-anthropological.’ The archaeo-
logical ‘method’ suggests to us the possibility of studying discourses on the
level of pure description, returning to an active language beyond the passive
representational version. We experience such elements in Boutaiba’s text in
Chapter 2 of this volume. Foucault points out that archaeology ‘describes
discourses as practices speci?ed in the element of the archive’ (1972, p. 131),
the archive being ‘the general systemof the formation and transformation
of statements’ (1972, p. 130), and so archaeological descriptions of dis-
courses are ‘deployed in the dimension of a general history’ (Foucault,
1972, p. 164 in Kendall and Wickham, 1999, p. 24). ‘General history’, in
addition, is here opposed to ‘total history’ and focuses not on overarching
principles but on di?erences, breaks, disruptions, and mutations (Foucault,
1972).
There is then a crisis in Foucault’s own use of this archaeological
‘method’: instead of prioritizing a description of rules governing discursive
practices often forcing the theoretician out on the centre court, his genea-
logical ‘method’ prioritizes practices over theory ‘all the way’ and gives
much more attention to cultural and institutional forces ordering the play
of discourses. Instead of operating as if the analyst of the archives could
be free from the dominant discourses of her/his day, the genealogist diag-
noses practices from within.
Genealogy also establishes its di?erence from archaeology in its approach to dis-
course. Where archaeology provides us with a snapshot, a slice through the dis-
cursive nexus, genealogy pays attention to the processual aspects of the web of
discourse – its ongoing character (Foucault, 1981b, pp. 70–71).
It is in his inaugural lecture in 1970 (for a chair at the Collège de France)
entitled The Discourse on Language (L’Ordre du Discours, published in
1971) that we can see an opening towards what would become the domi-
nant approach in his later works – the genealogical (Dreyfus and Rabinow,
1982). And in Discipline and Punish, his next major work (1975), we see
Foucault abandoning the archaeological. He has now come to a point
Towards genealogic storytelling in entrepreneurship 211
where the systematicity of archaeology places restrictions on his more
recent interest in how discourses are formed and disseminated (as strategic
games):
One can agree that structuralism formed the most systematic e?ort to evacuate
the concept of the event . . . In that sense, I don’t see who could be more of an
anti-structuralist than myself. But the important thing is to avoid trying to do
for the event what was previously done with the concept of structure. It’s not a
matter of locating everything at one level, that of the event, but of realising that
there are actually a whole order of levels of di?erent types of events . . . From
this follows a refusal of analyses couched in terms of the symbolic ?eld or the
domain of signifying structures, and recourse to analyses in terms of the gen-
ealogy of relations of force, strategic developments, and tactics. Here I believe
one’s point of reference should not be the great model of language (langue) and
signs, but that of war and battle (Foucault, 1980, p. 114).
The works to follow, notably the three studies included under the
umbrella of The History of Sexuality (I: Introduction; II: The use of plea-
sure; and III: The care of the self), all operate with a genealogical approach.
Foucault says, discussing genealogy and social criticism (1994), that gene-
alogy (inspired by Nietzsche’s use of history, opposing the search for origin
or end, placing everything into historical movement) attends to ‘erudite
knowledge and local memories which allows us to establish a historical
knowledge of struggles and to make use of this knowledge tactically today’
(1980, p. 83). A genealogic approach will therefore seek to cultivate a
concern for the details and accidents that accompany every beginning.
Genealogists seek discontinuities, play, avoid the search for depth, and do
not practise interpretation as a way of uncovering hidden meaning
(Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982: 103pp). In this sense it rejects the ordering
force or essential nature of deep structures of language or social practices.
As genealogist, ‘Foucault is interested in how both scienti?c objectivity and
subjective intention emerge together in space set up not by individuals but
by social practices’ (ibid., p. 108). As a consequence, we would not be inter-
ested in subjects or subjects’ relations to other entities, but instead acknowl-
edge that subject(ivities) emerge on speci?c local-temporal ?elds of
practices and focus on how these relations are played out in complex strat-
egy games and tactical transformations.
The genealogist is uninterested in origins, hidden meanings, minds of
individuals, psychological explanations. Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982, p.
109) describe:
‘Look not to the stable possession of a truth, or of power itself,’ Foucault would
say, as if either were a result of psychological motivations; rather conceive of them
as strategy, which leads you to see ‘that its e?ects of domination are attributed not
212 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
to “appropriation”, but to dispositions, manoeuvers [sic], tactics, techniques,
functionings; that one should decipher in it a network of relations, constantly in
tension in activity . . .’
The genealogical approach directs us not towards substantial entities,
but focuses on ‘the emergence of a battle which de?nes and clears a space’
in which subjects play their roles, ‘there and only there’ (Dreyfus and
Rabinow, 1982, p. 109). In Foucault’s ways of practising genealogy, inspired
by Nietzsche
62
and sharing a refreshing attention to history with Weber,
everything is set in historical motion.
History is the concrete body of development, with its moments of intensity, its
lapses, its extended periods of feverish agitation, its fainting spells; and only a
metaphysician would seek its soul in the distant ideality of the origin (Foucault,
1977, p. 145).
The genealogist uses history to diagnose the present, seeks to isolate an
apparatus – a relation of the non-discursive as well as discursive practices
– which, apart from being a tool for the writer of a history of the present
(an e?ective history), is also that which constitutes subjects and organizes
their possible ?eld of action (Bakhtin on heteroglossia, Chapters 1 and 2,
this volume; Leitch, 1992, pp. 55–6). Central to Foucault is an e?ort to
provide the analyst with conceptual tools that direct us to movement, the
movements of a history that never stops:
We askabout our originandour being, not torecognise whowe are andthe inevi-
tability of what we have become, but in order to render what appears as the
unquestionable ground or cause of our existence as an e?ect of what we don’t
recognise. This is why Foucault traces all the discourses of the human sciences –
moral discourses of reform, normalisation, self-recognition and cure – back to
their inhuman causes (Colebrook, 1999, p. 198).
With this short introduction to archaeology and genealogy we have
referred to discourse in a casual way. Let us now turn to a discussion of dis-
course so as to place also this concept in some historical movement, and
equip ourselves with the possibility of discussing discursive approaches in
section three.
LANGUAGE BECOMING DISCOURSE
. . . human beings are thrown into language without having a voice or a divine
word to guarantee them a possibility of escape from the in?nite play of mean-
ingful propositions (Agamben, 1999, p. 45).
Towards genealogic storytelling in entrepreneurship 213
Language has not always been problematized as discourse, though.
Foucault identi?es three stages in the history of representation (which is
how he frames his discussion of language in The Order of Things, 1970):
the Renaissance (ending somewhere between 1599 and 1650), the Classical
Age (ending roughly at the beginning of the nineteenth century), and
Modernity (taking o? during the nineteenth century). It is important to
note that these periods are identi?ed according to the epistemic breaks that
take place in the archaeology of knowledge of the human sciences accord-
ing to Foucault’s analysis. It is ?rst in Modernity (and the transition from
the Classical Age to Modernity is marked, not the least, by the attempt
from Kant to make an epistemology of knowledge into the philosophy
about man) that language and representation becomes really problematic.
Discussions of the so-called linguistic turn in social sciences often result
in a need to problematize representations. Instead of seeing language as a
passive medium that – by the help of various methodological/statistical
tricks – can copy an image of ‘reality’ in language, such representations are
seen as impossible to achieve and emphasis is put on showing how every rep-
resentation is a presentation. Again, language is active, always ‘performing’
– something new or a repetition, a convention – and never simply transport-
ing sense/meaning (for example, Rorty, 1980; Calás, 1987; Hassard and
Parker, 1993). Besides Foucault’s, there are other versions of discourse avail-
able: a classical/scholastic use of discourse (as in Descartes’ writings);
Ricoeur’s version focusing on the said/communicated of speech and the
dialectic between this event of the said and its meaning; Habermas’ version
of discourse, which is like a public-conversational-rationality of a more or
less universalistic kind. We focus on a Foucauldian version not only because
of its enormous in?uence within humanities and social sciences, but pre-
dominately since authors in this volume who write in a discursive approach
do so more or less in ways in?uenced by the richness of Foucault’s continu-
ous rewriting of his own positioning (see Pettersson and Campbell in par-
ticular, Chapters 9 and 10).
In the pre-representational period ‘language functioned as a being in its
own right’ (Colebrook, 1999, p. 163). Truth relied neither on an ideality, nor
on correspondence. It was not a thing in itself but rather the ‘force of
words’ (ibid.). Language was non-representational, that is, not subordi-
nated to any external authority, to any being outside itself. ‘Language once
had the force of its own being’. Foucault describes that this is lost in
between the sixth and seventh century or, in between the Hesoid and Plato.
‘It was not “subjected to transcendence” or legitimated by some external
ground or presence’ (Colebrook, 1999, pp. 163–4). Truth resided in what
language was or what it did, not in what was said.
During the Renaissance, the details of nature receive names in a natural
214 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
language. Language, knowledge and thought are linked through the models
of resemblance and similitude which are there to handle a world of signa-
ture. ‘The nature of things, their coexistence, the way in which they are
linked together and communicate is nothing other than their resemblance.’
(Foucault, 1970, p. 29). Foucault explains further:
It was resemblance that largely guided exegesis and the interpretation of texts;
it was resemblance that organized the play of symbols, made possible knowledge
of things visible and invisible, and controlled the art of representing them. The
universe was folded in upon itself . . . Painting imitated space. And representa-
tion . . . was posited as a form of repetition (1970, p. 17).
He further suggests that the sixteenth century superimposed hermeneu-
tics as a way to make a sign speak and discover its meaning, and semiology
as a way to distinguish and locate signs and to know how and by what laws
they are linked, in the form of similitude: ‘to search for meaning is to bring
to light a resemblance’. Language existed ?rst of all, Foucault adds, ‘in its
raw and primitive being, in the simple material form of writing’. The tran-
sition between the Renaissance and the Classical Age is marked by the
change in how the problem of language is posed:
. . . in the sixteenth century, one asked oneself how it was possible to know that
a sign did in fact designate what it signi?ed; from the seventeenth century, one
began to ask how a sign could be linked to what it signi?ed. A question to which
the Classical period was to reply by the analysis of representation; and to which
modern thought was to reply by the analysis of meaning and signi?cation
(Foucault, 1970, pp. 42–3).
But let us not run ahead. Before we shortly describe the Modern, let us
acquaint ourselves with how Foucault describes language in the Classical
Age. ‘According to Foucault, the Classical Age set itself the project of con-
structing a universal method of analysis which would yield perfect certainty
by perfectly ordering representations and signs to mirror the ordering of the
word . . .’ (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982, p. 19). Rorty (1980) discusses this
‘language mirrors nature’ thesis and comments that it is already the Platonic
‘. . . analogy between perceiving and knowing’ which teaches us that the
order of the world imposes the truth on a proposition of that order (ibid.,
p. 157). Descartes is of course the emblematic ?gure of this line of thinking,
and his dualism (between res cogitans, the thinking substance, and res
extensa, the material – in space and time extended – substance) set the limits
for how certain knowledge could be developed: there is a world, created by
God, existing in itself, and there is language working as a perfectly transpa-
rent medium for thought (Foucault, 1970, p. 295). Thinking is the activity
of clarifying the order of the world as captured in language. Meaning is
Towards genealogic storytelling in entrepreneurship 215
unproblematic as this is taken care of by God. A proper analysis – a method
for clari?cation and simpli?cation, a dissection of nature – guarantees cer-
tainty and truth. A ‘perfect language’ in this sense excluded ‘man’ from dis-
course: ‘Since it was taken for granted that language by its very nature made
possible successful representation, the role of human beings in relating rep-
resentations and things could not itself be problematized’ (Dreyfus and
Rabinow, 1982, p. 20). Foucault points this out:
In Classical thought, the personage for whom the representation exists, and who
represents himself within it, recognizing himself therein as an image or
re?ection, he who ties together all the interlacing threads of the ‘representation
in the form of a picture of a table’ – he is never to be found in that table himself
(Foucault, 1970, p. 308).
In the Classical Age, language that names, patterns, combines, con-
nects/disconnects things ‘as it makes them visible in the transparency of
words’ is discourse: ‘. . . in the Classical age, discourse is that translucent
necessity through which representation and being must pass – as beings are
represented to the mind’s eye, and as representation renders beings visible
in their truth’ (Foucault, 1970, p. 311). Words are not marks/signs to be
deciphered, as in the Renaissance age, nor, as in positivism, perfect instru-
ments for the analyst, but simply a network ‘on the basis of which beings
manifest themselves and representations are ordered’. Representation and
being were linked – which is why Descartes is the emblematic ?gure in the
Classical Age – in the strong subject who says ‘I think, therefore I am’. The
‘I think’ and ‘I am’, representation and being, were related through a
method delivering this link as a ground and evidence as long as ‘the mode
of being implied by the cogito’ was not interrogated. The opening of this
interrogation marks the transition to the modern age or Modernism.
‘For the threshold of our modernity is situated not by the attempt to
apply objective methods to the study of man, but rather by the constitution
of an empirico-transcendental doublet which was called man’ (Foucault,
1970, p. 319, emphasis on cited text). This is when man becomes the subject
and the object of his own understanding. ‘Man now appears limited by his
involvement in a language which is no longer a transparent medium but a
dense web with its own inscrutable history’ (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982, p.
28). Kant now emerges as the initiator of this modern re?ection, this ana-
lytic, that tries to show ‘on what grounds representation and analysis of
representations are possible and to what extent they are legitimate. Note
that Kant is here trying to avoid both anthropologism, extending knowl-
edge of man as an empirical being to an explanatory ground, and anthro-
pomorphism, projecting reasons’ own achievements onto the world itself
(Colebrook, 1999). Modernity, Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982) note, begins
216 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
with this unworkable idea of a sovereign being, imposing the limitations of
language on ‘man’, who is enslaved (by the limits of knowledge in lan-
guage): ‘. . . the limits of knowledge provide a positive foundation for the
possibility of knowing . . .’ (Foucault, 1970, p. 317). Kant, rejecting the
rationalist’s as well as the empiricist’s models of epistemology, sought, in
his Critique of Pure Reason, to show how reason determines the possibili-
ties for experience and knowledge. Following Kant we ?nd a series of think-
ers devoting themselves to the problem of the empirical and the
transcendental and to the task of providing a philosophical foundation for
the possibility of knowledge (Comte, Hegel, Marx, Husserl, Heidegger).
With Heidegger we clearly sense the opening towards themes characteris-
tic of what in more general terms has come to be called postmodernism,
and more speci?cally poststructuralism.
Through this short history writing we learn that in modernism we can
locate the crisis that became formulated by Heidegger: the failing attempt
to ground the world on a higher or present being. This attempt fails to rec-
ognize the question of how grounding (of the ground) happens or how the
present is presented. Structuralism, although recognizing the groundless
nature of concepts, proceeds in its systematization while forgetting the
question of how that ‘deep structure’ of language (and social practices) is
possible: the question of the genesis of structure. We ?nd poststructural-
ism as a label for several ways of responding to this problem. Instead of
seeking to know some pre-structural and original origin, poststructuralism
a?rms structuration as a process ‘. . . which actively and a?rmatively pro-
duces all forms of origin, centre or presence’ (Colebrook, 1999, p. 103).
Derrida says:
There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of play.
The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which
escapes play and the order of the sign, and which lives the necessity of interpre-
tation as an exile. The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, a?rms
play and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name of man being the
name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheol-
ogy – in other words, throughout his entire history – has dreamed of full presence,
the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of play (Derrida, 1976, p. 292).
Derrida’s and Foucault’s projects, although multiple ones in both cases,
share this move from the determining forces of structure to an interest in
the event as a becoming, ‘neither governed by being nor comprehended by
structure’. (Colebrook, 1999, p. 106). Studying entrepreneurial processes in
various ?elds of practices would not, then, be legitimated by the work of
analysis as an uncovering of the truth of these processes, nor by the work
of a hermeneutics that works out interpretations of these. This would only
refer to some neutral or original ground, which science and scienti?c
Towards genealogic storytelling in entrepreneurship 217
knowledge has the privilege to occupy and from where the disorder of the
world could be corrected. Poststructuralism instead drives us to participate
in the worlds we study, to write new stories so as to open up to greater pos-
sibilities for action. Writing itself becomes a?rmed and not subordinated
to some structure of reason. When Foucault says that he has only written
?ctions, we could read this as saying that he continued to come to writing
as a literary act not in opposition to science or the scienti?c, but as to a?rm
the productive force of language. Power, in Foucault’s work, is often this
positivity or force that produces. In this way, and in writing, we have also
and continue to produce concepts and ‘truths’ that enslave us when taken
as universal, total, and grounded in a higher authority. Foucault therefore
avoids describing his work in terms of a grand theory and says instead that
he is doing strategy. To do this, the genealogist makes use of knowledge tac-
tically, demonstrating how what was assumed necessary through being
handed down to us from the history of our disciplines might not be so at
all. In this way, new space for writing as a creative act is opened.
DISCURSIVE APPROACH
Knowledge/Power and Stories
Through our attention to discourse we learn that knowledge and power are
inseparable. In addition we learn that language as discourses is productive
of subjects and objects of its concern. The unity of knowledge and power
is noted already by Francis Bacon (1561–1626): ‘Nam et ipsa scientia potes-
tas est’ – Knowledge is power. However, Bacon operates with a concept of
power that Foucault moves beyond. Instead of power as an asset or posi-
tion, related almost exclusively to domination, he stresses that power is also
productive-positive: it makes things happen and circulates as a freedom of
subjects to create. Power operates on freedom and because there is freedom:
‘Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free’
(Foucault, 1982, p. 221). In his inaugural speech (1971) Foucault also asks:
‘But what is dangerous about people speaking? In that their discourse con-
tinuously multiplies? Where is the danger?’ The ‘danger’ is that everyday
people create to know. Without the e?ectiveness of dominant strategies for
how to know, speaking might easily subvert, transform or destabilize the
reigning order. What Lyotard called ‘the little narrative’ (petit récit) is in
this sense an e?cacious act, a tactical act, making use of a freedom to
create. Science – in its enlightenment and modernist form – has always
related to this as to passion/play, that is, as a legislator of proper reason
speaking down to everyday narratives from a hierarchized position.
218 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
Scienti?c knowledge operates to tame everyday speech through assigning a
proper place for it, a place rehearsed in school, which ‘. . . honours but
disarms it’ (ibid.) A discursive approach seeks to trace the possibility of
such ‘silencing’ and turns to listen to these stories.
Richard Rorty, who has put lots of energy into showing how language as
discourse makes an epistemology of knowledge, in its traditional, initially
Kantian, form, into merely another ‘unful?llable’ promise, or metanarra-
tive in Lyotard’s terms, says this eloquently. This helps us to imagine rela-
tions between a narrative form of knowledge and the Foucauldian interest
in everyday practices as the focus for studying discourses:
Detailed historical narratives of the sort Foucault o?ers us would take the place
of philosophical metanarratives. Such narratives would not unmask something
created by power called ‘ideology’ in the name of something not created by
power called ‘validity’ or ‘emancipation.’ They would just explain who was cur-
rently getting and using power for what purposes, and then (unlike Foucault)
suggest how some other people might get it and use it for other purposes. The
resulting attitude would be neither incredulous and horri?ed realization that
truth and power are inseparable nor Nietzschean Schadenfreude, but rather a
recognition that it was only the false lead which Descartes gave us (and the
resulting overvaluation of scienti?c theory which, in Kant, produces ‘the philos-
ophy of subjectivity’) that made us think truth and power were separable. We
could thus take the Baconian maxim that ‘knowledge is power’ with redoubled
seriousness (Rorty, 1991a, p. 175).
Any discursive approach would be animated by this re?ection.
Discourses, say, of entrepreneurship, are not only systems of rules for what
could be said, when, and by whom (see Pettersson, Chapter 9 in this volume
on the Gnosjö discourse). For example, the discourse of ‘opportunity
recognition’ is also governed by institutional forces deciding what can be
published, what could be referenced, or what should be attended to when
dealing with this ‘topic’ (see Campbell, Chapter 10 in this volume; Gartner
et al., 2003, for the example of opportunity recognition; Gartner, 1989, for
the example of the trait discourse in entrepreneurship studies):
Because a discourse is a system of competing forces where rules govern what is
valid, sayable and possible, a system of signs has a speci?c and historically deter-
minate structure of relations. While the structuralist notion of langue was of a
static unity of equally exchangeable elements, Foucault’s idea of a discursive for-
mation operates by exclusion. Ideas of ‘truth’ and validity are produced by rules
which govern a discourse; such rules are located in institutions and practices
(Colebrook, 1997, p. 42).
What is dangerous about people speaking? I believe the carnival – as a
cultural practice – is perhaps the best illustration of how danger in this
Towards genealogic storytelling in entrepreneurship 219
respect is thought of. Foucault indicates this when discussing the ceremon-
ies of punishment (in Discipline and Punish, 1979): ‘there was a whole
aspect of the carnival, in which rules were inverted, authority mocked and
criminals transformed into heroes’ (p. 61). That is, this site of power – as
with public execution – could easily become transformed into a ‘site of
social disturbance, or even revolt’ (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982, p. 146). The
carnival always presented the threat to authorities that the great movements
of ‘the ?esh’ would suddenly turn against reigning order and lead to trans-
formative action. A little speech at the wrong moment, in the wrong place
could change everything. Science struggled with the playful/carnivalesque
in order to prepare a place for it in the popular culture/writings (Findlen,
1998). These stories, the uno?cial, the silenced, the popular, ‘mere’ folly,
interests the genealogist who analyses the relations to the o?cial, proper,
serious discourses and shows how they have become possible as well as how
things could become totally di?erent. As entrepreneurship researchers we
recognize something familiar in this approach, which describes also entre-
preneurial movements – from ‘what is’ to ‘what could become’.
Discourse and Event
We recognize, also from our above discussion of the relations to structural-
ism, that Foucault shares the view with structuralists that subjects are not
the producers of meaning. Rather, meaning is discursively produced
according to the dynamics of discursive practices and institutions. This rep-
resents the point where Foucault moves beyond the structuralist position,
the ‘systemic’ view of meaning-formation, and as such it is an opening
towards the possibility of the event which the closed structuralist system of
language would make impossible. Foucault saw this as an important part
of his method, of how he worked:
. . . I wonder whether, understood in a certain sense, ‘eventalization’ may not be
a useful procedure of analysis. What do I mean by this term? First of all, a
breach of the self-evident. It means making visible a singularity at places where
there is a temptation to invoke a historical constant, an immediate anthropologi-
cal trait, or an obviousness that imposes itself uniformly on all. To show that
things ‘weren’t as necessary as all that . . .’ (2002, p. 226).
An event alters and recon?gures the force operating in a discursive forma-
tion (Colebrook, 1997). Adiscursive formation is, in Foucault’s earlier writ-
ings, something like a system of serious statements, the latter being
comparable to speech acts. In the genealogical period, discursive formations
are rather described as formation of objects, concepts, tactics and strategies
which give meaning to the world, a ‘logic’ organizing and normalizing the
220 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
social. Agenealogic approach also stresses the dynamic, processual, discon-
tinuous, immanent, strategy-tactics double conditioning, and the multiplic-
ity of discursive elements that come into play in strategies (relations of
power). We sense the urge to make analysis into a practice that avoids killing
what is studied, that is, that allows the becoming of life to stay in focus and
avoid ?xation/ossi?cation. This is also why the narrative is important as a
form of writing and knowledge in which life is allowed to be carried to the
reader/listener with its liveliness, fervour, excess, potentiality, and passion
still breathingus. As we breathe air for life, life breathes us throughnarratives.
Furthermore, Foucault continues, ‘. . . eventualization means rediscov-
ering the connections, encounters, supports, blockages, plays of forces,
strategies, and so on, that at a given moment establish what subsequently
counts as being self-evident, universal, and necessary’ (2002, pp. 226–7).
Studying the formation of a ‘dot.com’ start-up (see O’Connor, Chapter 5
in this volume) as an entrepreneurial event would then require that we
determine the process of ‘dot-comization’ through which this new start-up
emerged as possible, necessary and real. We would not analyse it (the event)
as an institutional fact or ideological e?ect, Foucault notes, but as an event
in the tension between this ‘dot-comization’ of the economy – the processes
producing the possibility of and necessity of launching a venture – and the
local e?ects this reality has in the social ?eld. ‘An event, consequently, is not
a decision, a treaty, a reign, or battle, but the reversal of a relationship of
forces, the usurpation of power, the appropriation of a vocabulary turned
against those who had once used it . . .’ (Foucault, 1977, p. 154).
The challenge is to avoid the reproduction of categories operating to
‘dispel the shockof daily occurrences, todissolve the event’ (Foucault, 1977,
p. 220). For ‘. . . forces operating in history are not controlled by destiny or
regulative mechanisms, but respond to haphazard con?icts. They do not
manifest the successive forms of a primordial intention and their attraction
is not that of a conclusion, for they always appear through the singular ran-
domness of events’ (ibid., pp. 154–55). To isolate the event is to think
without telos (end) or arche (origin), or, to turn to the practices, to their
logic, to the overall e?ect escaping actors: ‘People knowwhat they do; they
frequently knowwhy they dowhat they do; but what they don’t knowis what
what they do does’ (Foucault, cited in Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982, p. 187).
The question of what ‘what they do’ does is the question of practices.
Practices and Discursive Formations
The genealogist sees that cultural practices are more basic than discursive for-
mations (or any theory) and that the seriousness of these discourses can only be
understood as part of a society’s ongoing history (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982,
p. 125).
Towards genealogic storytelling in entrepreneurship 221
Discursive approaches direct our attention to practices: ‘Discursive prac-
tices are characterised by the delimitation of a ?eld of objects, the
de?nition of a legitimate perspective for the agent of knowledge, and the
?xing of norms for the elaboration of concepts and theories’ (Foucault,
1977, p. 199). This is where rules regulating discourses are located. Together
with our cultural habits and our institutions, practices are where we ?nd the
rules and norms watching over, normalizing and legitimating discourses.
When we have been able to describe a discursive formation, which can also
be described as a speci?c domain of knowledge that produces its exterior-
ity, for example, medical science constructed by and for ‘doctors’, produc-
ing ‘what nurses know’ as its exteriority, we should locate it in the broader
cultural/institutional context. This would be how the archaeological and
the genealogical complement each other.
How do we get at the practices enabling our analysis of the e?ects of
‘what the do’? This is, again, when we can turn to stories. Narrating, which
always is a cultural, institutional and discursive operation, brings practices
to us in a form where life is still in language:
Narratives are . . . storehouses of practices. The telling of a folk-tale can be itself
a form of practice. De Certeau therefore agrees with Pierre Bourdieu’s criticism
of the opposition between theory and practice. Theory itself is a form of activ-
ity; it is a ‘labour of separation’ which produces the material it seeks to know as
both ‘other’ and subordinate (de Certeau, 1988). At the same time, practices are
themselves a form of theory (Colebrook, 1997, p. 126).
As we get busy organizing knowledge in our studies and writings, knowl-
edge is organizing us. As we set out to design research practices for our
empirical processes, research practices design our ways through these pro-
cesses. The ‘productivity’ of discourse should alert us to acknowledge this
e?ect of a discursive approach: we become aware that discourses already
have approached us, and we ?nd ourselves in the midst of making use of
the silently provided solutions they have brought:
Discursive practices are not purely and simply ways of producing discourse.
They are embodied in technical processes, in institutions, in patterns for general
behaviour, in forms for transmission and di?usion, and in pedagogical forms
which, at once, impose and maintain them (Foucault, 1977, p. 200).
Afocus on discursive formations would lead us to what we might describe
as an orientation, in the ?eld, towards archaeological descriptions – showing
how people think and act in relation to certain objects; how they can legiti-
mately talk about these (again, see O’Connor, Chapter 5; Rehn and Taalas,
Chapter 7; or Pettersson, Chapter 9 in this volume); and under what circum-
stances and according to what norms they can make use of and elaborate on
222 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
concepts. However, turning, as does Foucault in practising a genealogic
approach, to practices we are given the possibility to broaden our scope to
include the non-discursive (such as the body) as well as the discursive.
Narrating, we can describe as a practice we ?nd both discursive and non-
discursive. We have alsoadescriptionof the tacit, of skills, styles andof social
routines that would exemplify the non-discursive. Narratives, precisely for
exemplifyingboththediscursiveandthenon-discursive, becomehighlyinter-
esting to the genealogist seeking to locate the discursive in the landscape of
our cultural practices. This accompanies our interest inentrepreneurship. For
a style, characteristic of a certain culture (Swedish, or of teaching, or of
skateboarding) ‘acts as the basis on which practices are conserved and also
the basis on which new practices are developed’. (Spinosa, Flores and
Dreyfus, 1997, pp. 19–21). They cantherefore suggest that style is the basis of
practices and that ‘pecial sensitivity to marginal, neighbouring, or
occluded practices [. . .] is precisely at the core of entrepreneurship . . .’ (ibid.,
p. 30). They also conclude that this sensitivity ‘. . . generates the art, not
science, of invention in business . . .’ (ibid.). Entrepreneurship would thus
result inthe creationof newstyles, that is, of newbases for everydaypractices.
Having elaborated on how a discursive approach would direct our study
I have tried to describe the points with a genealogic approach. In so doing
I have also come to suggest the interesting crossing of genealogy and the
attention to and use of narratives in our studies. I now turn to developing
this point in section 4.
GENEALOGIC STORYTELLING
Narratives are important as they bring with them the ‘eventness’, the tem-
porality, of the event studied. It is on the level of narratives that we ?nd it
‘natural’ to resist the historically mediated tendency to place the wit of
everyday practices in a position where we assume the need for a little
schooling, the work of scienti?c rationality, in order for such narratives to
make sense. Focusing, as a genealogist, on the cultural practices and narra-
tives as a central form for hosting and expressing those practices, the
purpose of research can shift from building positions from where we cast
critique upon society into one where we enhance our possibilities to actu-
alize forms of participation in shaping society and to multiply the ways we
can participate. Taking this as an argument to do less theory and instead
narrate genealogic stories, we would move from a priority of scienti?c
rationality over narrative/literary wit. This distinction is drawn with the
familiar modernist anxiety we recognize in particular from the dark light
of enlightenment. When it comes to a production of truth, there is no
Towards genealogic storytelling in entrepreneurship 223
point, apart from elevating our contemporary position, to accept the sharp
distinction between the scienti?c and the literary. A genealogic approach
refuses to see that there are either universal, ahistorical and normative
foundations for critique, or groundless critique. Genealogists would instead
study the formation of universals as well as their local forms and functions
in practices of today (Dean, 1999). In the context of this book we would
conclude from this that the genealogical discursive approach would not
accept a (modern-)scienti?c di?erence drawn between scienti?c rationality
and narrative wit of everyday practices. We would instead acknowledge
their interdependence and how they play together in human lives. Such con-
clusions are drawn under the in?uence of Michel de Certeau’s writings on
narratives, ?ction, and science (de Certeau, 1997). Let us read de Certeau
to see how he writes on the relation between narratives and science:
Shouldn’t we recognize its scienti?c legitimacy by assuming that instead of being
a reminder that cannot be, or has not yet been, eliminated from discourse, nar-
rativity has a necessary function in it, and that a theory of narration is indissoci-
able from a theory of practices, as its condition as well as its production? (de
Certeau, 1984, p. 78, emphasis in cited text).
It is as if de Certeau has one of the Latin meanings of discourse in mind,
that is, the act of running about (discurrere – to run about). The ‘necessary
function’ of narrativity in discourse would then be this running through
which concepts get ‘discoursed’. Narratives would – for the genealogist –
be culturally soaked practices which in their everyday form represent a mar-
ginal language, that is, carrying the possibility to subvert and surprise
dominant discourses, o?cial or ‘epistemologized’ knowledge. Marginal or
silenced stories, apart from carrying a transformative force, are also politi-
cal and collective (Marks, 1998; Deleuze end Guattari, 1986).
As marginal, narratives are related to myth in the history of science.
Narratives, Vattimo (1992) says, are distinct from myth through presenting
‘themselves explicitly as, “having become”and never pretend to be “nature”’
(p. 26). A genealogical approach directs us, precisely, towards the tension
between the o?cial/epistemologized/discourse and the uno?cial/ silenced,
to the point where narrative wit and scienti?c rationality cross, and is in this
sense diagnostic, that is, working on the present as an open set of possibili-
ties, while recognizing the delimitation of the necessary and normal by dom-
inant forms of reason.
We owe a lot to both Michel de Certeau (1997) and Maurice Blanchot
when it comes to great developments in our creative possibilities to imagine,
use, and destroy relations between literature and knowledge. De Certeau
continues to discuss this withering distinction (as seen in Blanchot’s and
Breton’s writings; compare Foucault, 2000, pp. 171–4):
224 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
To do that [recognize the scienti?c legitimacy of narrativity] would be to recog-
nize the theoretical value of the novel, which has become the zoo of everyday
practices since the establishment of modern science. It would also be to return
‘scienti?c’ signi?cance to the traditional act which has always recounted practices
(this act, ce geste, is also une geste, a tale of high deeds). In this way, the folktale
provides scienti?c discourse with a model, and not merely with textual objects
to be dealt with. It no longer has the status of a document that does not know
what it says, cited (summoned and quoted) before and by the analysis that knows
it. On the contrary, it is a know-how-to-say (‘savoir-dire’) exactly adjusted to its
object, and, as such, no longer the Other of knowledge; rather it is a variant of
the discourse that knows and an authority in what concerns theory (1984, p. 78).
When we set out to investigate this in-between of science and literature,
of scienti?cally legitimized forms of knowledge and everyday narra-
tives/wit, we will disclose a ?re-break patrolled by ‘?re ?ghters’ belonging
to science proper – those who, in the opening scene of enlightenment,
cleared the break (Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke). In this ?re-break not
only Blanchot and Bréton, but certainly Foucault would appear as pyro-
maniacs, ‘guilty’ of trespassing, of disorderly conduct, and of bringing
stories like fodder for the ?re into the dry and in?ammable land of science.
In?ammable as all humanwhencleansedof ludens inthe name of oeconomi-
cus for which ‘scienti?c rationality’ all too often has served as detergent.
In order to clarify the relationship of theory with those procedures that produce
it as well as with those that are its objects of study, the most relevant way would
be a storytelling discourse. Foucault writes that he does nothing but tell stories
(‘récits’). Stories slowly appear as a work of displacements, relating to a logic of
metonymy. Is it not then time to recognize the theoretical legitimacy of narra-
tive, which is then to be looked upon not as some ineradicable remnant (or a
remnant still to be eradicated) but rather as a necessary form for a theory of
practices? In this hypothesis, a narrative theory would be indissociable from any
theory of practices, for it would be its precondition as well as its production (de
Certeau, 1997, p. 192).
What science represses or silences is given the name of literature, folk-
tales, ‘mere stories’, or ‘simply rhetoric’. In doing this it:
? depoliticizes its practices and results;
? operates with a unilinear conception of time/history (which in Hegel
was related to a progress towards dialectical ful?lment, Vattimo,
1992, pp. 2–5);
? represses passions and a?ects (as Hirschman, 1977; de Certeau, 1997;
Cooper and Burrell, 1988; Hjorth, 2003 have shown); and
? kept ethics out of its discourse through speaking in the name of truth
(de Certeau, 1997, pp. 214–21).
Towards genealogic storytelling in entrepreneurship 225
Lyotard uses the well-known example of Plato’s allegory of the cave from
The Republic to show that science emerges in and searches legitimacy
through narrative forms of knowledge. He explains:
Scienti?c knowledge cannot know and make known that it is the true knowledge
without resorting to the other, narrative, kind of knowledge, which from its
point of view is no knowledge at all. Without such recourse it would be in the
position of presupposing its own validity and would be stooping to what it con-
demns: begging the question, proceeding on prejudice (Lyotard, 1984, p. 29).
It is a deeply rooted re?ex on the part of the ‘scienti?c writer’, though, to
use a battery of techniques – presented as methods – to cleanse the ‘scienti?c
argument’ from traces of narrativity such as the playful, ambiguous, ironic,
?gurative and metaphorical. Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly (from 1511)
appears as a blow from a safety valve in the midst of the tightening language
of science, parallelled with and serving the formation of the concept of state
and a Raison d’État (in Machiavelli’s Prince, from 1513). The poly-
morphous language of narratives could not be allowed in this process for
which unity and singularity had to be in reason as in God. Bruno Latour
(1987) suggests that the transformation of linear prose into a folded array
of successive defence lines is the surest way to tell that a text has become
scienti?c. He refers to the di?erence in style between articles within the same
?eld of knowledge and shows how they have transformed from proceeding
in the linear prose to that of being strati?ed into many layers and broken up
by references, coding, schemes, statistics, curves and diagrams, columns. Of
course, this text would more or less demonstrate Latour’s point.
The point here is to illustrate, fromdiscussions of the history of science as
well as frompostmodern destabilizations of the ‘order’ of the scienti?c text,
that narratives and narrativity are indeed serving the genealogist in general
and students of entrepreneurship in particular. In order for us to grasp how
the narrative formof knowledge haunts the scienti?c it is helpful to study the
practices of ‘making science’ (how methods work in particular) and the sty-
listic regulations that are used as wedges to create and keep distance from
‘stories’. Latour and Foucault are the ones concentrating on this transfor-
mation process – when scienti?c institutions together with methods and
styles of writing forminto apparatuses that secure the voice of truth speak-
ing in the name of the real. Genealogy can serve in the disclosure of how
what is nowan established scienti?c result depends on a series of exclusions,
accidents and crossings through which it has come to triumph in solitude: in
Foucault’s words, to inquire into the contemporary limits of the necessary.
Writing, for the genealogist, has the obligation of disrupting the ‘self-
evidence or feeling of progress which enables satisfaction with the present as
an inevitable outcome of the past’ as Colebrook (1997, p. 58) put this.
226 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
From the perspective of narrative knowledge, however, the point with
describing scienti?c knowledge in these terms is not to reject it as ‘wrong’.
That would be to stumble over oneself. In addition, ‘. . . incomprehension
of the problems of scienti?c discourse is accompanied by a certain toler-
ance: it approaches such discourses primarily as a variant in the family of
narrative cultures’ (Lyotard, 1984, p. 27). Instead, we should proceed
according to a genealogic storytelling, where we trace a genesis of e?ective
discursive formations, describe how they summoned their power to form
strategies in relation to which one can a?rm or deny the true and the false,
and, after having shown how certain practices emerged into a status as prin-
ciple in speci?c systems, continue to tell the silenced stories bearing witness
to the instability of principles’ self-evidence (Hjorth, 2001). Such a tactical
research (see also Hjorth and Steyaert, 2003) searches for sudden breaks
and accidents – in the genesis of dominant discursive formations, strategies
– and tell their stories as a subversive move. These silent histories often
come in the form of small narratives, in the form of everyday languages,
uno?cial reports and wit. ‘Something in narration escapes the order of
what it is su?cient or necessary to know, and, in its characteristics, con-
cerns the style of tactics’ (de Certeau, 1984, p. 79). Genealogy, seeking to
disturb the order of the self-evident, is therefore oriented towards narrativ-
ity, which in the style of tactics transforms the strategic domination of
theory.
Writing, considered as writing, as an inscription and delimitation rather than a
passive and transparent representation would be tactical. There would be less
focus on meaning, content or conceptual generality – this would be the e?ect of
strategic ordering – and an attention to the singular act of inscription which is
necessarily repressed in the acceptance of strategy [. . .] A text is not an expres-
sion or re?ection of its world. The very experience of a world as general, mean-
ingful and identi?able order is the e?ect of a textual strategy or organisation
(Colebrook, 1997, p. 123).
GENEALOGIC STORYTELLING AND
ENTREPRENEURSHIP
There is a distinctly entrepreneurial element in the tactical of this discur-
sive approach we have called genealogical storytelling. It searches the in-
betweens and makes use of opportunities as these are presented in the
openings that moving into these cracks generate. Entre- and -prendre of
entrepreneurship is here given a translation. That is, tactical research as in
a discursive approach called genealogic storytelling, directs us towards
those potentialities, those virtualities that can become actualities through
Towards genealogic storytelling in entrepreneurship 227
di?erentiation, divergence and creation. This form of organizational crea-
tivity – for the new always demands organization to be created in order to
work – is what we call entrepreneurship (see opening of this chapter). It
‘foolishly’ desires the actual (Aldrich and Fiol, 1994) and is powered by
connecting with other desires to increase the productive capacity
(Johannisson, 1985). In a world ‘full of order’, dominated by ‘successful
strategies’, entrepreneurship seems increasingly to be targeting those strat-
egies, searching for cracks in them, for the right timing, and to strike there
and then to create surprises: ‘Occupying the gaps or interstices of the stra-
tegic grid, tactics produce a di?erence or unpredictable event which can
corrupt or pervert the strategy’s system’ (Colebrook, 1997, p. 125). In a dis-
cursive approach we recognize the power of thinking as a productive power,
that is, what holds the potentiality of worlds. Any structure would then,
instead of being received as given, be acknowledged as an e?ect of the event
of structurality. A discursive approach seeks to describe how the structure
is e?ective but also how it was prepared through a series of interpretations,
and, on what battle?elds it summoned its resources.
The often-reported ‘pragmatic quality’ in entrepreneurial processes (for
example, Gartner, Bird, and Starr, 1992) has given researchers reasons to
interpret this as foolishness, as ‘acting as if’, or to elaborate on how risk,
uncertainty and ambiguity is part of the entrepreneurial process. It is like
entrepreneurial processes actualizing ideas/concepts/projects against better
knowledge; like everything we know does not apply in the case of entrepre-
neurial creativity. With our discursive approach, however, we can think
di?erently. Entrepreneurship can be approached as an example of how we
can respond to the excess of creativity and di?erence in life. This desire to
create knows – as if entrepreneurs were e?ective genealogists – that also
dominant orders are unstable; that ‘what is’ only appears so as a result of a
stabilizing achievement. Entrepreneurship becomes the art of transforming
the desire to create, of channelling or creating passages for this ?ow of life
into a speci?ed future. Like the genealogist’s writing of a history of the
present, the successful entrepreneurial venture is careful to translate his or
her concepts via the ‘grammar of local history’ into the context where he
or she intends time to take o? from a new plateau (Hjorth and Johannisson,
2003; Spinosa et al., 1997): a kind of place sensitivity made use of through
timing. This challenge is well illustrated by how the tacticians of the blat
system maintained embedded economies (Rehn and Taalas, Chapter 7 in
this volume) as well as by Foss’ ‘theatre entrepreneur’ translating her ideas
into the local language and history still keeping their transformative power
(Chapter 4 in this volume).
Entrepreneurial processes are tactical processes, and our interest as gen-
ealogists in the interstices, the in-betweens, the transitions, breaks, and
228 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
crossings is shared by this entrepreneurial focus on cracks in the strategic
grid. This is where the tactical act can strike, with a sensitive timing, and
create di?erence (or, indeed, allow di?erence to manifest itself). The pyro-
maniac, referred to above, is again a useful image: the in?ammable land of
a scienti?cally rationalized economic reality presents opportunities for a
playful response to life’s creative excess. Homo ludens light ?res: sudden
break-outs, events, producing energy in processes making use of what was
o?cially understood as ?xed. Partly extending our previous language, we
would exemplify how our discursive approach leads us to describe entre-
preneurship as the force connecting the elements needed for a ?re to break
out: heat – passion/desire to create; oxygen – the di?erentiating power in
life, close to us as our breathing, continuously escaping attempts to formal-
ize (attempts to transform logos into logic); fuel/fodder – stories/narratives
feed the ?re and need to proceed with great timing. When these three are
present, ?re strikes as an event of di?erence, that is, entrepreneurship
creates new organization, shapes the future at the present. The e?ect of
entrepreneurship is a name given to this elusive event of ?re – a metonymy
for the release of social creative energy through entrepreneurial processes.
Fire is the event taking place when molecules leave an ‘excited state’, releas-
ing energy in the form of heat and light, and this light is seen by the
human eye as that we have named ‘?re’ (C ? O
2
?CO
2
? heat ? light).
Entrepreneurship, rather than leaving, is the continuous movement
towards new possibilities for ?re, and so the natural-science image is here
clearly inadequate for our descriptive purpose. Desire, di?erence, and nar-
ratives relate to entrepreneurship in much more complex ways than do heat,
oxygen and fuel to ?re. They do share the status as in-between phenome-
non though: crossing resources to create new; often associated with acci-
dents or sudden changes; releasing energy; spectacular e?ects. This will also
remind us of the work of the discourse analyst: not only to attend to power,
crossings, accidental shifts and turns, and marginal stories, everyday wit,
but also to attend to the surprise of the event:
This is the very project of genealogy; given where we are and the regularity and
normativity of how we think, is it possible to disown our thought and think oth-
erwise? This can only be examined through a new form of the question of the
self and the question of who thinks. We ask about our origin or being, not to
recognise who we are and the inevitability of what we have become, but in order
to render what appears as the unquestionable ground or cause of our existence
as an e?ect of what we don’t recognise (Colebrook, 1999, p. 198, discussing
Foucault).
If a discursive approach in the form of genealogic storytelling helps us
to study the event, it seems like it will help us study entrepreneurship.
Towards genealogic storytelling in entrepreneurship 229
Readings
12. Reading the storybook of life:
telling the right story versus telling
the story rightly
Jerome Katz
NARRATIVE AND DISCURSIVE APPROACHES IN
ENTREPRENEURSHIP STUDIES
I grew up around parents who were business and civic entrepreneurs, which
is to say I grewup in a world full of stories. Whether discussing a newperson
being recruited, a contact made, a sale or contribution or placement, the
di?cult past or the glorious future, life among entrepreneurs was a story-
book sort of life, insofar as a lot of it involved and evoked stories. With such
a background, sitting amid experts on entrepreneurial narratives and listen-
ing to their explanations of the purposes, processes and methods of entre-
preneurial stories, I was o?ered moments of intense enlightenment and at
times intense frustration. The enlightenment came as I ?nally understood
what made a particular narrative compelling or gave it a resonance with my
own thoughts and emotions. The frustration came when I posited the words
of the narrative experts against the stories I have carried, and ?nd myself
inadequate to making the leap from the discussion about stories to the
stories I know. In either situation, I found myself going away fromthe pres-
entations ?lled to my intellectual brim with ideas I wanted to ponder even
more, and hopefully the chapters here will bring you to a similar impression.
The role of narratives in entrepreneurship seems to me remarkably inter-
twined with the historic dialectics or dualities of our ?eld. There is for
example popular entrepreneurship and research entrepreneurship. On one
hand, in most societies there are mainstream narratives, often from maga-
zines for and about entrepreneurs. From these come an incessant stream of
stories and tales that form a large part of the common understanding of
entrepreneurship in a given country.
The popular narratives contrast with the scholarly narratives of
researchers, which, while often originally identi?ed using popular narra-
tives, come to exist and be shared among very select populaces, largely dis-
connected from the mainstream of the entrepreneurial narratives from
233
which they emerged. It is like laboratory (vs. naturalist – another dichot-
omy) zoological studies – it often seems we entrepreneurship researchers
?nd a narrative in its natural habitat, capture it, and return it to our own
research venue for study and even dissection. Like those lab-bound zool-
ogists, we come to understand the structure of the story, and even how its
parts work and ?t together, but the narrative analysis process often seems
to result in our losing the understanding of how the story ?ts into and
serves its purposes in its natural environment.
Perhaps the dialectic that I found personally the most informative was
embedded in the social context of the conference itself. There seemed to me
to be a distinct di?erence in the situation of the narrative builders depend-
ing on what side of the Atlantic they called home. For the Europeans in
attendance, the narrative was readily accepted, as were the users of that
technique, and the source of irritation was the di?culty of getting narra-
tive-based research published in journals oriented toward quantitative
works. While a few North Americans were present, they often identi?ed
with the frustration of their European research cousins, but often went
beyond that to talk about what seemed to me to be the loneliness of the nar-
rative researcher in American academia. These narratives perhaps drew a
parallel from the stories of the solo entrepreneurs being described in the
sessions, and it also seemed clear that in those parallels were also a reserve
of strength on which to draw. In these situations, it could often appear
obvious that the researchers drew strength from one another, and even from
their method, as they found inspiring examples among the entrepreneurs.
At times the gathering, which was on a relatively remote island near the
edge of the StockholmArchipelago, became something very near a resurrec-
tion of gatherings of entrepreneurship researchers early in the development
of the ?eld. Modern entrepreneurship as a discipline was really founded by
a generation of ‘lone wolves’. These academics, with names like Sexton,
Churchill, Hills and Brockhaus in the USA and Birley, Gibb, Chell, and
Klandt in Europe were often the only people on their campuses promoting
entrepreneurship, usually to dismissive academic audiences. What emerged
as a response to that rejection was what I’ve called a ‘travelling gypsy band’
of academic meetings on entrepreneurship. The meetings travelled fromone
school to another, but in Europe or North America throughout much of the
1980s there was nearly a meeting a month somewhere on entrepreneurship
research. In those meetings subsets of ‘the usual suspects’ arrived and for a
day or two shared the emerging ideas and the emotional commitment to a
discipline they hoped to grow. They were successful, perhaps beyond their
expectations, but for those people gatheredinSandhamn, the sense of shared
ideals and shared commitment was strongly evocative of those stories told
by the prior generation of lone-wolf academics.
234 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
Subsequent Inspirations
When at the conference, part of my role was to make comments on the pres-
entations and the discussions that followed. One of the options Daniel and
Chris gave me was to reprise those comments here. However, a lot of time
has transpired since then, and the chapters in this volume are often very
di?erent from those papers originally given at Sandhamn, so what I want
to do is to take a moment to o?er brief observations on what I took away
from these revised papers.
THE RESEARCHER IN THE NARRATIVE PROCESS
I kept ?nding myself asking repeatedly ‘where is the researcher’s own nar-
rative in these e?orts?’ It no doubt re?ects a bias of my training in the quali-
tative procedure that the researcher was always considered as an instrument
of data collection, but one that could easily be a?ected by the environment,
learning, emotion and even fatigue. As the researcher-as-instrument
learned more about the culture and people, greater variation in behavior
and meaning could be identi?ed, but in this process the instrument is also
changed. I was taught that change per se is not evil, but the researcher must
put some e?ort into continually assessing oneself. Journals, repeated meet-
ings with individuals who help the researcher explore their own conscious-
ness around the research problem, research group peer reviews and a host
of other procedures, even to content analyses and repeated surveying of
feelings, were all suggested.
Listening to many of the participants at Sandhamn, it seems there is a
di?erent norm working with many from this group. I confess my education
in qualitative method was clearly at the hands of positivists, although posi-
tivists who believed in chaos, ambiguity and even the occasional belief in
the contrariness of person, technology and world. But regardless of these
complications, the belief was that inpersonally studying others, using quali-
tative methods, in the ?eld, over extended periods, the researcher needs to
also have a means of monitoring and considering changes in themselves
and the study as they proceed. Underlying this is the belief that through
such e?orts useful knowledge can come, and from that knowledge comes
improved ways to perform research and analysis, or as the postmodernists
claim, to get at ‘the truth’.
Amid the postmodern mindset underlying many of the researches
reported at Sandhamn is a contrasting belief that the uncertainty of meas-
urement and the contextuality present in every research endeavor makes
self-assessment an often futile gesture – one that o?ers at best a veneer of
Telling the right story vs telling the story rightly 235
objectivity, but in doing so undermines the realism of the narrative research
setting. There is a philosophical elegance to the argument, and some very
valid examples from the history of the social sciences, but the same can also
still be said for the positivists and middle-range approaches.
I think in this volume the question comes to my mind most clearly when
I juxtapose two chapters – Lene Foss’ passionate depiction of Bente and
Kathryn Campbell’s discourse on quilt making as a metaphor for studying
women entrepreneurs.
The ?rst time you read Lene Foss’ ‘ “Going against the grain” . . .
Construction of entrepreneurial identity through narratives’, you can’t
help but admire Bente, the entrepreneur whose life is the focus of the nar-
rative. Lene does an exemplary job of establishing the historical and geo-
political context and interweaving these with Bente’s life to show how
entrepreneurship emerges in a social context, even when it appears as the
actions of an individual entrepreneur. I ?nd even now that I wonder if
Lene’s very real, and very warranted admiration for Bente and her achieve-
ments mean that the story gets less critical consideration than is warranted.
For example, the business hardships encountered seem to be compara-
tively trivial in their impacts on the ?ow of the business or the narrative,
when they seem to have the potential to be far more grave than the narra-
tive suggests. It has taken a long time to understand the Scandinavian idea
of self-su?ciency, which is called ‘duktig’ in Swedish. If I follow this cor-
rectly, individuals strive to show themselves able to take care of themselves
and their businesses on their own. Along these lines, the Scandinavian sense
of moderation or modesty (in Swedish ‘lagom’) enters. When combined,
the idea is that a good person does not make a big deal about the problems
they encountered and bested. Caesar’s famously brief account of a lengthy
campaign – Veni, vidi, vici (I came. I saw. I conquered.) – is what I think of
when I read this narrative.
Let us say for the moment that the understatement is present. It might
re?ect the true level of di?culty Bente faced. It might understate the reality,
but does so in a way that other Norwegians (or perhaps, more broadly,
other Scandinavians) might recognize as modesty in the face of grave chal-
lenges. But perhaps there was no understatement. Bente’s e?orts were the
relatively straightforward and averagely di?cult process she describes.
Then of course the underlying story, with its elements of heroism and inno-
vation in the Far North, loses much of its punch.
There is another whole context to think about, which is what Bente said,
what Lene heard, and then reported. I know from prior experience that
Lene is a conscientious and insightful researcher, but in this speci?c case,
when it seems the narrative Lene wants to o?er us is one with an implicit
concept of heroism, is the understatement a cultural artifact, a naturally
236 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
occurring inconsistency inthe narrative, or anerror of the researchor analy-
sis process? As the postmodernists posit, when any research situation is
looked at in its smallest details, the precision that science aspires to becomes
less and less.
Could improved self-monitoring or self-narrative procedures help
resolve questions like the one above? Possibly, but no doubt with costs for
the researcher in terms of time, resources, and what could quickly become
a painful self-awareness. The question of the worth of such e?orts is one
that strikes me as culturally grounded, in particular based on the cultural
norms of the publication outlets or research networks in which an individ-
ual operates. This social relativism itself melds the cynicism over method
inherent in postmodern thinking with the analysis so dear to positivists,
and may thus be seen as a suspiciously inclusive outcome by both camps.
But for researchers, it o?ers a rule of thumb for deciding when to include
self-assessments and when they are not essential.
Kathryn’s approach o?ers a remarkable clarity of self-awareness. What
is known by those attending the workshop at Sandhamn, but might be news
to readers is that Kathryn’s writing and speaking voices are each unique,
and quite distinct from one another. In person her narrative style is infec-
tiously humorous. She demonstrates a remarkable ability to seize on every-
day occurrences and show how our ‘normal’ responses re?ect aspects of
our cultures and ourselves that we take for granted. Her vocal personal nar-
rative style is direct and inclusive, at once evocative and enlightening. You
have a chance to read her article, and I invite you to create your own nar-
rative describing it.
But in both writing and speaking, what is consistent is Kathryn’s use of
herself as the instrument of analysis. She does an outstanding job of point-
ing out what she sees, how these things strike her, and what she makes of
them. She admits which ideas are her own, and which were inspired or devel-
oped from the thoughts of others. The result is what I used to call a hodge-
podge, but now call a quilt in deference to her narrative of exposition.
Her chapter, and to a lesser extent her presentation at Sandhamn, were
personal narratives, o?ering her own insights on the nature of entrepre-
neurship among women and the cultural settings that complicate and expli-
cate that process. As a self-narration, it is no doubt easier to be self-aware,
but if one were to intersperse interpretive narratives such as Kathryn’s with
the narratives of an entrepreneur on which the interpretations are based, I
think readers would have the chance to see the entrepreneur, the researcher,
and how the two relate to the same ostensible topic. In such situations I
think the reader has the opportunity to truly be the third set of eyes in the
research situation, and that is an exciting prospect.
So in my mind I see Lene’s story as a heroic e?ort on the researcher’s part
Telling the right story vs telling the story rightly 237
to conceptualize a heroic e?ort on the entrepreneur’s part. In that process,
the story becomes the driving cause, and its lessons to me revolve around
storytelling and what is right – telling the story the right way (the way it
happened) versus telling the right story (the story that gets at the heart of
the process). Postmodernists declaim there is no one right thing, and Lene’s
e?ort points out the many ‘rights’ that need to be considered. This contrasts
with Kathryn’s un?inchingly consistent building from the researcher
outward to encompass all that is read and witnessed, so that the intended
perspective is clear, but perhaps elements of the underlying story get short-
changed. Both approaches are instructive, and both are useful for under-
standing entrepreneurship and ourselves.
TOOLS FOR FUTURE USE
After my arguably interminable discourse above on researcher self-
awareness, I would be wholly remiss if I did not single out the dramaturgi-
cal approach described by Torben Damgaard, Jesper Piihl, and Kim Klyver
in their chapter ‘The dramas of consulting and counselling the entrepre-
neur’. As a means of testing one another’s understanding of the people and
situations being researched, their approach o?ers some exciting prospects
for uncovering unexpected insights about how we perceive others.
From working with writers of plays and ?ction, I would approach their
model with a bit greater fear of accuracy than the authors. Drama authors
know that the reason so many characters in plays, movies and television
come across as two-dimensional is that authors often ?nd they ?rst notice
the more extreme, unusual or distinctive elements in a character. This often
is followed by the role the character plays in the narrative, moving it along
in particular ways, usually at particular times. With these two elements
covered, the author may decide to concentrate on other elements of the
story, often ones in which they have a particular interest.
Very often audiences may not notice that the character consists only of
the distinctive element and their dramaturgical role, since in the immediacy
of the performance, both elements ‘ring true’. It is only on re?ection after-
wards that the limitations of the portrayal become apparent. As one entre-
preneurship researcher who has been in media put it, ‘How do you make
sure you gave the real story when all you need to get by is a good story?’ In
using their approach, adding ways to check the quality and depth of the
characterization, above its recognizability, would do a lot to assure the
method produces the results for which one could hope.
When at Sandhamn, the story I found extremely fascinating as a story
was Monica Lindh de Montoya’s ‘Driven entrepreneurs: a case study of
238 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
taxi owners in Caracas’. On re-reading a year later, the bustling narrative,
with its overlapping perspectives of drivers and owners and the interplays
among the owners themselves make for an involving read. In fact, she has
done a remarkable job of juggling many stories in a short chapter and
giving them in a way that makes it easy for the reader to keep straight the
many strands of lives she has described. As a story, it is instructive for those
entrepreneurs considering renting out their resources, and as a way to see
how di?erent human resource strategies can result in di?erent outcomes.
Some day Monica or some other reader will recognize the power of her
story to explain one of the most arcane and jargon-?lled of economic con-
cepts, those of agency theory.
Stylistically, I ?nd that I learn a lot from de?nitions and the process of
creating them. In that light, Smith and Anderson’s chapter ‘The devil is in
the e-tale’ turned out to be a personally rewarding place for me to start my
rethinking about the conference. Interestingly, this chapter seemed to me to
be the one that had the most involved subplot, looking far more di?erent
on paper in ?nal form than I recall from the conference itself. As it stands
now, their chapter o?ers one of the few published codi?cations of story
types in entrepreneurial situations. For researchers who must move between
qualitative and quantitative universes to balance understanding and pub-
lishability, rubrics like theirs are a critical resource.
When I heard Ellen O’Connor talk about creating a business as creating
a story, I beamed, since she was espousing one of my favorite lines. But this
was only the beginning of my smiles. Her approach to showing how a com-
pelling narrative gets built and improved upon through repeated interac-
tions and retellings gave me the ?nest example I’ve ever encountered of the
storytelling process optimized for the entrepreneurial situation. What is
particularly useful about her approach is the way she uses the concept of
intertextuality to model how stories of the future engage with the actions
of the present. Simple goal-setting models often failed to work in explain-
ing ?rm creation because the existing goal-setting models assume the
process linking action and outcome are generally known and accepted (that
is, legitimized). For new ?rms, especially ones in new industries, or with
untried products or services or personnel, the action-outcome link is prob-
ablistic, and the probabilities are determined by social processes. Ellen’s
approach explains the how, the why, and the when of these exchanges and
their e?ects on the entrepreneurial story and the eventual ?rm. It is a mas-
terful e?ort, and perhaps a seminal one.
Telling the right story vs telling the story rightly 239
GOOD STORIES FOR THE RETELLING
Sandhamn is a place that must be thought of in terms of the sea and the
port, with the common bonds linking the two the places where people can
share drink and stories. This is so true an aspect of the place that during
the conference no less than the King of Sweden came to the bar next to our
conference room to partake of drink and stories while his sailboat was
reprovisioned. Keeping this in mind, if you were in Sweden and someone
told you that they heard something in Sandhamn that they’d like to tell you,
you would give the ensuing story your greatest attention.
There are three stories from Sandhamn that I will take away, and because
each is in this book, you can too. Sami Boutaiba’s story of the YalaYala
group, entitled ‘A moment in time’ captures the zeitgeist of the millennial
period and the dot-com boom in a manner that is poignant, insightful, and
immediately identi?ed as re?ective of those times. Already I ?nd my young-
est students are uncertain about what was so di?erent about the dot-com
boom, and stories like Sami’s o?er an immediately understood narrative.
Katarina Pettersson’s ‘Masculine entrepreneurship – the Gnosjö dis-
course in feminist perspective’ has already struck a responsive chord in
several of the participants in the conference, sparking perhaps the most
heated exchanges of the time in Sandhamn. The observations she draws
from decades of material cannot quickly be dismissed, and provides either
a damning indictment of masculine domination of narratives, or a fasci-
nating opportunity to witness the emergence of feminine, possibly feminist,
voices amid a formerly all-male choir. It is a story that will always ?nd an
audience.
Finally, Alf Rehn and Saara Taalas’ ‘Crime and assumptions in entre-
preneurship’ is a piece certain to inspire academics to serious debate.
Should the de?nition of entrepreneurship be expanded to include the crea-
tion of all kinds of organizational entities, including those outside the law?
I was fascinated by the elaborate construction of the social context for the-
orizing that entrepreneurship research has so far only included law-abiding
entities.
Perhaps it re?ects di?erences in cultural backgrounds, but it has always
seemed to me that among American researchers, entrepreneurs often con-
ceptualized in advance of laws. The excesses of the dot-com boom bring
these to life, but it not a unique situation. Prior booms brought about prior
excesses, and there has always been a legal marginality inherent in the inno-
vations developed by the most advanced entrepreneurs. Many of the con-
sumer laws of today exist because of innovative actions of entrepreneurs,
and many of the established business practices of today were initially con-
sidered illegal when introduced by entrepreneurs. Often in the USA it has
240 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
been the role of the entrepreneur to create not only new organizations, but
new business practices, business models, and occasionally, business laws.
Should criminal organizations be studied? In many ways I suspect the
point is moot. I believe the reasons for a lack of studies of criminal organ-
izations are ones of safety and funding, not theoretical rectitude. A truly
insightful study of a criminal organization would put the criminals at
increased risk from competing criminal organizations and law enforcement
agencies both. Thus most e?orts to craft such a compelling narrative are
likely to end in the end of the researcher. In comparison, studying osten-
sibly law-abiding small-scale entrepreneurs, who limit illegalities to tax
evasion, price gouging, and employee harassment (or those entrepreneurs
inhigh-growthbusinesses whoengage inprice-?xing, accounting irregulari-
ties, and stock manipulation) are relatively safe venues. Still Alf and Saara
bring out the legal context and often under-appreciated contributions to
our orientation to research in a powerful and useful manner. It will take
years of discussion to settle their challenging question, and on such bases
academic careers are made.
REFLECTIONS ON NARRATIVE APPROACHES TO
ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Part of the reason ESBRI invited me to the conference was because as an
editor of so many di?erent special issues and research compendia, I can
often ?nd where the opportunity for publication exists for works. I have
tried to think about where the edge in publishing lies for narrative
approaches, and even a year later, the answers like narratives themselves,
are complex.
The conference papers show the diversity of what the narrative approach
covers. We have instances where the narrative was the narrative of another
individual or set of people (for example, Montoya, Foss, Boutaiba), the
narrative of the author (Damgaard, Pihl, and Klyver, Campbell), or the
narrative of other narratives (Rehn and Taalas, Pettersson). While the ?rst
two types of approach seem to me to have a commonality of purpose and
method, and incidentally ?t with commonsense ideas of what a narrative
is, calling the last type a narrative seems to decrease the clarity and distinc-
tiveness of the approach. Narratives of narratives are virtually indistin-
guishable from properly performed literature analyses (for example,
Cooper, 2001), and the conceptual or methodological gain achieved by
calling these narratives are not apparent, while the cost to those elements
central to narrative is evident, and arguably high.
This problem is reminiscent of the de?nitional problems the ?eld of
Telling the right story vs telling the story rightly 241
entrepreneurship faced for more than two decades. Entrepreneurship’s
approach was to permit and institutionalize several types of de?nitions, for
example, wealth creation, innovation, organizational formation. Other
solutions might also have worked. However the goal of clarifying what
entrepreneurship meant was to help researchers and users of research to
know what was being o?ered and its larger theoretical and intellectual
context. Until narrative methodology deals with its own internal di?er-
ences, it will be too di?cult for ‘outsiders’ to follow, and thus di?cult to
recruit new adherents.
There is no doubt a cultural problem in getting narrative approaches
(and here I talk of narratives of others and narratives of self) accepted in
journals, notably those entrepreneurship journals hewing to the more
quantitative approaches identi?ed with the American approach to science.
Part of this problem is physical – narrative papers take more space in jour-
nals, thus forcing out or delaying other papers.
Another part of the problem is that the distinctiveness of the ?ndings
based on narratives is not as great as one might hope. Part of this is edit-
orial – often narratives take a great deal of space to show a simple point.
There are no standards for how a researcher pares down the narrative
details to demonstrate the basis for analysis. Lacking such guidance, and
having an emotional investment in the data gathering, it is particularly
di?cult to decide how to present the minimum narrative necessary to prove
a point and (in the interests of honest science according to Chris Argyris)
permit the reader to discon?rm it.
Research narratives, for good or ill, also face competition from journal-
istic narratives, because many of the elements of using another’s words are
the same in both settings. Often a journalistic narrative can make its point
in 2000 words, including those of the person studied. The academic typi-
cally uses four times the space or more. As the entrepreneurial public
becomes a more sophisticated consumer of ideas, the gap between journal-
istic and research narratives lessens (to be fair, this is also happening for
quantitative works in the two settings also). In some chapters, like those of
O’Connor, the conceptual demands for more space are evident. But exam-
ples like hers are more the exception than the rule. Achieving a greater dis-
tinctiveness of voice and concept can only aid in di?erentiating research
from journalistic narratives. In the end, researchers only possess a window
of opportunity where they create new ideas and ways to think about entre-
preneurship. Those that make sense and answer questions of interest will
get picked up by the journalist community and popularized, so the value to
be added by the researcher is greatest on the leading edge of theory and
drops dramatically as one works with increasingly established (that is, old)
ideas.
242 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
Finally, I could not help but notice how the thinking underlying the
European approach to narratives takes an American ideal and makes it
work far better than the Americans have to date. It is the concept of respect-
ing the common person. Until the last third of the twentieth century, ‘great
man’ approaches to history and entrepreneurship abounded, and were
rooted in a distinctively European realpolitik, historically linked to cul-
turally embedded ideas such as royalty and ?xedness in social classes.
Throughout most of the twentieth century the Americans espoused a
‘common man’ approach, in part to counter the European model. This
approach underlay such things as the Progressive movement and the pop-
ulist approach to educating of philosophers such as John Dewey. The con-
ventional wisdom was that Europeans tolerated and even promoted elitism,
while America promoted populism.
With that historical thought in mind, it was fascinating to see how the
tables have turned. In the narratives presented in Sandhamn, the focus was
not on the ‘great men’ (or women) of entrepreneurship, but rather on giving
voice to average people who happened to do entrepreneurship. The choice
of people and stories for the narratives highlighted the populism underly-
ing the current postmodernist drive to support the narrative approach. This
contrasted with much of the research in America, especially for the strains
of entrepreneurship using a wealth-creation de?nition, where the modern
equivalent of ‘great men’ and great ventures are the enduring focus.
Perhaps in that populism, however it is philosophically rooted, there is
the connection with what remain core American values around respect for
the common person. If there is, it could serve as a wedge for entry into
American journals. The de?nition of entrepreneurship the narrative users
would need to build on is that of organizational formation (Katz and
Gartner, 1988) or self-employment (Reynolds and Miller, 1992), but with
the right de?nitional foundation, populist approach, and methodological
innovation, perhaps European narrativists might fashion a package that
would sell their intellectual wares in the competitive American market. It is
an idea worth considering.
FUTURE DIRECTIONS
I talked earlier about the lone wolves of the 1980s and how the people at
Sandhamn were reminiscent of those pioneering lone wolves. The larger
context faced by the modern lone wolves is di?erent from the world of the
1980s and in that di?erence lies the seeds of a new opportunity – one based
on being an entrepreneurial academic. Today publishers are scrambling to
?nd new journals. Advances in publishing and electronic distribution has
Telling the right story vs telling the story rightly 243
dramatically changed the cost structures of journals, and opened up new
opportunities. We have seen this in the explosive growth of entrepreneur-
ship journals in the past ten years, where more than 30 new journals have
appeared (Katz, 2003). As I have noted before (Katz, 1991, 1994, 2003)
these journals often have di?culty because they tend to be generic and as
such undi?erentiated one from another.
If as our participants asserted in the conference, there is a need for
outlets amenable to publishing narrative-based research and theory, and in
fact some of the broader research objectives of the narrative researcher
community can be best met in the settings found in entrepreneurship
research, then there is a possibility for researchers like those at the
Sandhamn conference to successfully negotiate to start a new entrepreneur-
ship journal, one focused on the narrative and discursive approaches to
entrepreneurship, and on the underlying theory and method of narrative
analysis. Such a journal would have a strong potential subscriber base in
Europe and North America among entrepreneurship scholars, and the
libraries of their universities, and there would exist a secondary market for
narrative researchers in other disciplines who seek out the journal for its
methodological articles. A journal like the one I describe might ?nd a ready
partner in one or more of the professional societies for entrepreneurship
researchers, further enhancing the attractiveness of the prospect for a com-
mercial publisher (and for the society, who might be able to provide it inex-
pensively to members). At its root is the problem of moving from telling a
story to living one, and that leap is at the heart of all entrepreneurship, be
it in business or academia, or in this case, both. A new journal would make
a ?tting legacy for the conference.
244 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
13. The edge de?nes the (w)hole:
saying what entrepreneurship is
(not)
William B. Gartner
This is a story I often tell at doctoral seminars about my own ‘initiation’ into
the community of entrepreneurship scholars. I believe that this might be
worth telling here as a coda to Rehn and Taalas’ chapter in this book. They
o?er a thoughtful exposition of some of the facets of an article I wrote
nearly two decades ago – ‘Who is an entrepreneur? is the wrong question’
(Gartner, 1988). We often see the outcomes of scholarly endeavors – the
book chapter, the journal article, the monograph and book – without some
sense of the conversations that develop as these ‘products’ are published.
I’ve found that journal articles, particularly, don’t necessarily ‘speak for
themselves’. The process of academic writing so often mutes the author’s
voice through a conversation that occurs during the process of reviews and
rewriting. This process is not often transparent to the reader. What appears
on the pages of a journal article is often the result of multiple dialogues
among the author, editor, and reviewers. It is these conversations, well, actu-
ally my recollection of these conversations that are the basis for this story of
how ‘Who is an entrepreneur?’ came to be written and published. In addi-
tion, I’ll use this story as a commentary on where the other chapters in this
book seem to be directing future entrepreneurship scholarship.
In 1984, Carland, Hoy, Boulton and Carland published an article in the
Academy of Management Review, ‘Di?erentiating entrepreneurs from small
business owners: A conceptualization’ that articulated a sense of entrepren-
eurship that was so radically di?erent from my experiences studying entre-
preneurs. To be honest, the article provoked feelings of rage. Rage? Well, a
month before I had just learned that the Academy of Management Review
was to publish an article of mine (Gartner, 1985) that o?ered a very di?erent
view of the nature of entrepreneurship. This article, ‘A framework for
describing the phenomenon of new venture creation’ posited that there was
signi?cant variation among the population of entrepreneurs and entrepre-
neurial situations. In other words, entrepreneurs and entrepreneurships
probably had a lot more di?erences among them than similarities. In fact,
245
this framework suggested that one of the primary conundrums facing entre-
preneurship scholars was this problem of accounting for all of the variation
(in entrepreneurs, their activities, the kinds of organizations they started,
and the situations in which these activities took place) and that it might
actually be very di?cult to ?nd any commonalities. And, now, the Academy
of Management Review had published an article that seemed to be so
diametrically opposed to a variation perspective.
Now, it might be worth backtracking in this story, to talk about how I
had arrived at the conclusion that the phenomenon of entrepreneurship
was intrinsically about the nature of variation. I had ?nished my disserta-
tion, ‘An empirical model of the business startup, and eight entrepreneurial
archetypes’ (Gartner, 1982) a few years before. This e?ort had been a strug-
gle to ?nd any commonalities among 106 case studies I had generated as
the empirical bases for my research on entrepreneurship. The initial
purpose of the dissertation was to explore whether entrepreneurship train-
ing had a positive e?ect on the ability of entrepreneurs to successfully start
and grow companies. In order to ?nd out whether this was true I contacted
entrepreneurship scholars at various universities to identify entrepreneurs
(my assumption was that they would identify their students) that they knew
who might have taken an entrepreneurship course or undergone some kind
of entrepreneurship training program. I identi?ed over 240 entrepreneurs
through this method, and, in contacting these entrepreneurs, I found out
that most of them had not had entrepreneurship training (and most were
not the students of the entrepreneurship scholars who had given me their
names), and that their startup stories were, for me, unbelievably diverse.
Since this group of 240 individuals didn’t really seem to have entrepreneur-
ship training as a commonality in their experiences, I decided to just ‘?gure
out’ what was going on with this ‘sample’. I suppose the dissertation
became a way of making sense of what I had. So, I engaged in both quali-
tative and quantitative e?orts to understand this group of people. There
were 106 individuals who ended up completing an in-depth phone inter-
view as well as responding to a detailed mail questionnaire. This took a
year. The variety of their stories was astounding. Individuals had started
businesses from all kinds of backgrounds and for all kinds of reasons.
There were a variety of businesses that were started (restaurants, manufac-
turing ?rms, doctors, lawyers, dentists, accountants, lawn service busi-
nesses, construction ?rms). I was surprised that there could be so many
ways to start businesses, and that there could be so many businesses that
people could start. What to do with this mass of information? It took
another year to come up with methods to both recognize the di?erences
among these 106 cases as well as ?nd similarities. I used hierarchical clus-
tering to evaluate the similarities and di?erences among these 106 cases
246 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
using all of the quantitative information I had collected. This clustering
method begins with grouping the ‘most similar’ cases at the initial level
through success steps into clusters of less and less similar cases until there
remains only one cluster left. Part of the challenge of using hierarchical
clustering methods is to determine at which stage the clusters that are
formed have the most similarities among the members of a particular
cluster, and the greatest amount of di?erences between each of the clusters.
While the clustering algorithms attempt to generate ‘tight clusters’ with lots
of ‘space’ between the clusters, there is much room for interpretation. Using
the qualitative case studies I had written, I had some sense of what each
story told, and where there might be similarities among these cases. I even-
tually decided that there were eight clusters that seemed to group these 106
case studies into similar ‘patterns’ of kinds of individuals, startup behav-
iors, ?rms, and situations. While the dissertation, then, o?ered eight ‘arche-
types’ of entrepreneurship, it was always in the back of my mind a sense
that these archetypes were at best a compromise for ?nding similarities
among what looked to be 106 very di?erent experiences.
The ‘framework’ article (Gartner, 1985) was, then, the ‘theoretical’
section of the dissertation that provided my logic for the way that the vari-
ation among all of these di?erent entrepreneurships was organized. So, I
was somewhat in the naive ‘glow’ of feeling that the Academy of
Management Review had ‘designated’ my perspective on entrepreneurship
as the path that entrepreneurship scholars would likely take for discussing
the phenomenon: Entrepreneurship was about variation.
And then Carland et al. (1984) appeared. They o?ered a statement of
entrepreneurship that didn’t seem to re?ect variation as a primary charac-
teristic:
An entrepreneur is an individual who establishes and manages a business for the
principal purposes of pro?t and growth. The entrepreneur is characterized prin-
cipally by innovative behavior and will employ strategic management practices
in the business (p. 358).
From my research experience, this kind of entrepreneur represented a very
small proportion of the individuals who had engaged in starting organiza-
tions. What about all of the other kinds of entrepreneurs? Well, Carland et
al. (1984) classi?ed them as small-business owners:
A small business owner is an individual who establishes and manages a business
for the principal purpose of furthering personal goals. The business must be the
primary source of income and will consume the majority of one’s time and
resources. The owner perceives the business as an extension of his or her person-
ality, intricately bound with family needs and desires (p. 358).
Saying what entrepreneurship is (not) 247
Well, that description didn’t seem to ?t many of the entrepreneurs in my
sample, either. And, so I began to rage about, what appeared to me, a very
simple classi?cation scheme for identifying entrepreneurs that seemed to
have no relationship to the entrepreneurs that I had studied. Most of my
entrepreneurs didn’t seem to ?t either of these categories, so what were
they? – Neither entrepreneur nor small businessperson, it appeared. As a
way to ‘cool down’ I decided to write a rebuttal to their article, something
that I was able to write in a period of a few weeks. I entitled the article,
‘Who is an entrepreneur? is the wrong question’ and I sent the article to the
Academy of Management Review on July 31, 1984. The gist of this initial
manuscript was that the phenomenon of entrepreneurship needed to
account for a myriad of things, and that de?ning entrepreneurship in terms
of the dimensions of pro?t and growth limited our attention to a fairly
narrow vision of what the phenomenon might entail. I came down heavily
in favor of focusing on the behaviors of individuals involved in starting
organizations, but, fundamentally, the article sought to draw the reader
back toward the framework o?ered in Gartner (1985), which would even-
tually be published.
And, now the story about the conversation I engaged in so that ‘Who is
an entrepreneur?’ could get published. It wasn’t much longer than about
three months (October 19, 1984) that I received a letter from the editor with
a couple of reviews. The editor was ‘reasonably optimistic’ that revisions
could be successfully undertaken. The reviewers had mixed feelings about
the manuscript: One liked it, the other had some concerns, but they
appeared to be minor. Each seemed to have their own sense of ‘what entre-
preneurship was’ and ‘who entrepreneurs were’ that either ?t, or didn’t, my
own sense of the phenomenon, but there did seem to be an openness to
letting me speak my mind about entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship. The
editor asked for a rewrite, and indicated that the article needed to address
the reviewers’ concerns: Two di?ering opinions to resolve. I responded with
conciliatory remarks to the reviewers, and a somewhat changed manuscript
that I submitted on January 15, 1985. A few months passed, and then I
received another letter from the editor indicating that one of the reviewers
was sick and unable to continue with the review process (whom I later was
told was Al Shapero) and that another reviewer was now assigned to evalu-
ate the manuscript. Within about two months I received another set of
reviews (April 4, 1985). This time, one of the original reviewers was clearly
in favor of the arguments in the revised manuscript while the newly added
reviewer indicated in his one page review that he had substantial reserva-
tions regarding the manuscript’s tone and ideas. The editor asked for more
revisions to respond to this new viewpoint. I was not happy to receive this
news. Another revision and a letter to the editor and reviewers was written
248 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
in six days, and sent back on April 10, 1985. The revised manuscript was
now entitled, ‘Entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship: Content versus process
approaches,’ and it attempted, I thought, to be less confrontational. But,
the letter to the editor suggested that there might need to be conversation
between us regarding my comments to the reviewers and that it might be
necessary to re-revise the manuscript and my comments to them before they
saw it again. My comments to the newly added reviewer were, to say the
least, scathing and angry about this reviewer’s beliefs (that were counter to
mine) about the nature of entrepreneurship that were o?ered in a one page
review. I felt that his reviewer was just clearly ‘wrong’ and his comments in
the review were not supported by the empirical evidence, and I wrote eight
single-spaced pages to show this reviewer how much I thought the
reviewer’s one page review lacked any sense of thoughtfulness, thorough-
ness, or academic rigor. Looking back, I realize that my comments would
not likely endear me to this reviewer, change his mind, or provide me with
a champion to encourage the editor to allow this manuscript to be pub-
lished. I received a letter back from the editor (April 22, 1985) that the
second reviewer had recovered from his illness and that all three reviewers
would be evaluating this third version of the manuscript. In early June 1985
the editor informed me that Al Shapero had died and that the review
process would entail reviews from the remaining two reviewers. Not long
after that I received a phone call from the editor asking me to meet with
him at the Academy of Management National Meetings in San Diego that
August to talk about the reviewer’s responses. Apparently my scathing
letter had not had any positive a?ect on convincing the new reviewer of the
error of his views. At this face-to-face meeting I was told that this reviewer
was so o?ended by my remarks that he had not thought a review of the
revised manuscript was necessary. The manuscript should just be rejected.
My reply was argumentative rather than scholarly. At that point I was
asked to consider another revision, and a more conciliatory approach to
addressing the reviewers, and as the editor indicated, ‘through the kind of
professional discussion for which we all strive.’ On October 16, 1985 I sent
another revised version of the manuscript to the editor along with this
rather brief note to the reviewers:
I have modi?ed the tone of the manuscript to re?ect a more professional discus-
sion of the issues, though the manuscript continues to have a strong point of
view. I have inserted what might be called a ‘gentleman’s disclaimer,’ that is, I
state that I have not signalled out the Carland et al. (1984) paper as any better
or worse than other research studies pursuing trait research, and I am using the
Carland et al. (1984) article as an example only. I imply that I do not wish to do
battle with individuals, but simply with the question ‘Who is an entrepreneur?’
which I believe has led the ?eld into a dilemma we can’t get out of. There are
Saying what entrepreneurship is (not) 249
many ?ne and energetic researchers in the entrepreneurship ?eld such as Carland
et al., and I believe we would all bene?t by directing our energies along more
fruitful paths. Although I hope the disclaimer sets a better tone than previously,
I cannot change the thesis of the manuscript. The thesis of the manuscript
remains the same: Research on entrepreneurial traits and characteristics is less
likely to enable us to understand entrepreneurship than research on how entre-
preneurs behave. It is a little idea, but little ideas incrementally move the ?eld to
higher levels of understanding.
Two months later (January 2, 1986) a letter from the editor and another
set of reviews arrived. The third reviewer continued to ?nd areas in the
revised manuscript where the logic of its arguments seemed to break down,
as well as pointing out that, ‘the response to Carland et al., should have
been presented when the article ?rst appeared. It has now been nearly two
years since the article appeared. It’s a little late for a rejoiner.’ The original
reviewer continued to be supportive and o?ered some suggestions about
the need to identify outcomes that might be useful for identifying success.
Another revision was requested, and I complied with another revision and
a letter to the reviewers on February 15, 1986. In this revision I decided to
delete all of the discussion of Carland et al. (1984) from the text and rewrite
the manuscript in whatever manner I could to make the reviewers happy.
In May a letter arrived from the editor indicating that the third reviewer
was still unhappy with the manuscript and the editor asked me to write a
letter indicating how I would address these concerns. On July 4, 1986 I sent
back a three-page letter attempting to, again, clarify my position, and put
the best possible light on the manuscript to address any of the issues
brought up by this reviewer. On August 7, 1986 I received a letter from the
editor rejecting the manuscript.
Well, disappointed, yet undeterred, I wrote the editor a letter challeng-
ing the rejection of the manuscript, and asked for some reconsideration,
given the number of revisions of the manuscript (?ve) as well as some com-
passion for the review problems that developed because of the animosity
between the third reviewer and myself. In addition, I made a phone call
pleading my case. The editor acquiesced and suggested that another
reviewer should be brought on board to o?er to make a ?nal determina-
tion. This review was undertaken and the editor wrote me on December 12,
1986 that the manuscript was, again, rejected. Sigh.
And, the rejections were not yet over. I decided to re-title the manuscript,
‘Who is an entrepreneur? is the wrong question’ and added back all of the
materials involving Carland et al. (1984) and began to send the manuscript
out for review. In all of these letters to these editors I suggested that a rebut-
tal by Carland et al. might be paired with this manuscript. Over the years
versions of this manuscript had been sent out to others in the ?eld, and most
250 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
scholars knew of its existence, and some had actually begun to cite the
manuscript as a working paper. Carland et al. was well aware of the manu-
script, and thought an opportunity to rebut my views would be a helpful way
to clarify their ideas, as well. The manuscript was sent to California
Management Review in January 1987, and rejected in February. The manu-
script was then sent to the Journal of Management in March and rejected in
May. The manuscript was then sent to the Journal of Business Venturing in
June and rejected in October. Finally, I sent the manuscript to the American
Journal of Small Business in November 1987, where the reviewers rejected
that manuscript, as well, but the editor, Ray Bagby decided to publish the
manuscript, along with a companion piece by Carland and Frank Hoy en-
titled ‘Who is an entrepreneur? is a question worth asking’ (Carland, Hoy
and Carland, 1988). And, in 1989 the Editorial Review Board of the journal,
now renamed Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, decided to award the
article ‘Best Article of the Year’ for 1988.
Whew. Well, what to make of this story? At times my intention in the
telling has been to suggest, ‘persistence pays o?,’ that eventually one’s ideas
get published, and, one’s colleagues may even recognize that one’s ideas are
a ‘contribution.’ At other times it is a story about how it is easy (or stupid,
or foolish) to lash out at a reviewer for a perceived ‘poor review,’ and that
the consequences of making a reviewer angry is unlikely to result in the
manuscript getting published. Or, it is a story about ?nding one editor that
could see enough value in the manuscript to decide to publish it. Or, it is a
story about being ‘unlucky’ with the selection of reviewers and the review
process, itself. Or, it is a story about . . .
But, wait, there is a bit more to the story, yet to tell. During the Academy
of Management Review review process it dawned on me that my colleagues
in the entrepreneurship ?eld, had, as I quoted through Cole (1969), ‘some
notion of it – what he thought was, for his purposes, a useful de?nition’ of
entrepreneurship, but that each scholar’s de?nition hadn’t really been made
conscious to themselves, or public to other colleagues in the ?eld. It was at
this point that I undertook a Delphi process among all of the entrepreneur-
ship academics. The details of the Delphi process are described in Gartner
(1990). In general, the process is designed for participants to express their
views on a particular topic, and then all of these various comments are dis-
tributed back to all of the participants so that in subsequent rounds par-
ticipants are queried in a manner to ascertain where there might be
commonalities among their viewpoints. My intentions were to ‘help’ my col-
leagues see their di?erences in their beliefs and views about the nature of
entrepreneurship. I felt that each person had a unique view of what the phe-
nomenon of entrepreneurship entailed; yet each person assumed that others
held similar views. Maybe, through this Delphi process, my colleagues might
Saying what entrepreneurship is (not) 251
reach some consensus as to what entrepreneurship is, or is not. Consensus?
The result of this process revealed to me how fragmented the views of entre-
preneurship scholars actually were, in terms of coming up with some sense
of the essential characteristics of the phenomenon. ‘What are we talking
about when we talk about entrepreneurship?’ (Gartner, 1990) is, then, a
companion piece to the ‘Who is an entrepreneur?’ article. ‘What are we
talking about . . .’ discovers that entrepreneurship scholars have di?ering
views on eight aspects of entrepreneurship as a phenomenon: the entrepre-
neur, innovation, organization creation, creating value, pro?t or non-pro?t,
growth, uniqueness, and ownership. That is, entrepreneurship scholars dis-
agree on each of these eight themes about whether these attributes are
important, or not. For example, some scholars believe that entrepreneurship
involves only pro?t-making enterprises, while some scholars believe that
entrepreneurship can involve non-pro?t or unpro?table enterprises. Some
scholars believe that entrepreneurship only involves growth opportunities
while other scholars disagree. Some scholars believe that entrepreneurship
requires innovation and uniqueness while other scholars disagree. Essen-
tially, then, entrepreneurship scholars disagree about all aspects of entre-
preneurship such that there is no single characteristic that all scholars would
indicate is a facet of the phenomenon that entrepreneurship would have. As
Cole (1969, p. 17) warned ‘And I don’t think you’re going to get farther than
that.’ With these stories in mind . . .
The scholars in this book extend the dialogue of current entrepreneur-
ship scholarship in a number of ways. First, the boundaries of entrepre-
neurshipitself are pushedout toconsider di?erent ways that entrepreneurial
activity occurs, such as the endeavors of taxi owners and taxi drivers in
Caracas, the ongoing conversations of identity creation that occur in an
internet startup in Silicon Valley and a consultancy in Denmark, the drama
of developing a theatre in Sør-Varanger, quilting in Canada, and criminal
activity in Russia. There appears to be no major commonalities among the
kinds of entrepreneurial phenomena that are talked about. Second, the
ways in which entrepreneurship itself is studied also vary in these chapters.
There is participant observation, autobiography, interviews, dramaturgy,
historical analysis, and, I’m sure, other labels for the methods these authors
used to make sense of the entrepreneurial phenomenon they encountered.
And ?nally, there are a variety of connections to other genres of academic
scholarship. I sensed that there were very few citations that all of these
authors shared as a source of common reference. So, as the edges of entre-
preneurship scholarship are pushed farther out to recognize a broader
range of entrepreneurial phenomena, ways of studying this phenomena,
and source ideas for connecting to this phenomena, one can celebrate that
entrepreneurship scholarship seems to be expanding towards a cornucopia
252 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
of variation. I think this trend is inherently positive because entrepreneur-
ship itself demands this requisite variety (Weick, 1979) in order for us to
know and talk about what it is.
One approach towards talking about entrepreneurship that, I believe,
holds great promise is the path taken in a chapter in this book by
Damgaard, Piihl, and Klyver in their construction of a drama, or ?ction,
about an aspect of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship. I have wondered
why there are so few ?ctional accounts of entrepreneurs and their experi-
ences. It would seem that in ?ction one could more fully utilize one’s imag-
ination to grasp many of the subtle, internal, and ephemeral qualities that
seem to be nearly impossible to write about in any of the scholarly forms
available to us. I am sure that because my literary roots are so thin I cannot
readily identify works of ?ction that would appear to have some grasp of
the world of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship that we, as scholars in the
entrepreneurship ?eld frequently encounter. Would we ?nd entrepreneur-
ship in Great Expectations (Dickens, 2003), Moby Dick (Melville, 1992), or
Good Faith (Smiley, 2003)? It might be that the actual experiences of entre-
preneurs are themselves ?ctions, as O’Connor points out in her chapter in
this book. It might be that the ?ctions created by entrepreneurs are more
imaginative than what might be created by any authors of ?ction, so that a
?ction writer’s e?orts would never seem to ring as true to us as the stories
told by these entrepreneurs themselves.
Finally, what may be a cause of concern in the trends that this book may
represent is that, as the boundaries of our ?eld ever continue to expand to
include more kinds of phenomena, more ways of studying these phenom-
ena, and more academic genres for talking about these phenomena, we, as
a community of scholars, become more remote and distant from each
other. Who is talking to each other in this book? What does it mean to come
together as a community of scholars when fewer and fewer of us are likely
to use the same language or talk about the same thing? And, it is particu-
larly troubling if our scholarly connections tend to be ‘out there,’ outside
of our ?eld, rather than within the boundaries of the ?eld itself. Who will
we talk to, if not among ourselves? Can there be a community without
ongoing conversations among us? This conversation, this dialogue occurs
when we reference each other’s work, and work to make connections
between where we are, and where others are in the ?eld (Latour, 1987). So,
as the edges of the entrepreneurship ?eld continue to expand, is the ?eld a
whole or a hole?
The story that I o?er might be one of trying to ?nd the common connec-
tions among us, as entrepreneurship scholars, as we seek to understand a
phenomenon that is inherently about ‘being di?erent’ (Gartner, 2001). Not
only are the people and the situations that we study ‘di?erent,’ I think we,
Saying what entrepreneurship is (not) 253
as scholars in the entrepreneurship ?eld seek to be ‘di?erent,’ as well, in our
approaches, our words, etc. The challenge, and the promise of narrative
approaches, is this ability to give voice to the uniqueness that is every
person’s experience, as well as to connect each story to our common
humanity. As the doctor and poet William Carlos Williams observed:
We have to pay the closest attention to what we say. What patients say tells us
what to think about what hurts them; and what we say tells us what is happen-
ing to us – what we are thinking, and what may be wrong with us . . . Their story,
yours, mine – it’s what we all carry with us on this trip we take, and we owe it to
each other to respect our stories and learn from them (Coles, 1989, p. 30).
254 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
14. Relational constructionism and
entrepreneurship: some key notes
Dian-Marie Hosking in dialogue with Daniel
Hjorth
Dian, when we had the workshop in Stockholm and you were invited to say
something on the theme of constructionism I remember that we, the people at
the workshop, and you, experienced a fruitful conversation, covering various
aspects and problems related to this approach. What we didn’t quite cover,
though, was your relation to entrepreneurship.
I have never met an entrepreneur. Or perhaps I have. My elderly woman
friend who does Bed and Breakfast – is she one? My mother – who began
her own ?orist’s shop – was she? And what about my Asian friends who run
the ever-open corner shop, are they? Are there ‘entrepreneurs’ in more col-
lectivistic societies than ours, or is the concept especially meaningful and
relevant in more individualistic contexts? Perhaps social scientists have
created ‘the entrepreneur’ thus to study them?
As with most concepts of fairly complex composition, constructionism has
emerged in many forms, or, to be more precise, comes to be used in many
di?erent ways. Not least the – if nothing else – ‘linguistic neighbour’ constructi-
vismtends to confuse people. I believe it would be great if you could clarify your
use of constructivism and how this sits in the context of your history of interest
in constructionist approaches.
Many years ago I became interested in a well known ‘contingency model’
of leadership. Speci?cally, my interest was in contingency models as a
potentially useful way of joining talk about persons and contexts and
exploring their interrelations. My journey led me to investigate literatures
that seemed likely to have something to do with leadership including, for
example, studies of managerial behaviour and of entrepreneurs. As I trav-
elled, I came to feel that centring one particular person (such as a leader,
manager or entrepreneur) and focusing on their personal characteristics
and behaviours gave too much signi?cance to that individual. Relatedly, I
had problems with the treatment of contexts as ‘out there’, available to be
manipulated through the sel?sh acts of the centred individua1.
63
These
255
analytical moves had the e?ect of over-emphasizing stability (what) at the
cost of processes and change (how). Separating persons and contexts also
made it di?cult to explore their mutually constructive relations.
To be very brief, I came to the view that the ?eld of Organizational
Behaviour and related ?elds were dominated by approaches that (a) treat
people as things, (b) independent of other entities (people and non-human
objects or contexts for human action), and (c) in ‘subject–object’ (S–O) rela-
tion. So, for example, when persons – let’s call thementrepreneurs – are the-
orized as Subject then they are treated as able to knowand to in?uence Other
as Object. Other is considered only from the subject’s point of view – as an
instrument for the Subject in the pursuit of their (supposedly neutral, ratio-
nal, and generally valuable) purposes. Of course the reader of a text brings
something to their reading of a text. So I should not say that some approach
‘IS’ entitative . . . ‘is either this or that’. This would again be ?xing the iden-
tity of someone or something, treating that identity as if it were independent
of my relation with it. Perhaps we should rather say that certain stories –
with their particular characters (entrepreneurs and . . .), storylines (risk-
taking . . .) and moral point (heroism, success despite hardship etc) – seem
more entitative (Hosking and Morley, 1991) than others.
So, what sort of story ‘lets go’ of the overly individualistic view of
persons (as independently existing, bounded entities) together with its asso-
ciated overly ‘culturalist’ view of societies, structures, organizations (as
independently existing, bounded entities)? One such story is ‘construc-
tivism’. It has been around for a very long time. In western psychology, it is
re?ected in the (early twentieth century) shift from talk of sensation to talk
of perception. This ‘cognitivist’ approach assumes ‘the world’ provides
sense data, and individual minds process this data to produce knowledge
about the world. Constructivism says that people cannot know the world
as it really is. Rather the mind ‘combines what is in the head, with what is
in the world’ so to speak. The term ‘social constructivism’ is used to refer
to a related story that pays particular attention to social in?uences and the
e?ects they have on our knowledge claims. In both cases, the interest is in
rationality – on the accuracy of our knowledge – and on how closely our
actions re?ect that knowledge.
If I may interrupt here and ask you to describe where you think constructivism
becomes inadequate and what constructionism instead can provide, what e?ects
this approach has, so to speak.
In constructivism the sharp (entitative) separation of individuals from
other objects is blurred by cognitive activities and social relations. The lan-
guage of sense ‘making’ (rather than sense taking) provides a way to signal
this constructivist position. So, for example, some explicitly speak of
256 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
leaders as those who in?uence other people’s constructions of reality. And
now researchers in the area of entrepreneurship seem increasingly attracted
to talk of sense making. Constructivism and social constructivism are part
of a wider shift in the sciences from naïve to critical realism. In my view,
they are now part of ‘normal science’ and as such, relatively uncontrover-
sial. But to answer your question, is this shift adequate? And does this shift
do enough to deal with my earlier expressed concerns about contingency
theorizing? For me, the answer is no. In my view, other possibilities deserve
serious attention. In particular, I am interested in:
? de-centring particular individuals (that is, entrepreneurs) and,
instead, centring relational processes;
? letting go of talk about individuals, mind operations (including sense
making) and knowledge, to
? instead talk of relational processes as inter-actions that
? (re)construct identities and worlds as local rationalities or cultures.
? This opens up the possibility that relations could be inclusive (par-
ticipative) rather than exclusive (between independent existences), a
possibility that
? includes researchers – who may re-construct their participation as
part of, rather than apart from, the relational processes they are
studying. This is also a way to
? locate power in relational processes and to link talk of power to talk
of local realities and relations between them; at the same time –
? assuming the complexity of realities and relations by exploring mul-
tiple and changing constructions, and
? their moral (not just pragmatic/instrumental) qualities.
The above constitute some key features of what I regard as ‘relational’ or
‘social’ constructionism.
Reading other texts of yours and your co-authors, you describe a multilogical
inquiry practice which is particularly precise in articulating how construction-
ism, especially in the form you call relational, is di?erent from constructivist
approaches, treating self- and world-making as two separate (intra- and inter-
personal) processes. When I read this, this rejection of a dualist position, rela-
tional constructionism to me shares the spirit of Foucault’s work and his intense
rejection of the individualist/subjectivist bias in our scienti?c culture – the
in?uence of a Cartesian model of epistemology and ontology as two separate
issues. A relational ontology/epistemology, abandoning this separation, is
described in your writings where you argue that constructions of self and other
are relational, i.e. related to each other and to the discursive practices of partic-
ular local and historically related cultures (Hosking, 1999). Also this I believe is
consistent with Foucault’s description of how we can counteract the Cartesian
Relational constructionism and entrepreneurship 257
re?ex. He writes: ‘. . . we should ask: under what conditions and through what
forms can an entity like the subject appear in the order of discourse; what posi-
tions does it occupy; what functions does it exhibit; and what rules does it follow
in each type of discourse?’ (1977, pp. 137–8).
Foucault’s ‘method’, which I think we should describe as anti-method, always
included a focus on discourse from the double focus on the historical conditions
of the emergence of discourses and the regulations of their ‘e?ectiveness’ in
social ?elds of practice. It seems to me that relational constructionism describes
this as the focus on social processes rather than on individuals, and stresses that
attention is directed towards social processes theorized as language based pro-
cesses of co-ordination, co-ordinations that also construct self in relation to
other. Now, and excuse this long route, do you recognize these ‘touching points’
between relational constructionism and a Foucauldian poststructuralist
approach? In addition, I would like to recall a sense of danger I had when
reading these descriptions of constructionism, a danger that this approach
directs our attention towards the future and its making in the present, but
perhaps not towards history. Now I know that referring to history like that is
imprecise; I do this, however, to leave space for your description of relational
constructionism’s use of history – of whatever kind – and how this danger might
be avoided.
It is perhaps relevant to note that people speak of relational (or ‘social’)
constructionism to mean many di?erent things. Often they seem to be relat-
ing a tale of constructivism – as if it were new. And often the tale seems to
embrace modernist assumptions. Much more rarely a postmodern narra-
tive is developed – as in the present case – and as in the related work of
Foucault. This brings me to a related point that, in my view, relational con-
structionism is best viewed as a thought style, as a ‘theory of theories’. It
embraces assumptions that are importantly di?erent from modernist and
critical realist perspectives. One important consequence is that relational
constructionism cannot just be ‘picked up’ and ‘used’ as a seemingly more
fashionable alternative to other theories, as many seem to want to do. For
example, theory, method and data are now seen as so interwoven that the
distinctions make little sense. For this reason, the term ‘data’ probably will
not be used (it is too suggestive of a view of facts as independent of theory
and methods). Similarly, ‘methods’ – all methods – are viewed as ways of
constructing realities.
I like the concept of thought style. It brings out the aesthetic dimension of doing
research that I believe is always underemphasized. In another time the concept
of paradigm might have been used. This, in turn, was accompanied by another
concept which, I believe, would also be a candidate for describing the resistance
to an intellectual shopping mall attitude on the part of the thinker, that is, that
one could just pick up, as you put it, a style when it seems convenient. The
concept I think of is of course incommensurability. I also acknowledge that
‘paradigm incommensurability – method’ makes up a consistent package.
‘Thought style – the reality-constructing e?ects of style – ways of constructing
258 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
realities’ would then be, if not another, so at least another package. I would like
you to stay a bit with this discussion of the relations between research style,
knowledge and realities. Let me ask like this: Are there arguments for the second
package due to speci?c, historical problems of the ?rst ‘package’ when used in
thinking and writing? That is, are the concept-relations in the ‘?rst package’ that,
though inevitably being productive when used, actively locks us into a speci?c,
perhaps even monopolizing perspective, one which pulls writers and readers into
a reality-constructing process you want to avoid?
Well, I’m with you up until your last point – where I’m not sure I know what
you mean. Perhaps it’s relevant to say that, in my view, relational construc-
tionism de-centres (but does not reject) the assumption of a ‘real world’ and
instead speaks of ‘relational realities’ – what people make real through their
interactions. One important consequence is that ‘research’ now has a
changed meaning – not to ‘tell it how it is’ – but, for example, to ‘tell how
it might become’. More generally, research might strive to be ‘world enlarg-
ing’ (Harding, 1986), to open up new possible identities and (local) worlds
– perhaps by ‘telling’ – but perhaps also by shifting emphasis from outsider
knowledge to participative change work.
There are consequences here for how researchers conduct inquiry processes in
the ?eld. Consequences that also seem common to poststructuralist and rela-
tional constructionist research. Neither approach can prioritize researcher
forms of knowing over practitioner forms of knowing. Indeed, I think it is pos-
sible to suggest, in the context of this book, that this general scepticism before
the traditional status of scienti?c knowledge is also a precondition for the emer-
gence of the widely spread attention to narrative forms of knowledge. Instead
of asking in order to ?ll out the blanks of a great theoretical jigsaw puzzle,
researchers would emphasize the co-creation of realities in processes of
knowing. This makes the centrality of ethical questions even more evident than
perhaps traditionally has been the case. When we think of relational construc-
tionism and ?eldwork, for example the study of a company-in-the-making or of
the processes of organization creation pushing the boundaries for ‘what is’ in
order to launch a new project, what are the possibilities for this kind of research
in terms of what comes out of it? How can we frame the relations between
researcher and society at large from this horizon? As a student of social pro-
cesses I believe every research project is a process of becoming a researcher. Now,
from a relational-constructionist point of view, or style of thinking, the question
is what you think is characteristic of such a process of becoming researcher,
having the question of ethics in mind?
OK, let’s backtrack a little and give a historical context to this style of think-
ing. Then we can look at some of the key characteristics of the process of
‘becoming’. First, the themes of what I am calling ‘relational construction-
ism’ have a very long history. If we just turn to relatively recent times we may
say that they can be found in many literatures including, for example in:
the philosophy of inquiry, feminism and feminist critiques of science, the
Relational constructionism and entrepreneurship 259
sociology of knowledge, cognitive and social psychology, interactionist,
cognitive, and phenomenological sociologies, radical family therapy, most
systems theories, and critical social anthropology. Constructionist themes
also are prominent in discussions of (post)modernism. Some well known
contributors to constructionist thinking include Mead, Bateson, Berger and
Luckmann, Schutz, Gar?nkel, Gergen, Foucault, and many others.
A good deal of constructionist work explores ‘what’ constructions
people produce. Sometimes researchers use the language of ‘discourses’
and sometimes the language of ‘narrative’ to refer to these.
64
Other work
explores ‘how’ constructions – of personhood, of entrepreneurship, of cul-
tures, relationships – are produced. I will go on to outline one view of the
processes in which realities are (re)constructed, actively maintained, and
changed.
Multiple inter-actions. First, I centre inter-action rather than its ‘prod-
ucts’. Realities and relationships are made in written and spoken (concep-
tual) language; in such cases it is useful to speak of inter-actions of texts,
that is, of text – con-text relations. In addition, realities and relationships
are made in co-ordinations of non-verbal actions, things, and events;
65
in
such cases we can speak, for example, of inter-acts or of ‘act-supplement’
relations (for example, Gergen, 1995). The most general point here is our
talk about relating, regardless of what is being related to what; we can use
the term inter-action to embrace all of these relational possibilities. Inter-
actions can include a handshake or some other non-verbal gestures; can be
conversations about local markets and strategy; can be the playing of a
string quartet, etc. Inter-actions involve texts, actions, objects, and artefacts
available to be made part of some ongoing process, to be re-constructed,
made relevant or irrelevant, meaningful or meaningless, good or bad, by
being put into relation.
As an entrepreneurship researcher, let me re?ect further on what you say. If the
study of entrepreneurship is gravitating towards the theme of possibilities,
opportunities, chances, and this certainly characterizes the development of
entrepreneurship research during the 1990s onwards, what are some of the impli-
cations of this constructionist style of thinking? On the one hand it seems we are
o?ered a more sober view of what used to pass as ‘a ?ash of inspiration’, ‘divine
genius’, ‘strategic decision’ or ‘creative mind’. For this, in a constructionist lan-
guage, is possible to describe in its more minute details as relational possibilities
traditionally falling outside a more roughly cut scienti?c language perhaps un?t
for studies of entrepreneurship or any form of social creativity? Talk of the indi-
vidual entrepreneur as a ?xed entity (who thus vanishes in relational construc-
tionism) obscures what is always the case: the continuous becomings of life
present multiple relational possibilities that make human living – varying with
place and time – into an entrepreneurial act of creating organization. Creating
an organization of these multiple relational possibilities produces the result of a
‘form a life’. From a relational constructionist point of view, talk of the entre-
260 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
preneur is very obviously (though implicitly) talk about power. It seems that one
can form this (entrepreneurial) life only by constructing power over others. The
question then is how anything – creation processes in particular as they always
explore in-betweens – come to pass as individual achievements? For this is how
entrepreneurship has been studied.
Well one reason lies with the multiple, simultaneous, and often tacit quali-
ties of construction. Construction processes consist of multiple, simultane-
ous and interrelated inter-acts, many of which are tacit. Take, for example,
some newly announced corporate mission. Relating to this text will prob-
ably involve multiple con/texts such as, for example, discourses of local and
of corporate management, of previous change initiatives, of being ‘messed
about’, of a strategic re-orientation . . . And not one reality but multiple
social realities may be made in the course of the many di?erent inter-
actions. Some may speak of the mission statement as the latest manage-
ment joke, it may be used as the basis for team brie?ngs, referenced in
development workshops, become a key narrative in stock market activities
and so on.
It is not just that inter-actions are multiple, they also are simultaneous
and many of the supplements or con/texts will be tacit. For example, the
deceptively simple coordination of shaking hands relies upon reference to
a great many local cultural practices to do with greeting, polite and impol-
ite forms, when one form is used rather than some other – with whom – in
what relations . . . It is perhaps, the tacit quality of many relations that leads
some to construct an entitative narrative, for example, of entrepreneurs,
markets, a business enterprise – encouraging the view that ‘it’ is an ‘it’ –
observable, singular, and relatively stable. It is in these processes of simul-
taneously relating multiple texts/acts, many of which are tacit, that local
realities are (re)produced and changed.
This would be possible to see as a description of entrepreneurship, if we change
to: processes of simultaneously relating multiple texts/acts, many of which are
tacit, so as to create local realities. A question here, reading your description of
the multiplicities and interrelatedness of relations and construction processes, is:
when do we have the possibility to identify and describe a construction process?
What are we looking for when we study these, and what would lead us to describe
a possible relational construct as an actualized one? In e?ect, then, I suppose I
could ask: what guides our style of inquiry in the ?eld?
Local-social-historical constructions. In the course of inter-action, stabilized
e?ects or patterns are (re)produced as some actions/texts are supplemented
in ways that socially certify them as relevant and perhaps helpful and/or true
(Hosking and Morley, 1991). These stabilized e?ects will include identities,
social conventions, organizational, and societal structures.
Relational constructionism and entrepreneurship 261
So entrepreneurial processes would then thrive on the skilful use of identities,
conventions, and structures in order to direct a power to produce. The result of
such production, by the force of convention, the re-production of a certain style
of thought, implies the presence of an entrepreneur and so all processes and rela-
tions, in retrospect, are reduced to creative minds, strategic decision making, and
products and companies, the lazy celebration of an entitative world.
But not all texts will be supplemented: some will go unnoticed; others will
be supplemented – but in ways that discredit them as irrelevant, inappro-
priate, unhelpful or untrue. Producing, reproducing, and changing stabi-
lized e?ects can now be seen as located in inter-actions rather than
produced by individual acts, for example, of those someone calls entrepre-
neurs. Inter-actions (re)construct power by certi?cation or discrediting. For
example, the pro?ered hand may or may not have the e?ect of inviting it to
be grasped and shaken. Indeed, as any comedian knows, it is possible to
play with that invitation, for example, by walking past the person with the
outstretched hand, by grabbing their hand and wrestling them to the
ground, by placing a wet ?sh in it and so on. We may say that a particular
act invites a range of supplements (or con-texts) – but not anything goes –
there are limits to what will be socially certi?ed. Once a particular perfor-
mance becomes ‘stabilized’ (for example, a greeting convention) then other
possibilities have to be improvised and it may be harder to have some new
pattern socially validated – after all, we already know what is ‘real and
good’. Such di?culties are especially likely to be encountered when subject-
object relations – that implicate discourses or ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ – are
already ‘in place’ as stabilized e?ects.
As an exercise of using the language tools of relational constructionism I could
attempt descriptions of entrepreneurship that provide examples of how we
could proceed in this style of thought. As an example we could now say that what
we have referred to as entrepreneurship are multiple self-reality related/relating
processes of invitational acts playing on the socially stabilized through either
con?rming or discrediting those stabilities. The power to produce ‘new worlds’
is an e?ect of combining the invitational acts of ‘what could become’ with the
con?rming/discrediting acts of ‘what is’. I believe, as a reader of this book, that
we ?nd many examples of this form of organizational creativity; for example in
Lindh de Montoya’s stories from Caracas, in O’Connor’s story of a company-
in-the-making, in the life of Foss’ ‘rural entrepreneur’, and in Rehn and Taalas’
stories of social creativity. It seems, then, that this language of relational con-
structionism is quite generally applicable. Brie?y touching upon this issue of
general-speci?c or universal-local, what would we have had to take into account
had this text been centred on a ?eld-study?
My reference to ‘local’ should be understood in contrasting relation to
general or universal. I wish to underline that social practices, and what is
262 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
likely to be socially validated or discredited, are local to a particular ‘com-
munity of practice’ (Lave and Wenger, 1991). To put it the other way
around, I am not talking about external realities and knowledge that is
generalizable to all communities and historical epochs. This said, ‘local’
could be as broad as ‘Western’, post-enlightenment constructions of
science. Equally, local could be local to a company during a particular
period in its history, local to a particular community of practice ‘within’
that company, or local to a business network in southern Sweden.
As I observed earlier, becoming a ‘local’, being warranted as culturally
competent, is achieved by relating in ways that are locally warranted or
socially certi?ed. ‘Insiders’ perform their identities as co-constructors of a
particular community (and they probably participate in many) when they
act in ways that are locally warranted as ‘real and good’.
66
So, in the
example of the handshake, outsiders are soon identi?ed when they try to
do this in cultures that have other greeting conventions such as kissing,
bowing or rubbing noses. Particular ways of ‘going on’ in relation may seem
?xed and may be taken for granted as ‘how the world really is’. However,
we should not forget either the essential artfulness of these ‘e?ects’ or the
processes that make and re-make them.
Entrepreneurial processes, in the context of what you have just said, could be
described also as possible because of this generic openness of history and future.
‘What is’ can always be destabilized through narrating how ‘it’ has become and
how ‘it’ continues to become reproduced as ‘present’. Entrepreneurial processes
change/interrupt people’s beliefs in the necessary continuation of outcomes of
the past in present ways of ‘going on’. Great ideas, convincing stories, timing,
desire, and so on, these are all useful to accomplish such interruptions.
Part of what ‘local’ means is the historical quality of relational processes.
They are after all, processes – so they are ongoing – making, re-making and
changing constructions. There is always a relational context – any and all
acts supplement some preceding act(s) – any and all texts may be related to
many con/texts. Inter-actions, and particularly regularly repeated ones
‘make history’, so to speak. As an example, announcing a new mission state-
ment might well make no sense (non-sense) unless resourced by discourses
concerning, for example, collective working, management hierarchies,
‘singing to the same song sheet’ . . . Similarly, a nineteenth century factory
worker probably would not have claimed to be ‘doing research’ when chal-
lenged for standing around seemingly doing nothing. And had he or she
done so, it seems unlikely that such a claim would have been warranted!
Relational realities. Inter-actions co-construct people and worlds; self-
making and world-making now are understood as co-genetic. This means
that self and other (people, material objects, events, social structures) exist
Relational constructionism and entrepreneurship 263
– as social realities – only as relational dualities and not as separate entities
(for example, Mead, 1934; Weigert, 1983). Identity (and other assumed
entity characteristics such as personality, organizational goals and struc-
tures) is not singular and ?xed and does not function as the de?ning char-
acteristic of someone or something. Rather, in a relational view identity
gets re-storied as a self – other – relationship construction. Identity (and
other ‘characteristics’) become understood as (a) relational and so (b)
multiple and variable (for example, a di?erent identity in di?erent self-other
relations), and (c) as a ‘done’ rather than possessed.
So, doing an entrepreneurial identity could be described as doing a mosaic of
invitational acts, as manifesting great audience sensitivity, resulting in useful
responses from as many as possible. This increases the organizational power to
produce and connects more desires to produce. It strikes me as an important
lesson to learn from relational constructionism – that we should study self- and
world-making as co-genetic. It adds lots of useful re?ections on the old but still
important discussion on whether to focus on the individual, the act or the
process (or all, but often understood as separate) in entrepreneurship research.
So in sum . . . ?
In sum, relational processes are ‘reality-constituting practices’ (Edwards
and Potter, 1992, p. 27) that construct markets, management, hierarchy, all
social realities . . . what is (is not), and what is good (bad). Further, these
realities are multiple and local rather than singular and transcendent.
Processes only construct the way someone or something is here and now;
other relations always are possible. Processes are constructed in multiple,
simultaneous, inter-actions, and reference co-ordinations already in
process. Relational processes are processes of self-making and world-
making; self and other are co-genetic.
SOME REFLECTIONS ON NARRATIVE AND
DISCURSIVE APPROACHES
When considered from a relational constructionist point of view, all
inquiry, all knowing, all action can be considered as narrative. The
‘inquirer’ participates in relational processes – in making self as an inquirer
in relation to other (for example, Howard, 1991), and in relation to narra-
tives of science, mathematics, entrepreneurship and so on.
67
In addition,
some approaches explicitly use the language of story telling or ‘narrative’
and these have become increasingly popular in studies of entrepreneurship
(see, for example, present volume), in psychology (Sarbin, 1986) and in
organization studies (for example, O’Connor, 1997). This said, it seems to
me that relatively little ‘narrative’ work takes a postmodern or relational
264 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
constructionist stance (but see Boje, 1995). Instead, investigators typically
treat narratives as ‘mind stu?’ – as the other’s subjective knowledge (some
sort of cognitivist orientation prevails), and position their self as an inde-
pendent observer generating and analysing data in order to know what
really is the case.
In contrast, relational constructionism positions con/texts (or inter-
actions) as more or less local, embedded in multiple inter-textual relations.
The embedded, situated, or local-relational quality of actions/texts has two
important implications.
68
First, narratives are regarded as social and not
‘individual’ constructions and so, for example, interview transcripts are not
treated as representations of a person’s subjective knowledge. Second, the
purpose of inquiry now may be thought of as being to ‘articulate local and
practical concerns’ (Gergen and Thatchenkerry, 1996, emphasis added).
This means articulating multiplicity, what some call ‘plurivocality’, and in
this way ‘giving voice’ to practices and possibilities that usually are muted,
suppressed or silenced. Inquiry is not to discover one ‘truth’ or to repro-
duce a mono-logical construction of change (Dunford and Jones, 2000).
We should stress the following in the story so far:
? Story construction is a process of creating reality
? in which self/story teller is clearly part of the story.
? Narratives are relational realities, socially constructed, not individual
subjective realities.
? Narratives are situated – they are con-textualized in relation to mul-
tiple local-cultural-historical acts/texts.
? Inquiry may articulate multiple narratives and relations.
? Change-work works with multiple realities and power relations, for
example, to
? facilitate ways of relating that are open to possibilities.
Studies in the style of relational constructionismseem, like most poststructural-
ist studies, to be less interested in the results or products of processes as such.
Herein lies a point of departure for criticismof the old systematization of knowl-
edge into disciplines, which often has formed according to the belief that some
empirically isolatable unit/entity – like ‘the entrepreneur’ or ‘the business’ – pro-
vides an accurate basis or ground for knowledge. However, such a system for
knowledge creation is clearly reductive from a relational constructionist style of
thinking. Knowledge (about objects, products or social processes) is not interest-
ing other than as a result of a limited interest in socially stabilized e?ects. In what
is surely a necessary self-re?exive turn, relational constructionism, as I read you,
problematizes the process of knowing. This makes me think of Derrida’s viewon
the becoming of knowing-processes, attention to the structuring of structures, the
simultaneous tension between the impossibility of relativism (using concepts
already draws on their meanings in histories of socially stabilized plays of
Relational constructionism and entrepreneurship 265
signi?cations), and the impossibility of closure (every concept relies on a
repressed other continuously promising yet always postponing a ground or origin
of meaning). With this openness, such a play of meanings, comes the need to
attend to power. For closure, stabilization, truth, ideologies now become power-
e?ects in the social ?eld. These e?ects are always part of attempts to produce
something depending on the e?ciency and circulation of truth-e?ects. This is also
expressed in poststructuralists’ and relational constructionists’ common use of
power as ‘power toproduce/create’ rather thanpower as positional asset or ‘power
over’ others in hierarchical relationships. Again, this follows Foucault’s distinc-
tion between negative (domination) and positive-productive power. The shift in
focus helps us write histories of present states of domination; it helps us describe
di?erent domains of knowledge and their following production of exteriority or
ground (how discursive formations operate); and it helps us study the productiv-
ity of strategies (e?ective formations of power-knowledge) in ?elds of practices.
I would like you to develop this issue of power fromthe perspective of our earlier
conversation.
POWER OVER AND POWER TO
Ok, I need to go back to my earlier comments about entitative discourses.
I said that these necessarily assume subject-object relations and privilege
the subjects’ constructions. Central to the Subject-Object discourse are
entitative assumptions about reality (ontology or what exists), what we can
know about it (epistemology) and how we can build that knowledge (meth-
odology). Knower and known are treated as if separate and separateness
warrants the scienti?c way of knowing – relative to other ways of knowing.
Knowing entrepreneurs and knowing scientists gather information about
the other (subordinates, the environment, the research object . . .) and then
use their knowledge to in?uence, re-form, change the other as object.
Commentators have spoken of this as a relationship of ‘power over’, that
is, as power of subject over object (for example, Gergen, 1995).
Many research methodologies reproduce mainstream conceptions of
subject-object relations, knowledge, and methodology. Examples include
conventional action research where knowing scientists re?ect back their
knowledge of the locals and their practices and, in so doing, also reproduce
their (the scientists) discourses of science, reality, generalizable knowledge,
how things usually are done elsewhere, notions of better-worse and so on.
Yet these (implicit) discourses are unavailable for critical re?ection.
Similarly, many top-down change e?orts try to impose one voice – one local
reality – to get others to buy in to some shared metaphor, mission, or vision,
or to ‘be ?exible’. Further, they often try to do so through constructing
subject-object ways of relating where some manager (for example, entre-
preneur) knows what is necessary and tries to in?uence (bargain, negotiate,
266 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
persuade, transform . . .) others to ‘agree’ with them (for example, Carnall,
1990; Dyer, 1984).
When considered on the basis of the present relational premises, subject-
object relations and ‘power over’ are just possible and not necessary relation-
ship constructions. Self and other need not be constructed (a) as binary
opposites, that is, as mutually exclusive and opposed, (b) as ‘impermeable’ or
(c) as having ?xed boundaries. So, for example, inclusive, non-hierarchical
ways of relating can be constructed in processes that treat multiple di?erent
relational realities as di?erent but equal. Non-hierarchical ways of relating
canconstruct ‘power to’ inthe sense of power tosustainmultiple interdepen-
dent local ways of ‘going on’ in ‘di?erent but equal’ relation (Gergen, 1995;
Hosking, 1995).
As an entrepreneurship researcher I would re?ect upon the possible future(s) of
the concept of success, often used as a legitimizing tool vis-a-vis practitioners to
get them interested in or to sponsor entrepreneurship studies. Success would
be the accomplishment that one preferred world (view) dominates possible others,
the e?ect being that those participating in the launching of a dominant view get
the bene?t of playing on home ground so to speak. Of course, entrepreneurship
can be read both as a formof successful domination of the social ?eld of possible
actions of others (probably the preferred reading in communitarian approaches),
and as the power to sustain multiple interdependent ‘styles’ or ‘ways of doing it’
so as to expand the possibilities of actions of others. The question is how entre-
preneurship takes advantage of this latter style of organizing this freeing of
desires to produce/create. Or, is this impossible to achieve froman economic point
of view, and therefore, impossible to use for an understanding of entrepreneurial
processes if this is tied to the concept of success in turn limited to an economic
understanding? Reading your description of ‘power to’ as someone eager to apply
this in entrepreneurship studies, I could see howthis concept of power(-relations)
provides a language for studying and theorizing entrepreneurship as a collective
act, as social forms of creativity, as organizational creativity.
In my view, the concept of ‘power to’ seems likely to open up a number of
(re)constructions. First, it opens up possibilities rather than closing them
down, for example, through a problem-oriented approach, monological
de?nitions of success (and failure), and other related entitative assump-
tions. Second, a community-based (local) view of rationality grounded in
‘unforced agreement’ and re?ected in coordinated action (for example,
Rorty, 1991)
69
replaces the assumption of universal rationality. Third, the
moral (rather than instrumental) quality of relational processes is centred.
Following Rorty, perhaps the ‘best’ that many can do to be ‘reasonable’ and
‘moral’ is to ‘discuss any topic . . . in a way which eschews dogmatism,
defensiveness, and righteous indignation’ (Rorty, 1991b, p. 37).
The above seems to be an argument for opening up to multiple realities
– rather than imposing one local-cultural-historical reality over others.
Relational constructionism and entrepreneurship 267
This, in the context of the earlier conversation, sounds like it could be describ-
ing entrepreneurial processes. Perhaps only half of it, the opening part, leaves us
to focus also on the creation of order that each new form of organization, and
organizational creativity, demands. Multiplicity, I believe, is crucial for creativity
and therefore crucial for the opening up of possibilities.
Relational constructionist writings and practices give great emphasis to
inquiry and change-work that generates and works with multiplicity rather
than suppressing or homogenizing it through the application of statistical
procedures or through management drives to ‘consensus’. In general terms,
multiplicity can be constructed in non-hierarchical ways that recognize and
support di?erence and that construct ‘power to’. This may mean including
everyone who has an involvement in some issue through participative
change-work. However, the point of participation is no longer to increase
the likelihood of acceptance of someone else’s decision, or to increase
the quality of a (consensus) solution. Rather it is a way of including and
enabling multiple local realities in di?erent but equal relation.
Last, since relational processes construct realities there is no requirement
to narrate activities as either inquiry or intervention – a ‘both-and’
approach is enabled. So, for example, action research can be developed in
more participatory ways along with related methodologies such as co-
inquiry and collaborative inquiry. Similarly, change-work shifts from the
language of intervention to the language of ‘transformation’ in order to
capture the notion of change ‘from within’. Attention shifts from the dis-
course of inquiry, for example, to care-full questioning and care-full listen-
ing as a way of ‘doing’ di?erent but equal relations, and to entrepreneuring
rather than entrepreneurs. I have never met an entrepreneur, have I?
268 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
Notes
1. I will argue in this chapter that the linguistic and performative turn are complementary
and both are needed to conceive a prosaic approach to entrepreneurship.
2. Which has been no sinecure, as we can read in Deetz’s plea (2003) to reclaim the legacy
of the linguistic turn.
3. What is paralogy? Consensus is only ‘a particular state of discussion, not its end’
(Lyotard, 1984: 65). The end is paralogy ‘a move (the importance of which is often not
recognized until later) played in the pragmatics of knowledge’ (p. 61). The ends are
moves that seek to contribute to diversity, uncertainty and undecidability, it is dissensus
or apprenticeship in resistance because invention is always born of dissensus (Bertens,
1995: 127). For a plea to cherish (more) paralogy in organization studies, see
Czarniawska (2001).
4. While with a very di?erent philosophical background. While Derrida ‘departed’ from de
Saussure, Bakhtin rejected him, even as a point of departure (see Holquist, 2002).
5. This fragment originally appeared in: Problema soderzhaniia, materiala, I formy v slo-
vesnom khudozhestvennom tvorchestve [The problem of content, material, and form in
verbal creative art]. See Morson and Emerson, 1990, p. xix.
6. There is little doubt that Bakhtin greatly admires the realist novel and its ability to
embrace the sense of the presentness of the present in a way that other genres don’t, most
notably the Greek Romance, but also such autobiographical genres that he refers to as
the analytic type and the energetic type (Bakhtin, 1981, pp. 140–42).
7. For a more elaborated analysis of the becoming process of YalaYala, see Boutaiba, 2003.
8. Ventures and Consulting were the names of their two working areas.
9. A three-year education aimed at developing competencies in project management and
entrepreneurship. The title of the candidates produced from this school is ‘chaos pilots’.
10. Translated into Danish, they were oftentimes distancing themselves from what they
called ‘1ønslavementalitet’, which is probably a notion with a sharper connotation than
the English wage earner.
11. Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist (1984, pp. 79–80) also eloquently describe the
tension between centrifugal forces and centripetal forces as a ‘constant struggle between
the centripetal forces that seek to close the world in a system and the centrifugal forces
that battle completedness in order to keep the world open to becoming’.
12. A manner of thinking that can be found especially in the essay on the chronotope in the
Dialogic Imagination (Bakhtin, 1981) essay on the Bildungsroman in Speech Genres and
other Late Essays (Bakhtin, 1986).
13. Compare the ?rst meeting with YalaYala and the poster on the wall stating: Speed is God
and Time is the Devil.
14. And, as already mentioned, these included friends and family and, most importantly,
themselves.
15. As one might notice, YalaYala was rather ambivalent towards working with consultancy
in the ?rst place. For one, they didn’t want to work with the kind of consultancy jobs their
anti-?xation point worked with (short-term jobs, when generally talked about). They
wanted to do long-term strategic consultancy, but they didn’t really have these kinds of
jobs. Yet, generally speaking once again, it seemed quite clear that the whole community
wanted to work more with ventures. This was an area that really seemed newand exciting.
16. How much time was actually spent on leads versus the amount of time spent on actual
jobs was not clear for anybody. But some members typically estimated that it was too
much time, in spite of the potential hidden in them.
269
17. Thus, before they actually started as a company, they had been talking about doing so
for approximately half a year.
18. The ideal of public exteriority may be said to have built in an ideal of simultaneity.
Hence, being open on all sides also means that others can enter into dialogue whenever,
and with potential impact, in a particular process.
19. That is, the tendency to narrate every moment as if it was a threshold, highly laden with
possibilities for transforming life.
20. Of which the rogue, the clown, and the fool are praised ?gures for their ability to subvert
through a demasking that can be that of wise naivete, laughter, parody, etc.
21. When YalaYala was established as a company, everybody paid an amount of money, and
the people who had their own ?rms brought these into the community. Thus, the ven-
tures they had in YalaYala and that did have some money involved was actually created
before YalaYala started.
22. The ethnomethodologist Harold Gar?nkel has become renowned for exposing and ques-
tioning the taken-for-granted by directly attacking it. For instance, he has been asking
students to go into shops and negotiate prices of goods where none thought any nego-
tiation was possible. In other words, Gar?nkel has got a reputation for producing
counter-cultural moves.
23. Pro?uence is the literary word for the sense that the story is getting somewhere.
24. Hence, they had formally started out in December 1999, and the movement of a very
intense focus upon selling slowly grew larger from around the time that the ?rst employee
was explicitly allocated time to work with the venture project.
25. In fact, it was a remark she didn’t tell me, but a colleague of mine, Torben Jensen, who
later did his investigation into United Spaces.
26. See Bakhtin, 1984, for a thorough discussion on Dostoevsky’s ‘invention of a literary
personality’ that never coincides with himself, because he is always in the process of
becoming.
27. According to Bakhtin (1981, notably pp. 89–95), adventure time is a way of under-
standing experience that was perfected very early on in the Greek romantic novel. The
typical plot of this story was organized around the meeting of hero and heroine and
the sudden ?are-up of passion and love between these two. The remainder of this
romantic novel, the large bulk of the text that is, is about all the obstacles the hero and
heroine must go through in order to be reunited. Yet, the important thing here is that
no matter what happens, no matter how much time goes by, their passion and love
remain absolutely the same. Therefore, adventure time is all about coincidence, waiting
for that particular moment where the plane of the ?rst moment can continue in a
manner absolutely una?ected by everything in between, by anything in the middle, so
to speak.
28. At the time I spoke to the CEO, he still missed a more overt support from the rest of the
members, notably during the actual interactions where the potential for a dialogue that
faced the internal di?erences was there.
29. A thorough overview of anthropology’s contributions to studies of entrepreneurship can
be found in Stewart (1991) and in the Introduction in Swedberg (2000).
30. For anthropological studies on entrepreneurs in Africa see, for example, Clark (1994),
Hart (1975) and Lewis (1976); for Asia, see Davis (1973), Dewey (1962), Evers and
Schrader (1994) and Ward (1960).
31. Although owners are free to set their own fees, the going rate in 2001 up to writing
(March 2002) was 30 000 Bs. a day (15 000 Bs. on Sundays). National and religious hol-
idays were free of charge. In a normal week in 2001, the taxi would thus bring in 195 000
Bs. for its owner (then $300), a sum that gradually declined in value with the ongoing
devaluation of the currency.
32. Most Venezuelans belong to the Catholic Church. People active in the Evangelical
Church are considered eccentric, but are seen as good employees because of the church’s
stand against the use of alcohol and because of the prominence that church-related
values have in the lives of its members.
33. Ten million Bolívares was at the time equal to 16 000 dollars.
270 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
34. 28 000 000 Bs. was nearly 45 000 dollars at the time.
35. Big accidents involving considerable damage are covered by insurance (although there is
a deductible portion) but smaller dents and scrapes cost less to ?x and are not covered.
According to most agreements the driver is responsible for the cost of ?xing these smaller
accidents.
36. Recovering income lost in this contract would be time-consuming and more expensive
than it is worth, so drivers with opción a compra contracts as well as those who rent the
cars know that they will not be prosecuted.
37. Owners, too, will readily divert other income – and savings – into the business when
imperative, such as when insurance must be renewed or repairs carried out.
38. In the early spring of 2002, the Bolívar traded at about 750 to one dollar. By June it stood
at 1200 to a dollar, and in April, 2003 at between 2300 and 2400 to a dollar in the free
market (preferential dollars at 1600 to a dollar were also available to individuals and
companies meeting very selective government requirements).
39. The gasoline available at the height of the strike was imported from Brazil and was
leaded, resulting in expensive damage to the taxis, most of which run on unleaded gaso-
line. Drivers, in their eagerness to keep working, tended to ?ll up with whatever gasoline
they could obtain.
40. I am thankful for comments on this chapter and earlier drafts from Turid Moldenæs,
Hanne C. Gabrielsen, Knut H. Mikalsen, Hallvard Tjelmeland and Randi Rønning
Balsvik.
41. The sami people have their own distinct language (Finish-Urgisch), their own folk music
(juogiat) and craft tradition (duodji). Their pre-Christian religion was heavily inspired
by shamanism, where the juogiat was performed together with a little drum (runebom).
Natural phenomena (like torden: sun, wind and moon) also played a role in their relig-
ion (Hætta, 2002).
42. The kven minority has strong roots in Eastern Finnmark and was acknowledged as a
national minority in 1999.The kvens were originally immigrants from Finland. They
settled in Varangar in 1590 (Ottar, 2001). In Finnmark the kven eventually developed
strong ties eastwards and often traded with Swedish merchants (Mellem, 2002). In the
latter part of 1800 the immigration increased due to failure of the crops followed by
famine and Russian rampage of their farms in Østerbotten.
43. Bente told later in the interview how her father got sick shortly before the parents
divorced.
44. During that time, she got used to being alone with him, caring for him and sometimes
she needed to call the hospital.
45. ‘Forum Theatre is the performance of a set of scenes or vignettes by professional actors
whom the audience can direct, thus altering the outcome each time the scene is played.
For example, if a member of the audience asks the actor to change the attitude of his
character from inattentive to attentive, the audience can immediately see the e?ect that
this would have on the situation.’ Source:http://www.forumtheatre.com/
46. In this text I use the words entrepreneur, self-employed and small-business owners etc.
synonymously.
47. This is also the aim of my thesis Pettersson, 2002. This text is thus founded on some of
the research ?ndings in my dissertation.
48. In my thesis, Pettersson, 2002, the material analysed consists of around 300 media
reports and 50 studies on Gnosjö.
49. These ?gures represent persons whose income, and income tax, stem from self-owned
businesses.
50. ‘. . . notions of caste and minority group are not productive when applied to women. Why
shouldthis majoritybe aminority? Andwhyis it that the members of this particular caste,
unlike all other castes, are not of the same rank throughout society? . . . As Gerda Lerner
put it . . . “All analogies – class, minority group, caste – approximate the position of
women, but fail to de?ne it adequately. Women are a category unto themselves: an ade-
quate analysis of their position in society demands new conceptual tools”’ (Harding,
1987, p. 19).
Notes 271
51. Jessie Bernard notes that economists are ‘candid and forthright’ about their bias, a trait
not shared by sociologists. ‘Sociologists have not speci?ed that most of their paradigms
also ?t only that cash-nexus world’ (Bernard [1973] 1998, p. 17).
52. A map of this ‘male-stream’ cosmology would include such eminent concepts as:
Cartesian dualism, rationalism, capitalism, individualism, universalism, modernism,
postmodernism, and humanism. But it also includes such unpalatable ideologies as: mili-
tarism, sexism, ableism, imperialism, reductionism, consumerism, paternalism, postco-
lonialism, racism, classism, primitivism, imperialism and naturism.
53. The world of science is dichotomized into ‘disjunctive pairs in which the disjuncts are
seen as oppositional (rather than as complementary) and exclusive (rather than as inclu-
sive), and which place higher value (status, prestige) on one disjunct rather than the
other’ (Tong, 1998, p. 246, quoting Karen J. Warren [1990]). These ‘binary oppositions’
(Tong, 1998, p. 199) or ‘polarities’ (Bernard [1973] 1998, p. 18) or ‘positional superior-
ity’ (Smith, 1999, p. 58, quoting Edward Said [1978]) are painfully familiar to women as
we have always been relegated to the low-status disjunct in innumerable binary opposites
including: intuition/knowledge; body/mind; emotion/reason; subjective/objective;
private/public; soft/hard; nature/culture; expressive/instrumental; functionalism/aes-
thetics; immanence/transcendence. In a win-lose dichotomous model, it is axiomatic that
the ‘Other’ cannot/must not be granted any status.
54. ‘Agency is identi?ed with a masculine principle, the Protestant ethic, a Faustian
pursuit of knowledge – as with all forces towards mastery, separation and ego
enhancement (Carlson, 1972). The scientist using this approach creates his own con-
trolled reality . . . The communal approach is much humbler. It disavows control, for
control spoils the results. Its value rests precisely in the absence of controls.’ (Bernard
[1973] 1998, p. 11).
55. ‘Weaving was a nearly global phenomenon, and quilting was practised by the Egyptians,
the Chinese, and the Persians, from whom it was introduced into Europe by the
Crusaders’ (M’Closkey, 1996, p. 114, quoting Hedges and Wendt [1980]).
56. ‘Stories were the primary medium of the African griot, whose task it was to memorize
all important historical events for the village community and to recite history in a crea-
tive fashion’ (Tobin and Dobard, 2000, p. 31).
57. Tong likens the ever-changing beauty of the kaleidoscope’s ‘hundreds of chips of
colored rocks’ to the vitality and in?nite variety evident in feminist writing (Tong, 1998,
pp. 279–80). While the process is contained, the patterns, created by re?ection, cannot
be externally controlled. The appeal of the kaleidoscope resides in the opportunity to
participate in ever-changing pattern formation.
58. Kuhn struggles with the concept of ‘truth’ which he commingles with the concept of
‘progress’. ‘We may . . . have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes
of paradigm carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and closer to the
truth’ (Kuhn [1962] 1996, p. 170).
59. The remarkable commonalities between a quilter and a qualitative researcher are nicely
captured in the characterization of the qualitative researcher as ‘. . . a bricoleur. [who]
produces a bricolage, that is, a pieced-together, close-knit set of practices that provide
solutions to a problem in a concrete situation. “The solution (bricolage) is an [emergent]
construction” (Weinstein and Weinstein, 1991, p. 161) that changes and takes new forms
as di?erent tools, methods, and techniques are added to the puzzle . . . The researcher-
as-bricoleur-theorist works between and within competing and overlapping perspectives
and paradigms.’ (Denzin and Lincoln, 1994a, pp. 2–3).
60. Kuhn was much enamoured of the descriptor ‘esoteric’, using it some dozen times
throughout his essay.
61. ‘A “sociology of the lack of knowledge” examines how and why knowledge is not pro-
duced, is obliterated, or is not incorporated into a canon . . . feminist researchers . . . have
demonstrated how certain people are ignored, their words discounted, and their place in
history overlooked. We have shown how certain things are not studied and other things
are not even named . . . Making the invisible visible, bringing the margin to the center,
rendering the trivial important, putting the spotlight on women as competent actors,
272 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
understanding women as subjects in their own right rather than objects for men – all con-
tinue to be elements of feminist research’ (Reinharz, 1992, p. 248).
62. ‘Accepting Nietzsche’s idea that no historical description can be complete (an aimfor such
completion locks the historian into the past), Foucault’s genealogy focuses on the connec-
tion between history, use and power. It is not power, interest, will, rather than discourse,
which is foregrounded in Foucault’s genealogy. History is a history of the present insofar
as it is written to disturb the self-evidence or feeling of progress which enables satisfaction
with the present as the inevitable outcome of the past’ (Colebrook, 1997, p. 58).
63. See Hosking and Morley, 1991 for a more extended critique of contingency models and
related systems approaches.
64. But note, this does NOT mean that those who use the language of narrative or discourse
are necessarily taking a relational constructionist perspective; see later discussion.
65. Perhaps not surprisingly, our de?nition is similar to de?nitions of ‘discourse’. However,
we do not fully embrace the wider theoretical stance of ‘discursive psychology’ or of dis-
cursive approaches that remain unre?exive about their own social construction; see
Gergen [1994] for a discussion of their qualities and relations with relational thinking,
also Steier [1991].
66. Although it is not necessary to be a local to carry o? a competent performance, you can
participate in becoming a local by being relationally responsive to the invitation (action)
of another. See, for example, Catherine Bateson’s [1993] narrative of ‘Joint performance
across cultures: improvisation in a Persian garden’.
67. So, for example, psychology (Maier, 1988), and ‘science’ (Carrithers, 1991; Howard,
1991) can be viewed as telling particular kinds of stories (for example, Hosking and
Morley, 1991).
68. Beware, many approaches to narrative embrace ‘modernist’ discourses and many are
best thought of as examples of ‘?rst-order constructionism’.
69. But here I am not talking about knowledge (as is Rorty) but about inter-action. In this
case ‘agreement’ means we can go on coordinating our actions without questioning or
being questioned, that we do not have to share the same story (agree) about what we are
doing (for example, Hosking and Morley, 1991).
Notes 273
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304 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
Aboriginal peoples
spirituality and 205
see also ethnicity
Acko?, R.L. 169
addressivity
becoming process and 24
surplus and 12
adventure time
Bakhtin on 270
YalaYala and 53–6
see also time
advising
types of 168
see also consulting
aesthetic
entrepreneurship studies and 20–21
Agamben, G. 213
agency
free, YalaYala and 29–34
identity and 98–9, 102
life course search and 82
masculine principle, as 272
Agnew, John A. 83
Agostino, J. 128
Ahl, Helene 177, 178, 186, 191
Aldrich, Howard 105, 106, 107, 108,
228
alibi for being
YalaYala and 37–9, 42, 45, 47, 52
Ana (Caracas taxi owner) 67–9, 75, 78
analogy
kaleidoscope, feminist writing and
272
see also metaphors
Anderson, Alistair R. 5, 239
Anderson, B. 83
Andy (high-tech venturer) 120
anthropology
entrepreneurship studies and 4–5,
57–8
linguistic turn e?ect in 3
narrative in, taxi owners and 74–8
Anzaldua, Gloria 196, 201
archeological approach see genealogic
storytelling
Armando (Caracas taxi owner) 69,
78–9
Arnett, Bill 198
assumptions
current, entrepreneurship studies
beyond 6
entrepreneurship theory and law
144–50
assymetry
drama of consulting and 171–2
Attwood, Lynne 186
authentic voice
feminist transformative rhetorical
strategies and 205–6
autobiographies
identity and 83–5
personal e-tales 139–40
see also biographies
Bacon, Francis 218
Baker, Ted 105, 107, 186
Bakhtin, Mikhail
adventure time and 54, 270
aesthetic/literary and 20–21
alibi for being 37, 42, 45, 52
centripetality 48
chronotope of 22–4, 26, 37, 39, 49
dialogic other and 46, 47, 48
‘double-voicedness’ 16
familiar contact zone 41
friction and 51, 52
genealogic storytelling and 213
language theory of 11–12
‘live entering’ 50
narrative and 15
philosophy and entrepreneurship
studies and 19
pretending and 36
prosaics and 9–10
305
Index
prosaics of 13–14
public exteriority 33
space of free agency and 30, 31,
32
threshold moment 28, 44
Bamberg, M. 128, 141
Bandura, A. 82
Barry, D. 128
Bart (high-tech venturer) 112
Barth, Fredrik 57, 157
Bastardo, Thailiana 60
Baudrillard, Jean 50
Bauman, Zygmunt 33, 43, 54
Baumol, William 145, 155, 157
becoming process
concept 22–6
time and 36
Bell, Michael M. 25, 42, 52
Bente (theatre developer)
narrative process and 236–7
story of 89–97
context 86–8
Berg, Nina Gunnerud 83, 177, 178,
186
Berking, H. 156
Bernard, Jesse 198
Berner, Boel 188
Bertaux, D. 82, 85
Bev (high-tech venturer) 117–18
Beyer, J. 46
bias
sociologists and 271
Biddulph, S. 137
‘binary oppositions’
women and 272
biographies
e-tales, as 134–7
see also autobiographies
Blanchot, Maurice 224
blat
entrepreneurship theory and law and
150–52, 155–6
Boserup, Ester 194, 204
boundaries
Bakhtin on 22
dialogue and 25
Boutaiba, Sami 4, 211, 240
Bouwen, R. 128
Bradley, H. 82
Brandist, C. 19
bricoleur
Lévi-Strauss as, structural-linguistic
anthropology and 3
researcher as, commonalities with
quilter 272
Bruner, J.
autobiography and 80, 83, 84
complexity and consulting and
170
narrative and 20
understanding in 128, 129
Brush, Candida 194
Buckler, S.A. 127, 128
Burke, Kenneth 108
Burrell, G. 16
Calás, Marta 192–3, 202
Callahan, C. 127, 128
Campbell, J. 129
Campbell, Kathryn 6–7, 194, 206,
237
Caputi, Jane 206
Carland, J.W. 245–6, 247, 249–51
Carr, David 23, 36, 40, 44
Carswell, M. 127
Castells, M. 152
centrifugal forces
centripetal forces compared 269
space of free agency and 30, 32–3
centripetal forces
dialogic other and 48
centrifugal forces compared 269
space of free agency and 31–2
Cerulo, K.A. 81
Chia, R. 17
Chittipeddi, K. 127
chronotope (Bakhtin)
becoming process and 22–4, 26
YalaYala and 37, 39, 49
Clark, K. 51
Classical Age
language becoming discourse and
215–16
Clausen, J.A. 82
Cli?ord, James 77
co?ee industry
legitimacy-building and 108
Cohen, Laurie 130, 186
Cohler, B.J. 82
Cole, A.H. 251, 252
306 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
Colebrook, C.
archeological and genealogical
approaches compared 213
discourse and event and 220
genealogic storytelling and 226, 227,
228, 229
knowledge/power and stories and
219
language becoming discourse and
214, 216, 217
narrative and 222
Coles, R. 254
Collinson, C. 109
Collinson, David 187
complexity
drama of consulting and 169–71
Connell, Robert W. 187
constructionism
constructivism compared 255–7
relational see relational
constructionism
consulting
drama of 160–63, 174–6
assymetry 171–2
complexity 169–71
consultant/entrepreneur
relationship 167–72
traditional research procedures
compared 163–4
control
taxi owner strategies and 65–7
conversational studies see dialogue
Coulter, Wendy Lewington see
Lewington Coulter, Wendy
counselling
drama of 160–61, 164–5
play 165–7
rethinking 172–4
creativity
entrepreneurship and 24
surplus and 13
crime
entrepreneurship and 149
blat 150–52, 155–6
drug-tra?cking 152–5
stories worth retelling 240–41
Czarniawska, B. 21, 77, 83
Dagens Nyheter 185
Daly, Mary 206–7
Damgaard, Torben 6, 128, 238,
253
Davies, B. 80
de Certeau, Michel 224–5, 227
de Montoya, Monica Lindh see Lindh
de Montoya, Monica
de Saussure, Ferdinand 2, 210
de Soto, Hernando 58
Deacy, C. 131
Dean, M. 224
deconstruction
‘normal science’ and 197–8
prosaics and 17
Dees, Gregory 108
de?nitions
discourse (Gregory) 181
entrepreneur (Cantillon) 191
entrepreneurship (Gartner) 144–5,
146, 158, 243
feminism 196–7
legitimacy (Suchman) 107, 108
morality 131
paralogy 269
Deleuze, G. 10–11, 224
Delphi process, Gartner and 251–2
Dennehey, R.F. 127
Denzin, Norman K. 202
Deppermann, A. 83, 84
Derrida, J. 17, 217, 265
Desai, M. 146
Descartes, René 215, 216
dialogic other
YalaYala and 44–8
dialogue
boundaries and 25
direct 13–14
entrepreneurship studies, extension
of 252–4
Hosking and Hjorth 255–68
polyphonic 45
prosaics and 8–9
surplus and 11
Diamond, Irene 207
Dictionary of Canadian English (Gage)
207
discourse
approach 233–5
de?ned (Gregory) 181
economic and entrepreneurship
compared 191
Index 307
entitative, relational constructionism
and 256, 266–7
e-tales and 126
language becoming 213–18
mode of action, as 130
narrative and
?rst responses 7
questions to be addressed 1–2
polyphony and 13
see also genealogic storytelling;
Gnosjö discourse
disequilibria
entrepreneurship theory and law
155–9
distance
taxi owner strategies and 64–5
Dobard, Raymond G. 198
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich 13,
34
Downing, Stephen 31
drama
consulting 160–63, 174–6
assymetry 171–2
complexity 169–71
consultant/entrepreneur
relationship 167–72
traditional research procedures
compared 163–4
counselling 160–61, 164–5
play 165–7
rethinking 172–4
entrepreneurship studies and 6,
174–6
narrative, in 238–9
see also ?ction; theatre
Dreyfus, H.L.
archeological and genealogical
approaches compared 211,
212–13
discourse and event and 221
genealogy and prosaics and 16
knowledge/power and stories and
220
language becoming discourse and
215, 216–17
drug-tra?cking
entrepreneurship and 152–5
Du Gay, Paul 191
Duncan, James S. 83
Dunford, R. 265
Eagleton, T. 17
ecofeminism
as feminist research methodology
203–4
economy
masculinist discourses on
entrepreneurship and 189–91
Edwards, D. 264
Elder, G.H. 82, 102
Elkjær, B. 165
Elliott, C.S. 127, 128
Elmes, M. 128
Emerson, C.
becoming process and 22, 25
creativity and surplus and 13
mess and 11
polyphonic dialogue and 45
prosaics and 9–10, 28
space of free agency and 30
emotion and spirituality
feminist transformative rhetorical
strategies and 204–5
empiricism
feminist research methodology, as
202
Eneström, Frans Johan 185
entrepreneurial identity see identity
entrepreneurial team see team
entrepreneurs
de?ned (Cantillon) 191
men as 184–5
small-scale, taxi owners as, nature of
58–9
women as 194–6
invisibility of 182
see also consulting; counselling
entrepreneurship
creativity and 24
de?ning what it is not
Carland et al 245, 247–8
entrepreneurial experience as
?ction 253–4
Gartner 245–7, 248–52
de?nition of (Gartner) 144–5, 146,
158, 243
de?nitional problems 241–3
genealogic storytelling and 227–9
Hosking’s relation to 255
masculinist discourses on economy
and 189–91
308 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
process of, as tactical 228–9
prosaics of see prosaics
relational constructionism and see
relational constructionism
theory, law and see law
entrepreneurship studies
aesthetic/literary 20–21
anthropology and 4–5, 57–8
beyond current assumptions 6
development of 18–19
drama in 6, 174–6
e-tales and 137–9
extension of 252–4
feminist methodologies 201–2
ecofeminism 203–4
feminist empiricism 202
feminist standpoint 202–3
foundations of 234
Gartner’s initiation into 245, 246–7
legitimacy and 5
linguistic turn and 3–4, 8
masculine nature of 6
narrative in see narrative
philosphical/vitalist 19
relational constructionism
consequences for 259
social/performative 19–20
traditional procedures, drama
compared 163–4
e-tales
entrepreneurship studies and 137–9
form and structure in 125–6, 142–3
forms of 131–2
entrepreneurial biographies and
novels 134–7
familial fables 140–41
hagiographies and historical
antecedents 132–4
mentorial 141
personal 139–40
narrative approach in
entrepreneurial studies,
examples 138–9
storylines in 135–6
understanding, value of 126–7,
129–30
narrative generally 127–9
values in 130–31
see also narrative
ethics
entrepreneurship theory and law
155–9
see also morality
ethnicity
Aboriginal peoples, spirituality and
205
identity and 82, 98
kven history 271
saami culture 271
see also minority
Etzioni, A. 128
event
discourse and 220–21
Fadahunsi, A. 157
familial fables
e-tales, as 140–41
feminism
de?ned 196–7
‘paradigm pluralism’ and 6
writings, kaleidoscope analogy and
272
see also Gnosjö discourse; quilts and
quilting; women
feminist standpoint
feminist research methodologies and
202–3
?ction
entrepreneurial experience as 253–4
novels as e-tales 134–7
see also drama
Fiet, J.O. 127
Findlen, P. 220
Fine, Michelle 195
Fiol, Marlene 105, 107, 108, 228
Fisher, Michael J. 77
Fleming, D. 129
Flores, Fernando 106
Fombrun, Charles 105, 107, 108
Forsberg, Gunnel 181–2, 192
Forum Theatre
nature of performance by 271
Foss, Karen A. 196, 199, 201, 203, 208
Foss, Lene 5, 128, 236
Foucault, Michel
archeological and genealogical
approaches compared 210,
211–12, 213
discourse and event and 221, 222
genealogic storytelling and 226, 229
Index 309
genealogy and prosaics and 16–17
genealogy of 212–13, 272–3
language becoming discourse and
214–15, 216, 217, 218
power and knowledge and 177, 181,
220
relational constructionism and
257–8
freedom see space
Freire, Paulo 195
friction
YalaYala, in 48–53
Frye, Northrop 194, 204, 207
gambling
speed and 34
Gartner, William B.
becoming process and 24, 25
‘being di?erent’ 253–4
Carland et al 247–8
reply to 249–51
Delphi process and 251–2
entrepreneurship de?nition 144–5,
146, 158, 243
?rst responses 7
initiation into entrepreneurship
scholarship 245, 246–7
legitimacy-building and 105, 106
linguistic turn and 3
Gatewood, Elizabeth 178
genealogic storytelling 223–7
archeological and genealogical
approaches compared 210–13
discursive approach
discourse and event 220–21
formations and practices 221–3
knowledge/power and stories
218–20
entrepreneurship and 227–9
language becoming discourse 213–18
see also discourse; narrative
genealogy
Foucault, of 212–13, 272–3
prosaics and 16–17
gender
construction, Gnosjö discourse and
192
social constructions of 183
see also feminism; masculinity; men;
women
Gergen, K.J.
relational constructionism and 265,
267
understanding in narrative and 127,
128, 129
values within e-tales and 131
giant ‘small steps’
feminist transformative rhetorical
strategies and 207–8
Gibson-Graham, J.K. 152
Gioia, G.A. 127
Glynn, M.A. 80
Gnosjö discourse
background 179–80
entrepreneur, as masculine label
185–6
entrepreneurship, masculinist
discourses on economy and
189–91
feminism and 6, 177–9, 192–3
gender, social constructions of 183
men
entrepreneurs, as 184–5
self-made 186–8
stories worth retelling 240
texts constituting 180–83
women, as wives or ‘helpmates’
188–9
see also feminism; masculinity;
women
Go?man, Erving 35
Gold, J. 129
Graeber, D. 152
Grauers, Eva Javefors see Javefors
Grauers, Eva
Green, Eileen 186
Gregory, Derek 181, 182
Guattari, F. 10–11, 224
Guba, Egon 202
Gudeman, Stephen 58, 74
Guillermo (Caracas taxi driver) 70–71
Gummesson, Ola 185
Gustafsson, Bengt-Åke 188
Hagestad, G.O. 82
hagiographies
e-tales, as 132–4
Hamilton, J.A. 98
Haraway, Donna 183
Harding, Sandra 259
310 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
Harré, R. 80
Harry (high-tech venturer) 111,
115–16, 117, 120, 121–2
Hattie, J. 81, 100
Hawken, Paul 207
Hawley, J.M. 98
Hawpe, L. 128
healing
feminism and 196
Hearn, Je? 187
Hedlund, Gun 182, 192
Heidegger, Martin 217
Henry (Caracas taxi owner) 63–4, 78
Heraclitus 19
Hernán (Caracas taxi driver) 73
heteroglossia
surplus and 12
Hill, R.C. 130
Hirdman, Yvonne 183
Hjorth, Daniel
aesthetic/literary and 21
dialogue with Hosking 255–68
?rst responses 7
genealogic storytelling and 227,
228
identity and 80, 100–101
masculinity and 188, 191
Holgersson, Charlotte 183
Hollway, W. 81
Holmquist, Carin
individuality and 191
invisibility of women and 178, 189
masculinity of entrepreneurship
studies and 177, 184–5, 188
masculinity of language and, 186
men and masculinities distinguished
187
Holquist, M. 9, 51
hooks, bell 195, 199, 201
Horatio Alger myth
e-tales and 133–4
Hosking, Dian-Marie 7, 256, 257, 261,
267
Howard (high-tech venturer) 114, 115,
116, 117
Howarth, C. 101
Hujanen, J. 83
humanities
linguistic turn e?ect in 2–3
Hunt, Gail P. 195, 199
identity
autobiography and 83–5
Bente’s story 89–97
context 86–8
change in 97–102
construction of, ‘self’ and 81, 82,
102–4
narrative and 5, 80–81, 99–102
space and time and 82–3, 97–8, 101
transitions 81–2, 97, 99, 102
imagination
language of, feminist transformative
rhetorical strategies and 207
individual
constructivism and 256–7
disappearance of, rationalising 42–3
leadership contingency model and
255–6
life course search and 82
removal of, YalaYala 43–4
Jackson, C. 81, 100
Jaggar, Alison 196, 203
Jameson, Daphne 109
Janeway, Elizabeth 208
Javefors Grauers, Eva 186
Jepperson, R. 108
Johannisson, Bengt
complexity and consulting and 170
genealogic storytelling and 228
identity and 80, 98–9, 100–101
masculinity and 188
Johansson, A.W. 165, 167–9, 171, 172,
173
Johansson, Malcolm 185
Johansson, Susanne 182, 192
Johnson, Mark 109
Jones, D. 265
kaleidoscope
analogy of, feminist writing and 272
Kanfer, S. 133
Kant, Immanuel 216, 217
Karlsson Stider, Annelie 186
Katz, Jerome 7, 105, 243, 244
Kaufman, Herbert 106
Keen, Ernest 30
Kendall, G. 211
Kirzner, I. 156
Klyver, Kim 6, 238, 253
Index 311
knowledge
lack of, sociology of described 272
power and 177, 181
genealogic storytelling 218–20
relational constructionism and
265–6
scienti?c and narrative compared
224–7
Kohli, M. 82, 85
Kolsgård, Svante 185
Kuhn, Thomas 197, 200–201, 272
Kven peoples
history of 271
see also ethnicity
Landström, Hans 191
language
discourse, becoming 213–18
feminist transformative rhetorical
strategies and
imagination, of 207
new words and meanings 206–7
masculine 185–6, 189–91
surplus and 13–14
theory (Bakhtin) 11–12
see also metaphors
Latour, Bruno 226, 253
Lave, J. 37, 263
law
entrepreneurship theory and
144–50
blat 150–52, 155–6
drug-tra?cking 152–5
ethics and disequilibria 155–9
leadership
contingency model, Hosking and
255
Ledeneva, A. 150
legitimacy
de?ned (Suchman) 107, 108
entrepreneurship studies and 5
see also morality
legitimacy-building
pentadic analysis 123–4
venturing and 105–6, 121–3
?rst transitional story 115–19
founding story 111–15
literature review 107–8
research methods and context
108–11
saleable story 120–21
second transitional story 119–20
Leitch, V. 213
Lerner, Gerda 199
Lett, J. 98
Levenhaugh, M. 130
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 3, 51–2, 54
Lewington Coulter, Wendy 195
life course
identity construction and 81–3
life story see autobiographies;
biographies; narrative
Lincoln, Yvonna S. 202
Linde, C. 109
Lindgren, Monica
economic and entrepreneurship
discourses compared 191
identity and 82, 102
masculinity of entrepreneurship
studies and 177, 186
men and masculinities distinguished
187
Lindh de Montoya, Monica 4–5, 238–9
linguistic turn
e?ect of 2–4
entrepreneurship studies and 8
social sciences and 214
Lloyd, Genevieve 190
Lodge, D. 129
Lounsbury, M. 80
Lourdes (Caracas taxi owner) 64–5, 78
Lucius-Hoene, G. 83, 84
Lunde, A. 86, 87
Lyotard, J.-F. 14–15, 218, 219, 226, 227
Lysgaards, A.-G. 165
Machan, T. 158
MacIntyre, Alasdair 109, 129, 131, 140
Mackenzie, A. 127
Mackenzie, Suzanne 184
Magally (Caracas taxi owner) 65–6, 78
Marcus, George E. 77
Marks, J. 224
Marsh, H.W. 81, 100
Martinez, Martha 106
Marx, Karl 146
masculinity
agency and 272
entrepreneurship studies and 6
e-tales characteristic 137
312 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
‘male-stream’ cosmology, map of
272
see also Gnosjö discourse; men
Mauss, M. 156
McAdams, D.P. 99
McCaskey, M.B. 169
McDowell, Linda 189, 190
McKenna, S. 127
Mead, G.H. 81
Meeks, Michael 194
Mellström, Ulf 188
men
economic 190–91
entrepreneurs, as 184–5
self-made 186–8
see also Gnosjö discourse;
masculinity
mentorial tales
e-tales, as 141
mess
order and 11
metaphors
entrepreneurship studies and 6–7
Gnosjö as 179
morality and, e-tales 137
motive for (Stevens) 194
organizational tools, as 2
quilts and quilting as 6, 195–6,
208–9
suitability of to study of women
194
see also analogy; language
methodology
consultant/entrepreneur relationship
167–9
asymmetry 171–2
complexity 169–71
counselling the entrepreneur
172–4
feminist 201–2
ecofeminism 203–4
feminist empiricism 202
feminist standpoint 202–3
traditional, drama compared 163–4
venturing and legitimacy-building
108–11
Mies, Maria 200, 201, 203, 204, 205
Millard, Elaine 183
Miller, Brenda 243
Millhaser, S. 136
minority
women as 194, 271
see also ethnicity
Mishler, E.G. 85
mode of action
discourse as 130
modernity
language becoming discourse and
214, 216–17
Mønsted, M. 165
Montagu, Ashley 200, 209
Montoya, Monica Lindh de see Lindh
de Montoya, Monica
Moore, Dorothy 194
morality
de?ned 131
e-tales and 132–7, 142
purpose of, narrative ful?lling 5
see also ethics; legitimacy; values
Morgan (high-tech venturer) 111–12,
113, 116
Morgan, S. 127
Morley, I.E. 256, 261
Morson, G.
adventure time 54
alibi for being 47
becoming process and 22, 23, 24, 25,
26
creativity and surplus and 13
mess and 11
narrative process, researcher in
235–8
polyphonic dialogue and 45
prosaics and 9–10, 28
space of free agency and 30, 31,
32
speed and gambling and 34, 35
time, hypothetical 35
Morton, James 152–3
motivation
taxi owner strategies and 67–70
motive
metaphors, for (Stevens) 194
Mulholland, Kate 186, 187–8, 189
Musson, G. 130
narrative
active, YalaYala 40–41
anthropology, in, taxi owners and
74–8
Index 313
approach 233–5
examples 138–9
re?ections on 241–3
discourse and
?rst responses 7
questions to be addressed 1–2
entrepreneurial see e-tales
entrepreneurial identity and see
identity
entrepreneurial team and 5
future directions 243–4
legitimacy-building see legitimacy-
building
moral purpose, ful?lling 5
popular and scholarly compared
233–4
process
Bente and 236–7
researcher in 235–8
prosaics and 4, 14–16
relational constructionism and
264–6
research and journalistic compared
242
social/performative and 20
stories worth retelling 240–41
taxi owners and 74–8
tools for future use 238–9
YalaYala summarised 25–6
see also e-tales; genealogic
storytelling
Nationalencyklopedin 180–81
Nelson, Julie 190, 191, 193, 194
Nilsson, Anders 98–9
‘non-questions’
asking, feminist transformative
rhetorical strategies and
206
‘normal science’
deconstructed, feminism and 197–8
Norman, R. 165
novels see ?ction
O’Brien, Mary 195
O’Connor, Ellen
compelling narrative and 239
contextual base importance 109
entrepreneurial experience as ?ction
253
legitimacy and 5
legitimacy-building de?ned 106
pentad and 108
Olesen, Virginia 196, 202
order
prosaics and 10–11
Orenstein, Gloria 207
Orr, Julian 109
Pålshaugen, Ÿ. 104
Pålsson Syll, Lars 190
paradigm pluralism
feminism and 6
in action 201–4
merits of 200–201
paralogy
de?ned 269
Parker, M. 146
patronage
taxi driver strategies and 71
Peet, Alfred 108
pentadic analysis
acts of legitimacy-building
narratives 123–4
described 108–9
performance
entrepreneurship studies and 19–20
Forum Theatre, nature of 271
Pettersson, Katarina 6, 240
Phillips, N. 161
philosophy
entrepreneurship studies and 19
linguistic turn e?ect in 2–3
Pietikainen, S. 83
Piihl, Jesper 6, 238, 253
Pitt, M. 127
place see space
Polkinghorne, Donald
autobiography and 83, 84
category to narrative, moving from
28
identity and 99
narrative and, understanding in 129
time as a discordant experience 43
polyphony
dialogue and 45
surplus and 13
poststructuralism
language becoming discourse and
217–18
Potter, J. 264
314 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
power
knowledge and 177, 181
genealogic storytelling 218–20
relational constructionism and
266–8
practices
discursive formations and 221–3
Prado, C.G. 16
‘pragmatic quality’
entrepreneurial processes and 228
Pringle, Rosemary 193
process
becoming
concept 22–6
time and 36
Delphi, Gartner and 251–2
entrepreneurial, as tactical 228–9
narrative
Bente and 236–7
researcher in 235–8
social, entrepreneurship as 19–20
Propp, V. 129
prosaics
Bakhtinian 11–14
concept 9–11
conversational studies and 8–9
deconstruction and 17
escaping, YalaYala business plan
and 35–7
genealogy and 16–17
narrative and 4, 14–16
returning to, alibi for being and 37–9
social/performative and 19–20
speed and 34–5
public exteriority
space of free agency and 33
quilts and quilting
cultural signi?cance 198–200
metaphor, as 6, 195–6, 208–9
researcher-as-bricoleur,
commonalities with quilter 272
see also feminism; women
Rabinow, P.
archeological and genealogical
approaches compared 211,
212–13
discourse and event and 221
genealogy and prosaics and 16
knowledge/power and stories and
220
language becoming discourse and
215, 216–17
Rae, D. 127, 129
Raimundo (Caracas taxi owner) 69–70,
78
Randall, William L. 50
Rao, H. 105, 107, 108
Reed, Rosslyn 187
Rehn, Alf 5–6, 130, 152, 228, 240–41
Reinharz, Shulamit 201, 206, 208
relational constructionism
entitative discourse and 256, 266–7
Foucault and 257–8
history of 259–60
key features (Hosking) 257
local-social-historical constructions
261–3
multiple inter-actions and 260–61
narrative and 264–6
power and 266–8
relational realities 263–4
research consequences 259
thought style, as 258–9
Renaissance
language becoming discourse and
214–15
research see entrepreneurship studies
researcher
bricoleur, as, commonalities with
quilter 272
narrative process, in 235–8
Reynolds, Paul D. 243
Rich (high-tech venturer) 113–14
Richardson, Laurel 15, 25
Ricoeur, Paul 54, 214
Ridderberg, Maria 180
Riesman, Catherine K. 83, 84, 85
Riley, M.W. 103
Rindova, Violina 105, 107, 108
Rivera, Alberto 74
Robinson, J.A. 128
Roddick, A. 127
Romanelli, Elaine 105, 107
Rorty, Richard 128, 215, 219, 267
Rosa, P. 157
Rose, Damaris 184
Rose, Gillian 183
Rydén, Josef 185, 189
Index 315
Saami peoples
culture 271
see also ethnicity
Sahlins, Marshall 147
Sahlin-Andersson, K. 20
Salisbury, R. 146–7
Saracheck, B. 133
Sarbin, T.E. 129, 141, 264
Schoonhoven, Claudia 105, 107
science
‘binary oppositions’, women and
272
gendered dichotomy and 190
narrative and 224–7
‘normal’, deconstructed, feminism
and 197–8
self
identity construction and 81, 82
Sennett, Richard 32, 34, 35, 37, 83
Sévon, G. 20
Sexton, Donald L. 191
Shananan, M.J. 82, 102
Shiva, Vandana 200, 201, 203, 204, 205
shopping mall
YalaYala and concept of 41–3
space of free agency and 33
Shotter, John 29, 31, 54
Sim, S. 14
Simonsen, P. 86, 87
Smircich, Linda 192–3, 202
Smith, Dorothy 202, 203, 205
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai 195
Smith, Robert 5, 134, 239
social construction
gender as 183
social process
entrepreneurship as 19–20
social sciences
linguistic turn e?ect in 2–3, 214
sociologists
bias and 271
sociology of the lack of knowledge
described 272
Somers, M. 102
space
creating, taxi driver strategies and
70–71
free agency 29–34
identity and 82–3, 97–8, 101
naked, time and 27–9
speed
prosaics and 34–5
time of naked space and 27–9
wasted time and 41–2
Spilling, O.R. 178
Spinosa, C. 223, 228
spirituality see emotion and spirituality
Starr, Jennifer 108
Stewart, Alex 58
Steyaert, Chris
dialogic other and 46
identity and 80, 100–101
philosophy and entrepreneurship
studies and 19
prosaics and 8, 9
understanding in narrative and 128
Stider, Annelie Karlsson see Karlsson
Stider, Annelie
Storey, J.D. 165
strategies
taxi drivers 70–72
taxi owners 62–4
control 65–7
distance 64–5
motivation 67–70
transformative rhetorical, feminism
and
authentic voice 205–6
emotion and spirituality 204–5
giant ‘small steps’ 207–8
language of imagination 207
new words and meanings 206–7
‘non-questions’, asking 206
Suchman, M. 105, 107, 108, 131
Sundin, Elisabeth 177, 178, 186, 188,
189
surplus
Bakhtinian prosaics and 12–13
order excluding 11
Svenska Dagbladet 184, 188
Swedberg, Richard 8
Syll, Lars Pålsson see Pålsson Syll,
Lars
Taalas, Saara 5–6, 130, 152, 228,
240–41
taxi drivers
strategies of 70–72
taxi owners
background 59–62
316 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship
narrative in entrepreneurship studies
and anthropology and 74–8
small-scale entrepreneurs, as, nature
of 58–9
social and economic ?ows and 72–4,
78–9
strategies of 62–4
control 65–7
distance 64–5
motivation 67–70
Taylor, P.J. 83
team
narrative and 5
Thatchenkerry, T.J. 265
theatre
developer see Bente
performance, nature of 271
see also drama
Thrift, N. 83, 100
time
becoming process and 36
identity and 82–3, 97
naked space and 27–9
wasted, speed and 41–2
see also adventure time
Tobin, Jacqueline L. 198
Tong, Rosemarie Putnam 81, 196, 199,
208
transitions
identity and 81–2, 97, 99, 102
Trice, H. 46
unconscious legalism
entrepreneurship theory and 144,
145
understanding, value of
e-tales and 126–7, 129–30
narrative generally 127–9
Usher, R. 43
values
e-tales, in 130–31
see also morality
Van Maanen, J. 174
Van Manen, M. 15–16
Vattimo, G. 224, 225
venturing, legitimacy-building and see
legitimacy-building
Vickers, Jill McCalla 206
Vorren, Ö. 86, 87
Wåhlin, N. 82, 102
Warin, J. 81, 100
Waring, Marilyn 194
Warren, Karen J. 207
Watson, S. 129
Weber, M. 132
Weick, Karl 24, 169–70, 253
Wells, Betty 203
Wendeberg, Birgitta 182, 187, 189, 192
Wenger, E. 37, 263
West, Rebecca 196
Wickham, G. 211
Williams, Alice Olsen 199
Williams, Mary Rose 207
Williams, William Carlos 254
Wilmer (Caracas taxi driver) 73
Winograd, Terry 106
Wirth, Danielle 203
women
‘binary oppositions’ and 272
entrepreneurs, as, 194–6
invisibility of 182
feminism de?ned 196–7
metaphors and
suitability of to study of women
194
thinking with 208–9
minority, as 194, 271
‘normal science’ deconstructed
197–8
paradigm pluralism
in action 201–4
merits of 200–201
research methodologies 201–2
ecofeminism 203–4
feminist empiricism 202
feminist standpoint 202–3
transformative rhetorical strategies
authentic voice 205–6
emotion and spirituality 204–5
giant ‘small steps’ 207–8
language of imagination 207
new words and meanings 206–7
‘non-questions’, asking 206
see also feminism; Gnosjö discourse;
quilts and quilting
Woodiwiss, James 154
YalaYala
adventure time 53–6
Index 317
alibi for being and 37–9, 42, 45, 47,
52
dialogue and 44–8
free agency space and 29–34
friction in 48–53
individual removed from 43–4
naked space and 27–9
narrative and
active 40–41
stories worth retelling 240
summarised 25–6
prosaics and 35–7
shopping mall concept and 41–3
space and
free agency 29–34
naked 27–9
speed and 34–5
time and 27–9
Yang, M. 152
Zien, K.A. 127, 128
318 Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship

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