Entrepreneuring and process: A Lefebvrian perspective

Abstract

This article engages with processual thinking building upon contributions that posit entrepreneur ing as fluid, not necessarily intentional nor necessarily planned, yet as open and indeterminate taking inspiration from the works of French philosopher Henri Lefebvre. Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis connects ‘becoming’ to ‘everydayness’, considering lived rhythms, respecting all events and, by doing so, offering a markedly fragmentary detailed understanding of rhythmicity. Seeing entrepreneuring as an active intervening in the spatio-temporal rhythms of everyday life, a Lefebvrian perspective allows for not only a subtle, nuanced and dynamic analysing of how disruptions of existing rhythms lead to smaller or larger changes to ‘reality’, but also points at how such changes are not neutral.

Imagining Futures: Theorizing the Practical Knowledge of Future-making

“…Although not explicitly mentioned, future-making is particularly relevant for entrepreneuring literature (Steyaert, 2007) because creating organization relies, in the first place, on the performance of practices towards constructing a coherent and plausible imaginary future (Thompson, 2018). Recent work has returned to the entrepreneurial imagination (Elias, Chiles, Duncan & Vultee, 2018), starting with the idea that the future is not only unknowable but that it is invented (Hjorth, 2013; Verduyn, 2015). Notably, Chiles and colleagues (2021) recently posit that the entrepreneurial imagination is a relational, unconscious, particularizing, embodied and visionary process.…”

Peering inside mutual adjustment: Rhythmanalysis of return to work from maternity leave

“…We propose that fair and productive maternity management means giving up the ideal worker norm and actively managing the real assemblage of bodily, social and organisational rhythms in which SMEs and new mothers are situated. Lefebvre encouraged us to analyse significant moments when orthodoxies are challenged and to think about how new rhythms weaving into everyday life may transform society (Verduijn, 2015). We use rhythmanalysis to conceptualise return to work from maternity leave as just such a disjuncture that can either harden masculine power over workplaces or shape more gender equal organisations.…”

A Processual Approach for the Quadruple Helix Model: the Case of a Regional Project in Uppsala

“…One should thus question the stability of things by looking at flows and ongoing states of becoming (Tsoukas and Chia 2002). Works of philosophers such as Whitehead, Bergson, Heidegger, and Lefebvre have been particularly important for the development of such processual perspectives (Verduyn 2015). Moroz and Hindle (2012) remark that Whitehead looks at processes as temporal movements where reality is interpreted as moments of experience.…”