Entrepreneurship-as-practice: grounding contemporary theories of practice into entrepreneurship studies

Abstract

In this article, we contend that entrepreneurship studies would greatly benefit from engagement with contemporary theorizations of practice. The practice tradition conceives of the process of entrepreneuring as the enactment and entanglement of multiple practices. Appreciating entrepreneurial phenomena as the enactment and entanglement of practices orients researchers to an ontological understanding of entrepreneuring as relational, material and processual. Therefore, practice theories direct scholars towards observing and explaining the real-time practices of entrepreneuring practitioners. Articles in this special issue on 'entrepreneurship-as-practice' are discussed and suggestions for future research and scholarship that utilize contemporary theorizations of practice are offered.

Spotlight on UK artisan entrepreneurs' situated collaborations: through the lens of entrepreneurial capitals and their conversion

“…These insights demonstrate the agentic work of entrepreneurial capital transformations and the need to study micro-processes with ethnographic methods to offer a more nuanced fine-grained understanding of situated practices (Thompson et al, 2020). In addition to other studies (Pret et al, 2016), this article shows insights, which are indeed of value for business (support) practitioners and entrepreneurs.…”

“…These conversions constitute entrepreneurial practices (Johannisson, 2018;Thompson et al, 2020), that is iterative entrepreneurial behaviours frequently carried out in the course of doing business in studio X. Sometimes, the answer to the customer was delayed, when Casey was unavailable.…”

The Social Imaginary of Emancipation in Entrepreneurship

“…In this section, we move from interpreting the texts as different "readymade" imaginations of emancipatory entrepreneurship, informed by the concepts of "emancipation from" and "emancipation to," to approaching the texts as distinct ideal types (Swedberg, 2014;Weber, 1978) of the social imaginary of emancipation in entrepreneurship theorizing. Specifically, we advance the argument that our interpretation of the emancipatory focus of the texts further encourages us to pose fundamental questions about the relationship between theorizing and social imagination (Cornelissen, 2013;Dey & Mason, 2018;Weick, 1989Weick, , 1995, and to introduce a practiceoriented theoretical vocabulary (Gartner, 1993;Thompson et al, 2020;Van De Ven & Johnson, 2006) that expresses substantial variety in entrepreneurship theorizing, despite its association with the relatively stable social imaginary of emancipation. We call to mind that it was during the first half of the 20th century and hence, in the era when our texts were written and published, that entrepreneurship as a research field emerged theoretically (Hoselitz, 1951;Schumpeter, 1955b).…”

Researching migrant entrepreneurship communities: a reflection through collaborative (auto)ethnographies

“…Van Burg et al (2020) argue that qualitative research is especially well positioned to extend our understanding about the aspects that are hard to measure, like sensemaking, entrepreneurial identity, perseverance, family embeddedness, and the day-to-day small variations in entrepreneurial behaviour. Moreover, as suggested by van Burg and colleagues, attending to mundane entrepreneurial practices also goes beyond ontological individualism that would focus on what migrant entrepreneurs do, and rather draws attention to relational, embodied, mediated, and organized aspects of these practices (Thompson et al 2020), situating the individual migrant entrepreneur within her or his entrepreneurial context. Such an approach would call for further attention to be given to collective research approaches of migrants to entrepreneurial opportunities.…”