Narrating Urban Entrepreneurship: A Matter of Imagineering?

Going all the way: the creativity of entrepreneuring in The Full Monty

“…This urban frame, of a devastated Sheffield against which this process of creativity unfolded, can be said to anticipate one of the core and by now commonplace changes of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century: creativity is connected with an urban context through the concept of the creative city and the creative class (Florida 2002). The promotional clip used at the start of the film, a clear example of what is now called urban boosterism, clearly illustrates how entrepreneurial initiatives are closely linked with urban regeneration and governance (Steyaert and Beyes 2009). Thus the film illustrates a change towards a post-Fordist understanding of work and its meaning, which is related to (a change in) gender and class position.…”

“…In a nutshell, the creativity of entrepreneuring consists of opening up to the possible, making it feasible in a team and making it acceptable for others. Third, I have situated the process of entrepreneuring in an urban context, making it into a form of urban entrepreneurship (Steyaert and Beyes 2009). The hypothesis I have elaborated concerning this entrepreneurial process is that The Full Monty team, if it wanted to succeed, had to change the city or, in fact, its relationship to the city.…”

Unsettling bodies of knowledge: Walking as a pedagogy of affect

“…This course was initiated in 2005 and has regularly been offered as a master-course at a European business university. The course is entitled ‘Cities and Creativity’, responding to the creative imperative in urban contexts (Reckwitz, 2017; Steyaert and Michels, 2018), and its main title indicates our interest in the study of prosaic practices of creativity as they mark and produce urban space (Steyaert and Beyes, 2009). While this offer is rather rare in the context of a business university, such a course forms often a core part of a programme in human geography (see Bassett, 2004; Latham and McCormack, 2009).…”

“…Second, most groups are confronted with conflicts and struggles around gentrification and the everyday injustices and inequalities that have increasingly shaped Berlin’s more central districts. Students are thus compelled to reflect upon these impressions as manifestations of an urban development in thrall to so-called entrepreneurial ideas of governance and control (Steyaert and Beyes, 2009). The sensory impressions gathered on their walks thus force them to grapple with the atmospheric and existential consequences of economic theories too often taken for granted.…”

Multiplicity and reflexivity in organizational research

“…It is especially concurrent with a widely proclaimed expansion of the cultural economy -mostly framed as a synergy between cultural and economic processes. In this context we can observe a rising aesthetization of organizational life and a turn to the ongoing production and dissemination of images of all sorts, sometimes referred to as "imagineering" (Steyaert and Beyes, 2009). Thus a wealth of images are available and can be used to analyze specific organizational research questions; such visual research is then based on what can be called "pre-existing" (Pauwels, 2000), "existing" (Warren, 2009a), or "found" (Rose, 2007) images.…”