ABSTRACT

Entrepreneurship is largely considered to be a positive force, driving venture creation and economic growth. Critical Perspectives on Entrepreneurship questions the accepted norms and dominant assumptions of scholarship on the matter, and reveals how they can actually obscure important questions of identity, ideology and inequality.

The book’s distinguished authors and editors explore how entrepreneurship study can privilege certain forms of economic action, whilst labelling other, more collective forms of organization and exchange as problematic. Demystifying the archetypal vision of the white, male entrepreneur, this book gives voice to other entrepreneurial subjectivities and engages with the tensions, paradoxes and ambiguities at the heart of the topic.

This challenging collection seeks to further the momentum for alternate analyses of the field, and to promote the growing voice of critical entrepreneurship studies. It is a useful tool for researchers, advanced students and policy-makers.

part I|56 pages

Contesting neoliberal aspects of traditional entrepreneurship approaches

chapter 2|19 pages

Social entrepreneurs

Precious and precarious

chapter 3|15 pages

Social enterprise and the everydayness of precarious Indigenous Cambodian villagers

Challenging ethnocentric epistemologies

chapter 4|20 pages

Reasons to be fearful

The ‘Google Model of Production’, entrepreneurship, corporate power and the concentration of dispersed knowledge

part II|52 pages

Locating new forms of Indigenous and community-based entrepreneurship

chapter 7|15 pages

Feeding the city

The importance of informal warung restaurants for Indonesia’s urban economy

part III|54 pages

Critiquing the archetype of the white, Christian entrepreneur

chapter 9|15 pages

Bringing strategy back

Ethnic minority entrepreneurs’ construction of legitimacy by ‘fitting in’ and ‘standing out’ in the creative industries

part IV|46 pages

Challenging the gendered subtext in entrepreneurship

chapter 12|14 pages

On entrepreneurship and empowerment

Postcolonial feminist interventions

chapter 13|17 pages

Bridging the gap between resistance and power through agency

An empirical analysis of struggle by immigrant women entrepreneurs

part V|40 pages

Deconstructing entrepreneurship

chapter 14|20 pages

The governance of welfare and the expropriation of the common

Polish tales of entrepreneurship

chapter 15|18 pages

Deconstructing ecopreneurship