Abstract
International Small Business Journal
Special Issue
Guest Editors: Daniel Hjorth, Copenhagen Business School; Robin Holt, Liverpool University, and Chris Steyaert, University of St Gallen
In an entrepreneurial setting, change and becoming are configured through creativity, whether this is about wealth creation, job creation, or innovation. We believe that the lack of a more thorough engagement with process thinking prevents entrepreneurship studies from advancing.
We have seen a time of development in process studies in management and organisation theory. This relates to, but is in significant ways different from, a long history of interest in change - whether studied as transformation, improvisation, accidents, or emergence. Rather than study static variables in isolated relationships, this line of process studies look to find patterns and associated outcomes in organizational and agent performance over time, for the purpose of capturing reality in its basic condition of flight. This approach, where existing theories are applied to process as a new entity, has also made an entry into entrepreneurship studies.
Tsoukas and Chia (2002), however, identify an alternative development in process thinking which places greater emphasis on, as well as extends, its philosophical basis for attending to phenomena of change and difference as questions of becoming rather than changes to being. In this alternative path, thinkers such as Henri Bergson and Alfred N. Whitehead have been influential as well as more recently, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Although Entrepreneurship Studies, for good reasons, can be said to be the study of change and becoming and creatively responding to newness, little progression has been made on Processual Entrepreneurship Studies. This SI seeks to remedy this.
Such an engagement also promises to provide important interdisciplinary links to innovation- and creativity studies in management- and organisation theory. This special issue wants to re-engage entrepreneurship studies with process thinking and with what has been called the process of “entrepreneuring”. This includes empirical studies of entrepreneurship processes; conceptual developments for the purpose of enhancing our analyses of entrepreneurship processes; developments in methods for studying entrepreneurship processes; as well as methodological contributions of importance for advancing processual entrepreneurship studies. We would like this special issue to offer a set of papers that demonstrates how processual entrepreneurship
studies also can itself be entrepreneurial. Examples of themes, topics, and problems:
Concepts, metaphors for describing, studying and analysing processes in entrepreneurship studies
Process philosophy and entrepreneurship studies
Methods for studying entrepreneurship processes; methodological pluralism
Metamorphosis, transformation, contextualization, performativity
Time, space, movement and entrepreneurship studies
Force, power, body, affect, and the politics of entrepreneurship processes
Relational approaches and the study of entrepreneurship processes
The paper submission deadline is July 31st 2013. Papers must be original and comply with ISBJ submission guidelines. Please refer http://isb.sagepub.com/ for submission guidelines and a link to the on-line submission system. In the on-line system please ensure you submit your paper within Manuscript Type: ‘Special Issue: Processual Entrepreneurship’.The guest editors would also draw attention to the EGOS SWG related to this topic (http://www.egosnet.org/2013_montreal/general_theme, ‘Understanding Organization as Process’). Informal enquiries on the Special Issue are welcome;