Chris Steyaert

• University of St. Gallen

Democratizing entrepreneurship itself is by far no guarantee for emancipation: the majority can (over)rule, masculinist dominance or regressive ideologies may flourish, and exclusions occur. By ethnographically following the transformation of a socially engaged agency into a diverse cooperative, we offer a processual study of emancipatory entrepren...

This article embarks on a hopeful exploration of queer phenomenology in order to reorient management learning toward the senses, the body, and the spaces of learning and teaching we inhabit during education. Starting from Michel Serres’ long-standing provocation that “If a revolt is to come, it will have to come from the five senses,” I ask whether...

In this article, we connect with recent attempts to rethink management learning as an embodied and affective process and we propose walking as a significant learning practice of a pedagogy of affect. Walking enables a postdualist view on learning and education. Based on course work focused on urban ethnography, we discuss walking as affect-pedagogi...

In this paper, we argue that ‘good care’ in residential nursing homes is enacted through different care practices that are either inspired by a ‘professional logic of care’ that aims for justice and non-maleficence in the professional treatment of residents, or by a ‘relational logic of care’, which attends to the relational quality and the meaning...

Recently, radical democratic initiatives have been undertaken by freelancers and founders who come together in a range of alternative forms such as ethical entrepreneurial coalitions, urban coworking spaces, and open cooperative networks. In this paper, we argue that these initiatives to invent alternative, more equal forms of organizing engage str...

We examine the increasing popularity of collaborative work to understand the consequences of these practices for organizational control. Applying a Lacanian framework, we pay attention to how this (re-)emerging trend of collaborative work is underpinned by affect-laden fantasies of community-driven co-creation. Based on a multi-source study design...

The bicycle is an almost iconic study artefact that assembles the technological with the social, the organizational with the cultural, and the geographical with the political. This chapter traces how the bicycle was invented and transformed through a variety of uses, and how it increasingly is considered a ‘vehicle’ for ecological transformation th...

In recent times, practice-based approaches have gained momentum as theoretical tools to understand entrepreneurship. Even if this project is far from finished, in this paper we argue that it needs its own critical assessment by zooming in on one of the major implications which comes with taking the practice turn, namely the question of reflexivity....

In this study, we aim to revisit theorizing on inclusion by turning to practice theory. Challenging the individualist ontological assumption of most diversity and inclusion studies, we follow a practice‐based theory of diversity to understand how an inclusive social order is accomplished. Our empirical case centers on the real‐time practicing of a...

In this article, we argue that there is a need to theorize the relationship between entrepreneurship and the political beyond the currently dominant neo-liberal and emancipatory narrative by turning to an onto-political conception of entrepreneurship based on the processes of entrepreneurial experimentation. In entrepreneurship studies, the relevan...

Wohin man auch blickt, finden sich kreative Praktiken, Räume, Organisationen und Subjekte: der Kreativitätskomplex. Im Arbeitsalltag, im Stadtraum, in Medien und Werbung, auf den sozialen Plattformen, in Schulen und Universitäten - der Imperativ für alle lautet, neu und besonders, auffallend und einzigartig zu sein. Doch wie ist es dazu gekommen? M...

Wohin man auch blickt, finden sich kreative Praktiken, Räume, Organisationen und Subjekte: der Kreativitätskomplex. Im Arbeitsalltag, im Stadtraum, in Medien und Werbung, auf den sozialen Plattformen, in Schulen und Universitäten - der Imperativ für alle lautet, neu und besonders, auffallend und einzigartig zu sein. Doch wie ist es dazu gekommen? M...

Wherever we turn, we find creative practices and creative spaces, creative organizations and creative subjects. At work or in public places, in media representations and in advertisements, on social platforms, in schools and universities: There is a demand to be new and special, conspicuous and singular. How did this creativity complex and its impe...

Wherever we turn, we find creative practices and creative spaces, creative organizations and creative subjects. At work or in public places, in media representations and in advertisements, on social platforms, in schools and universities: There is a demand to be new and special, conspicuous and singular. How did this creativity complex and its impe...

This paper turns to practice theory as a new theoretical lens to better understand the complexity of diversity in organizations. Questioning the field’s ontological dualism between individualism and societism, we propose to engage with practice theory’s relational ontology and its main conceptual and methodological ideas. From this, we develop a pr...

Organizational ethics has attracted increasing attention, but how individuals make sense of themselves as ethical subjects is a yet to be explored domain. The few empirical articles on ethical subjectivity have focused on how people within organizations seek to find a balance between a sense of ethical selfhood and dominant organizational discourse...

This book provides a timely critique on the idea of social entrepreneurship and its reputation as a means for positive social change. The book uses different traditions and modes of critique to interrogate, disrupt and reimagine the concept of social entrepreneurship. Presented in five parts, each individual contribution uses a different critical p...

This article examines power issues related to language diversity in organizations, thus answering the need to investigate the role of language in cross-cultural management. More specifically, it contributes to a better understanding of how intraorganizational power relations are (re)defined through language use. Building on insights from language-s...

This article argues that the notion of affective atmosphere provides a privileged access to the study of organizational affect as it relates to a spatial ontology of ‘being-together-in-a-sphere’. Drawing on the study of affective atmospheres in philosophy and cultural geography, we develop a conceptual positioning from which to analyze a musical in...

Much of the literature on language in international business (IB) has sought either to lay out the advantages of a common language or lingua franca that crosses the linguistic boundaries of a multinational company (MNC) (Harzing, Köster, & Magner, 2011; Luo & Shenkar, 2006), or to identify the imperialistic and hegemonic effects of using such lingu...

This lively guide showcasing original and carefully curated research illustrates the dynamic relationship between discourse and organizational psychology. It maps the origins and development of discursive approaches in the field of organizational psychology and provides a timely review of the challenges that may confront researchers in the years to...

Process studies put movement, change and flow first; to study processually is to consider the world as restless, something underway, becoming and perishing, without end. To understand firms processually is to accept but also – and this is harder perhaps – to absorb this fluidity, to treat a variable as just that, a variable. The resonance with entr...

In lieu of an abstract, here is the introduction: In their critical analysis of entrepreneurship Jones and Spicer (2009: 115) end their study by suggesting that perhaps “what we find when we unmask the entrepreneur is the face of the other”; the face that, in the work of theorists like Levinas, Derrida or Badiou, symbolizes the par excellence ethi...

Working at the intersection of narrative and psychoanalytic theory, we present in this article an affective conceptualization of identity dynamics during times of career change, incorporating the notion of unconscious desires. We propose that frictions in career change narratives, such as the paradoxical co-existence of coherence and ambiguity, all...

Anhand der Beschreibung und Reflexion einer universitären Lehrveranstaltung, die die Erkundung städtischer Affekte und Atmosphären mittels ethnographischer Praktiken zum Inhalt hat, umreißt unser Beitrag eine Pädagogik des Affekts und skizziert ihre Implikationen für den Sinnbegriff und das Theorem des sensemaking. Zunächst stellen wir kurz einen „...

In this paper, a queer approach to feminine writing is related to the development of new female subject positions through conceiving of other understandings of time. To conceptualize this relationship, the novel The Hours by Michael Cunningham is analysed and interpreted as a queer story of how women — writing, reading and enacting a novel — acquir...

This article identifies power, subjectivity, and practices of freedom as neglected but significant elements for understanding the ethics of social entrepreneurship. While the ethics of social entrepreneurship is typically conceptualized in conjunction with innate properties or moral commitments of the individual, we problematize this view based on...

With the transformation of urban governance into a mode of entrepreneurialism, museums have become prominent and privileged sites for reshaping cities as attractive places for cultural and artistic consumption. Using an ethnographic field study, the authors investigate how the logic of the creative city is at work in the planning of a new art museu...

This paper aims to uncover the normative assumptions that guide language studies in international business. Relying on sociolinguistics and cosmopolitan theory, we point to the possibility of conceiving language as a social practice rather than a discrete entity, and understanding globalization as the entanglement between universality and particula...

This paper focuses on the aesthetics of the uncanny to inquire into and perform affective sites of organizing that are imbued with feelings of uncertainty and uneasiness. We argue that the uncanny forms an unconcept' that allows us to think and apprehend white spaces' of organization not as new or other spaces but through a process of relating inte...

How do developers and designers of a new technology make sense of intended users? The critical groundwork for user-centred technology development begins not by involving actual users’ exposure to the technological artefact but much earlier, with designers’ and developers’ vision of future users. Thus, anticipating intended users is critical to tech...

This article questions the unreflexive use of English in academic practices by highlighting the paradox of multilingual scholarship and the need for practices that may help both scholars and journals to become inventive in performing multilingual scholarship. Even when academic outputs are only in English, language multiplicity exists and needs to...

In this conceptual paper, we aim to develop a much needed ethical research agenda for international Human Resource Management (HRM), given that the changing geopolitical dynamics interrogate the political role of multinational companies and the ethical stance they take in their HRM practices. To theoretically ground this agenda, we turn to cosmopol...

Purpose – This paper seeks to pinpoint the importance of critical research that gets to problematise social entrepreneurship's self-evidences, myths, and political truth-effects, thus creating space for novel and more radical enactments. Design/methodology/approach – A typology mapping four types of critical research gets developed. Each critique's...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is, first, to assess the potential of the visual to enact multiplicity and reflexivity in organizational research, and second, to develop a performative approach to the visual, which offers aesthetic strategies for creating future research accounts in organization and management studies. Design/methodology/approac...

Learning goals Upon completing this chapter, you should be able to accomplish the following: Understand that the euphoria surrounding social entrepreneurship marks a severe hindrance for the advancement of knowledge. Comprehend that critique represents an affirmative means for extending the knowledge of social entrepreneurship beyond the confines i...

This article connects to and extends the attempts to bring space back into critical organizational theory, which, we argue, has mainly been based on the socio-spatial perspective as pioneered by Henri Lefebvre. Taking issue with the various ways in which Lefebvre’s work can be interpreted, we develop an alternative route. Adopting a mode of non-rep...

To address the complexity of multilingual communication, this paper applies a discursive approach to analyze how people account for the ways that specific languages are used in multilingual companies. Through our discourse analysis, we identify six different ways of accounting for language use. Further, we map the various tensions between these acc...

The aim of our article is to reflect upon intervention as a threshold where art and action research meet. For this, we will relate calls to apply the capacity of the performing arts to the social sciences to examples of neo-avant-garde art practices which show a renewed interest in (intervening into) the everyday production of public space. We reco...

In this article, I look into Bengt Johannisson's experiments with enactive research in the so-called Anamorphosis Project. This methodological experiment was based on the assumption that to understand entrepreneurship, researchers themselves must enact an entrepreneurial process and reflect upon it by engaging in auto-ethnography. By connectin...

Bengt Johannisson received the International Award for Entrepreneurship and Small Business Research in 2008. In this essay we present and evaluate his work over the last four decades in three of its dimensions: pioneering, provocative and participative. While his research interests and themes range widely, early on he resisted the individualization...

This chapter extends the literature on socially and ecologically minded entrepreneurship (Nicholls 2008, p. xix)—to ask how individuals can (re) imagine and realize more sustainable global ecosystems. Human action can create landscapes that are “at least as rich and as stable, occasionally as beautiful as those shaped by nature” (Lyle, 1999; Campbe...

Wenn wir das Verhältnis zwischen bezahlter Arbeit und Glück pauschal in einem Satz zusammenfassen müssten, würde dieser lauten: ›Es geht nicht ohne und nicht miteinander‹. Wiederholt wurde gezeigt, dass sich Arbeitslosigkeit negativ auf das Befinden von Menschen auswirkt, andererseits ist einer bezahlten Tätigkeit nachzugehen auch kein Garant für G...

In this introductory article, we explain the purpose of this special issue that is set up as a Festschrift in honour of the (editorial) work of Bengt Johannisson. Inspired by Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium, the special issue is structured along six essays that are both commemorative and affirmative, that is we use the work o...

This book focuses on the concept and role of relational practices as a way to understand, conceive, and study processes of organization, and subscribes to a processual view of organization that, since Weick's seminal book The Social Psychology of Organizing, has turned the study of organizations into one of organizing. More than 30 years later, the...

This paper critiques and re-imagines current research approaches to the field of social entrepreneurship. Taking a theoretical view of research as ‘enactment’, this paper explores research as a constitutive act and explores a range of ways of relating with and constructing the subject of inquiry. Three models of enactive research are presented, eac...

Purpose Responding to recent pleas both to critically analyze and to conceptually advance social entrepreneurship. The purpose of this paper is to examine how the political “unconscious” operates in the narration of social entrepreneurship and how it poses a limit to alternative forms of thinking and talking. Design/methodology/approach To move th...

Understanding the study of sexual spaces as heterotopological, this article argues that, in the context of sexual minorities, new forms of sexual identity that contest the dominant forms are generated and practiced in specific, ‘other’, spaces and timings, so-called ‘heterotopias’. To develop and illustrate this argument, the garden and gardening p...

Diversität als Managementansatz wird in der Schweizer Unternehmenswelt erst seit kurzem diskutiert. Anhand empirischer Studien zeigt dieser Beitrag auf, wie die "globale Idee" des Diversity Managements im Kontext eines lokal verankerten Verständnisses von Pluralität und Chancengleicheit in spezifischen Weisen interpretiert, kontextualisiert und in...

Dieser Band diskutiert aktuelle und zukünftige Steuerungsoptionen der Kreativwirtschaft. Internationale Experten aus Forschung und Praxis stellen das Orientierungswissen zu neuen Institutionen, Wissensmanagement und vernetzten transnationalen Arbeitsformen vor und problematisieren die Frage der Steuerbarkeit dieses aufstrebenden Handlungsfeldes. Er...

This study looks at how global ideas of diversity are practiced in Swiss-based organizations at a time when related social interventions vary widely: how do those interventions enable or foreclose varieties of difference? Using a discourse psychological analysis, we identify four interpretative repertoires that professionals and participants draw u...

In this Counterpoint, we build on Paauwe's suggestions to take the field of HRM and Performance further. Rather than aiming for a synthesis or proposing a radical alternative, we argue that R(econstructive)-reflexivity is needed for theorizing HRM. In particular, we bring in insights from critical studies on the notion of HRM, on the notion of perf...

Daniel Hjorth and Chris Steyaert make a unique contribution to management education. Their ability to illustrate complex ideas through theatre and visual media is outstanding and much appreciated by a wide audience. This book is no exception. Their insights into the nature of entrepreneurship are fresh and original. Their style of presentation is b...

Entrepreneuring has never achieved a breakthrough as the key concept that could elucidate the inherently process-oriented character of entrepreneurship, but it may be able to serve as the conceptual attractor to accommodate the increasing interest in process theories within a creative process view. This paper considers whether this is possible. In...

Reading and analyzing the Toy Store story imply a critical inquiry into how the act of storytelling can be understood. The entrepreneurial story is situated within the context of the plea to downplay the focus on the individual entrepreneur. As this discussion did not share some of the critical debates on the status of the subject, a narrative stud...

From a semiotic point of view, we observe that technologies can increasingly be “authored” or “written” by their users. If we are to understand processes of user-driven innovation, we need not only to consider how the user writes the technology but also how the user is configured within and through different discourses. Our study aims at contributi...

This article argues that current management education works primarily with an instrumental, reified and fragmented conception of knowledge that ignores the connection between knowing and passion. To propose a learning process that is less dispassionate and disembodied and that conceives of knowledge as invention, we first exemplify the current cris...

We begin within a specific social field constituted by a process of organisational change, which was initiated by the current policy of deregulating the electricity industry in Europe. As we join the story, the quiet days of monopoly are coming to an end at ELEC, a Danish utilities provider. We focus on how employees are produced as subjects in suc...