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The Other Organization: Heterotopia, Management, and Entrepreneurship
Abstract
Organizations are viewed as ordered places that legitimizes the hand that holds back, and that formalizes structured, institutionalized ways of saying and doing. Against this backdrop, we want to see the more recent attention to the entrepreneurial as a reason to conceptualize the new organization that emerges from within the existing organization as the “other organization,” accomplished through heterotopia. We propose that such creation of organization, the process of entrepreneurial emergence, can be thought of as part of organizations: organization entails both the already organized and the emergent; and organization-creation efforts are tactically exploring the cracks, the interstices, of the already organized. The “other organization” is actualized within the heterotopic and ephemeral space opened by such efforts. Bringing heterotopic/heterochronic space-time back into the study of organizations requires that we immerse ourselves in the spaces of resistance, emergence and play. This essay—hopefully, also playfully—does that.
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The aim of the SI is to bring to the fore the places in which cross-sector partnerships (CSPs) are formed; how place shapes the dynamics of CSPs, and how CSPs shape the specific settings in which they develop. The papers demonstrate that partnerships and place are intrinsically reciprocal: the morality and materiality inherent in places repeatedly reset the reference points for partners, trigger epiphanies, shift identities, and redistribute capacities to act. Place thus becomes generative of partnerships in the most profound sense: by developing an awareness of their emplacement, CSPs commit to place, and through their place-based commitments produce three intertwined modalities of place-specific ethics that bind CSPs and place: ethic of recognition, an ethic of care, and an ethic of resilience. Our authors have found vivid examples of how emplaced CSPs embody these ethics, signaling hope for the sustainability of our (always hyper-local) life-worlds.
Triggered by the Russo-Ukrainian war starting early in 2022 and the subsequent movement of refugees toward various European countries, this rapid response paper provides five reflections on the role of social entrepreneurship in light of humanitarian crises. We validate two problems with the help of a problem owner from social entrepreneurial practice and suggest answers to them grounded in existing evidence documented in the academic literature (translational research approach). First, we show how social entrepreneurs can focus on solving the right problems in chaotic and fast-paced crises, and second, we illustrate measures to scale appropriately. Finally, on a meta-level, hope emerges as an additional answer. Even if social entrepreneurs should not address the "right" problems and even if they scale inappropriately, in light of any humanitarian crises, they still contribute value by creating hope for their societies, their stakehold-ers, and for themselves.
Building on Alistair Anderson’s work, this paper proposes transforming enterprise education to deeply address questions of sustainability, social justice and hope in our time of multiple and complex crises. New pedagogies, practices, vocabularies and connections help us to enact crises in entrepreneurial, ethical and creative ways, enabling us to remain hopeful in the face of unknown horizons. Drawing from critical pedagogies, from Epistemologies of the South, and from the wisdoms of Alistair Anderson, the paper outlines how transforming to a more, hopeful, socially just and sustainable enterprise education could move us beyond present alternatives. We suggest that transforming enterprise education (TrEE) would better facilitate students as ethical change-makers when they engage with their worlds, and its unseen future horizons. TrEE emphasizes the time needed for questioning dominant meanings and space for experimenting with new ones. It invites re-placing us in the margins and with the excluded. It takes an expansive view of the ecosystem, and places enterprise within its wider context. It focuses students, teachers, entrepreneurs and various other stakeholders in learning together with the non-human and relies on sustainable stewardship, social justice and hope at the core of transforming enterprise education
Although there is wide recognition of the importance of entrepreneurship for generating societal impact, entrepreneurial activities alone rarely achieve a positive impact without the engagement of communities. To date, however, entrepreneurship researchers have tended to overlook the importance of community for creating societal impact through entrepreneurship, and lack a comprehensive understanding of the nature and roles of communities. To address this, we conduct a systematic review of the literature published in 51 journals across the Management and Entrepreneurship, Economic Development/Community Development, Economic Geography and Regional Science, Energy, and Public Administration disciplines, that makes three contributions. First, it identifies a new typology of community and proposes a comprehensive framework of roles through which societal impact is created by entrepreneurship for, in, with, enabled by, and driven by communities. Second, it demonstrates that the key to understanding how community relates to societal impact creation is to jointly account for both its type(s) and role(s). By linking community types and roles, the findings also suggest a theoretical contribution based on the relationship between the degree of formalization of a community type, and the degree of agency that a community role enacts. Third, the review underscores that communities are not just static settings but can also be dynamic actors in efforts to use entrepreneurship to create societal impact. Our cross-disciplinary review highlights trends and gaps in the extant literature and provides researchers with an evidence-based research agenda to guide future inquiry on this vital topic.
We conduct a comprehensive review of embeddedness in entrepreneurship research. Although the term “embeddedness” is frequently used in this field of study, less is known about the ways in which it is operationalized and applied. Using criterion sampling, we analyse 198 articles in order to investigate how embeddedness is conceptualized and what role it plays in the extant entrepreneurship literature. We categorize our findings based on different phases of the entrepreneurial process (early, mature and exit) and outline the dominant focus and the main conceptualization of embeddedness for each phase. We highlight important learnings for each of the three phases and identify potential areas for conceptual development. Across the phases, we find that embeddedness and context are often used interchangeably. We thus call for construct clarity in the field. In the existing literature, entrepreneurs are generally portrayed as reactive to embeddedness, resulting in a loss of entrepreneurial agency. To remedy this, we introduce the term agencement, which takes into account the relationship between the entrepreneurship and embeddedness. Further, entrepreneurs are found to be embedded in multiple contexts at the same time, and embeddedness can be understood at different levels and to different degrees. To address this complexity, it is relevant to focus on the embedding process itself, acknowledging that it takes place in social interactions including cultural, cognitive, and emotional aspects between contexts and across levels. While the extant literature supports the notion that embeddedness is important for understanding entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs, it does not necessarily support our understanding of how embeddedness takes form or why it takes certain forms. We therefore include a call for future research to turn to process and practice theories.
Moments of crisis may serve as critical junctures for imagining alternatives. As the future has become increasingly volatile and precarious in these unsettled times of pandemic, climate emergency, rising inequality and an ever looming digital (r)evolution, there is a great need and opportunity to develop theory that can guide society towards its future potentialities. But how can we theorize what does not (yet) exist? A central task would be to develop methodological strategies that make the future amenable to empirical study.
This paper is a longitudinal study that uses insights from postcolonial feminism to explore women's entrepreneurship as a political form of feminist organising for social change in Saudi Arabia. Postcolonial feminist approaches challenge Western feminism, which can obscure the diversity of women's lived experiences, agency and activism. Through Bayat's (2013) theory of 'quiet encroachment', I identify the ways in which contemporary Western conceptualisations of feminist solidarity and social movements have dismissed ‘Other' women's ‘silent', protracted and (dis)organised activism in parts of the Middle East. By exploring how Saudi women have utilised their entrepreneurial space as a legitimate platform for change, I aim to enrich understanding of women's activism through everyday solidarity practices, which allow them to quietly encroach onto the previously forbidden political space. The findings exemplify how their activism ‘quietly' developed over time through a three‐step process ‐ from the entrepreneur aiming to empower women within their organisation, to developing feminist consciousness within their entrepreneurial network, to becoming a ‘political activist' lobbying for policy changes for women. These solidarity practices exemplify the West's relationship with ‘the Other', and reveal that feminist organising for social change must be explored within its own context in order to fully appreciate its global political potential.
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Support systems for early venturing efforts need to be harmonious with the emergent nature of those efforts. With current literature treating the conceptions of new ventures as exogenous, there has been limited focus on the transition of venturing efforts from nebulous, open-ended, and accidental toward becoming scalable, focused, and deliberate. We develop a dynamic model for organizing support systems for the early phases of new-venture creation, where scattered ideas evolve into venture concepts as tokens, frames, and premises for further action. By viewing venturing efforts and opportunities as emergent and drawing on the literature on complexity and organizational space, we propose openness, self-selection, visibility, and connectivity as the defining characteristics for organizing support systems. In contrast to literature's predominant focus on a predictive, linear approach, we expand the theoretical scope of support systems to include organizing that is more attuned to the uncertain and nonlinear nature of new venture creation that they support. Our work has broader implications for organizing uncertain early-phase development processes.
We live in a time of space, also in the study of organization. This review essay reflects on the state and the potential of organization theory’s spatial turn by embedding it in a wider movement of thought in the humanities and social sciences. Reading exemplary studies of organizational spatialities alongside the broader history and renaissance of spatial thinking allows us to identify and discuss four twists to the spatial turn in organization theory. First, organization is understood as something placed or sited. Second, it is a site of spatial contestation, which is constitutive for (and not merely reflective of) organizational life. Third, such contestation is itself an outcome of a spatial multiplicity that encompasses affects, technologies, voids and absences. Fourth, such an excess of space is beyond (or rather before) representation and thus summons a spatial poetics. In following these twists, increasingly complex and speculative topographies of organization take shape.
RESEARCH SUMMARY
We examine the influence of two conflicting emotions—group fear and group hope—in entrepreneurial team decision making. We are interested in which emotion will be more strongly related to whether entrepreneurial teams escalate their commitment to a currently failing venture versus terminating that venture. Using a longitudinal start‐up simulation and based on data from 66 teams across 569 decision making rounds, we find that group “hope trumps fear.” That is, the relationship between group hope and escalating commitment to a failing venture is stronger than the relationship between group fear and terminating that venture. We predict and find that team engagement mediates these relationships. We find partial support for a predicted moderation effect of group friendship strength. Theoretical implications are discussed.
MANAGERIAL SUMMARY
Emotions are a critical but often unacknowledged part of entrepreneurial decision‐making. We tested whether group fear or group hope will most strongly influence teams’ decisions to escalate their commitment, versus terminating a currently failing venture. Using a longitudinal entrepreneurial simulation, based on data from 66 teams across 569 decision‐making rounds, we find that “hope trumps fear.” That is, the relationship between group hope and escalating commitment to a failing venture is stronger than the relationship between group fear and terminating that venture. Group engagement versus disengagement helps to explain this finding. Our results indicate the importance of entrepreneurs understanding and managing their team emotions for best decision‐making. It also helps explain the continued engagement of entrepreneurial teams who even when fearful, have hope.
Using a nested multiple-case study of participating ventures, directors, and mentors of eight of the original U.S. accelerators, we explore how accelerators’ program designs influence new ventures’ ability to access, interpret, and process the external information needed to survive and grow. Through our inductive process, we illuminate the bounded-rationality challenges that may plague all ventures and entrepreneurs—not just those in accelerators—and identify the particular organizational designs that accelerators use to help address these challenges, which left unabated can result in suboptimal performance or even venture failure. Our analysis revealed three key design choices made by accelerators—(1) whether to space out or concentrate consultations with mentors and customers, (2) whether to foster privacy or transparency between peer ventures participating in the same program, and (3) whether to tailor or standardize the program for each venture—and suggests a particular set of choices is associated with improved venture development. Collectively, our findings provide evidence that bounded rationality challenges new ventures differently than it does established firms. We find that entrepreneurs appear to systematically satisfice prematurely across many decisions and thus broadly benefit from increasing the amount of external information searched, often by reigniting search for problems that they already view as solved. Our study also contributes to research on organizational sponsors by revealing practices that help or hinder new venture development and to emerging research on the lean start-up methodology by suggesting that startups benefit from engaging in deep consultative learning prior to experimentation.
We define "entrepreneuring" as efforts to bring about new economic, social. institutional, and cultural environments through the actions of an individual or group of individuals. Thus, we view entrepreneuring as an emancipatory process with broad change potential. This view foregrounds three aspects of entrepreneuring that merit closer attention in future research-seeking autonomy, authoring, and making declarations. We highlight the novel directions for entrepreneurship research suggested by our emancipatory perspective and relate it to the special topic forum articles.
Studying entrepreneurship in the context of recession and (post)crisis opens up a set of important questions regarding the relationship between entrepreneuring, social relations, and social change. In drawing upon insights from a 2-year ethnographic study of the Spanish’s Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (Mortgage Victims Platform), known as the PAH, this article centers on the mobilization of rather unlikely citizens to a process in which most of them never thought they would be part of. We suggest that a renewed engagement with such insights regarding the emergence of new forms of organizing, the development of (new?) forms of relationality and being together, and the role of different forms of emotions in hindering/favoring agency, offers important avenues to enrich entrepreneurship research.
A rapidly growing research stream examines the social effects of entrepreneurship on society. This research assesses the rise of entrepreneurship as a dominant theme in society and studies how entrepreneurship contributes to the production and acceptance of socio-economic inequality regimes, social problems, class and power struggles, and systemic inequities. In this article, scholars present new perspectives on an organizational sociology-inspired research agenda of entrepreneurial capitalism and detail the potential remedies to bound the unfettered expansion of a narrow conception of entrepreneurship. Taken together, the essays put forward four central provocations: 1) reform the study and pedagogy of entrepreneurship by bringing in the humanities; 2) examine entrepreneurship as a cultural phenomenon shaping society; 3) go beyond the dominant biases in entrepreneurship research and pedagogy; and 4) explore alternative models to entrepreneurial capitalism. More scholarly work scrutinizing the entrepreneurship–society nexus is urgently needed, and these essays provide generative arguments toward further developing this research agenda.
Research on precarity predominantly adopts a monolithic view of labour market intermediaries and ignores the differential distribution of precarity based on social group membership. This omission not only hinders a nuanced understanding of precarity but also prevents our ability to address inequalities. To address this, we examined the influence of caste on differential experiences of precarity among labour contractors in the garment industry in Tamil Nadu, India. We find that unequal distribution of social capital along caste lines leads to Dalit labour contractors experiencing greater precarity than their upper caste counterparts and also being stuck in such precarity. Specifically, caste-based dynamics of social capital threaten the survival of Dalit labour contractors by distorting their economic wellbeing and destabilising their leadership, and hinder their upward occupational mobility by confining their spatial mobility, limiting resourceful connections, and thwarting growth opportunities. Our study shines new light on how societal inequalities differentially distribute precarity among actors in the same occupation and underscores the intersectional nature of occupational precarity as well as the contextual nature of social capital.
Kim Stanley Robinson—award-winning science fiction writer—has warned us that our current history is a choice between utopia or catastrophe. In this interview and in the following reflections, we explore the implications of this existential choice for the social science disciplines; in particular, economics, finance, accounting, and management. Our goals are to build a provocation and develop some propositions about the direction of capitalism and the purpose of management research in an age of climate crisis. Against the backdrop of dread and greed and the specter of plutocratic capitalism, we offer a politics of hope. We envision a green capitalism in which corporations are held accountable for environmental and social stewardship. Rather than falling back on government or the corporation as an “either/or” choice, we urge a “both/and” approach and call for the active inclusion of communities and citizens in climate response through democratic, polycentric governance structures. Within this agenda, we envision a new role for the academy as “Ministry”; namely, giving voice to future generations and the silent (or silenced) victims of the present and, by embracing pragmatic realism, inspiring a liveable future—an optopia—that we can still forge from where we are.
This article, in an act of transmutation or world-making, replaces a workshop that was envisioned between one of the authors and Alistair Anderson. It takes the form of a dialog with one of his main co-authors to retrospectively and analytically explore the collective work of Alistair on ‘embeddedness’. We find that Alistair initiated a scholarly community of practice on a socialized view of entrepreneurship (‘entrepreneuring’), the essence of which can be captured through the notion of embeddedness. We describe the emergence of this community, its key production phases, and highlight the main features and insights of its approach, which was never theorized as such. The article also presents possible theoretical extensions of this research by opening several research doors for future work.
In our Introduction to this Special Issue on Organizational and Institutional Entrepreneuring, we draw attention to the importance of recognizing how processes and practices of entrepreneuring take place in the context of an already organized world. We particularly draw attention to how such entrepreneuring processes, as imaginative-poetic extensions beyond the present, can occur in a variety of societal, institutional and organizational contexts. Overall we focus on entrepreneuring as the process of creating organization. As a result, we believe that important insights arise by drawing attention to ways of ‘starting’ and ‘actualizing’, rather than conceptualizing entrepreneurship as something that was already ‘started’ in the past. This Special Issue thus helps to provide much-needed scholarship that expands our knowledge base and provides a foundation for future research. We conclude our Introduction with a summary of the articles making up this Special Issue, noting the ways that each article helps to advance our knowledge base about the processes of entrepreneuring.
Entrepreneurs create our tomorrows and we have a responsibility to comprehend as well as appreciate what they do. A repositioning of entrepreneurship scholarship is essential, if we are to fulfill our purpose, enact our principles, and engage fully with the peoples, places, and processes of entrepreneuring’s edgy ecotones. We argue for embracing the biosphere and exploring the in-between. We confirm the need for research that champions everyday entrepreneurs and challenges dominant ideal types. We propose and support an ethics of creative and circular frugality. To achieve these consistent and coherent aims, it is time for entrepreneurship to reposition as a connective, heterotopic, engaged, and transdisciplinary ecotone—rich, diverse, and embedded in the in-between.
What is the nature of whistleblower subjectivity? In this article, we depart from current scholarly depictions of this figure as a fearless truth-teller who is fully independent of the organization. We argue for a new framing that sees the self-construction of the whistleblower as infused with passionate attachments to organizational and professional norms, even after one experiences severe reprisals. We base our claims on recently gathered empirical data and draw on Judith Butler to theorize how, contrary to existing understandings, passionate attachments to one’s organization and profession shape whistleblower subjectivity, rather than conscious risk-taking, or autonomous self-reinvention. Our second contribution is to highlight the importance of practical and material supports for this vital figure in society; until now the whistleblower has been idealized as an extraordinary hero rather than a real human in need of assistance. Overall, we propose a new theorization of the whistleblower involving passionate investments in the organization or profession that has cast one out.
Deleuze and Guattari discuss the rhizome as being "absolutely different from roots and radicles" 6. The rhizome is explained via principles. 1 and 2: connection and heterogeneity.: "any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be". Principle 3: "Principle of multiplicity" "There are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines". Principle 4: "Principle of asignifying rupture" "There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome." Principles 5 and 6: Principle of cartography and decalcomania: Where traditional thought is 'tracing', a rhizome is a map. Tracing involves laying onto reality the pattern of structure, itself a construct. "The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious". They take the term plateau from Gregory Bateson, it refers to a sustained intensity. "We call a 'plateau' any multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome".
"Write with slogans: Make rhizomes, not roots, never plant!"
This article analyses data from 25 Irish craft beer entrepreneurs supplemented by associated web and press material, to explore how habitus emerges in a nascent entrepreneurial field. Welter’s frame of entrepreneurial contexts – business, social, spatial and institutional – is combined with Bourdieusian theory to explain the emergence of habitus. Findings show that emerging habitus is enacted through hybridisation of diverse global and local field logics, via the adoption, development and extension of their logics. It is also path-dependent on the life and career histories of a critical mass of habitus members, previously exposed to these fields. The study shows both local and global strategies of collective resource sharing – a novel approach to tackling the resource paucity typically faced by partitioned specialists facing large-scale generalists.
Seeking to govern the city in relation to climate change is a political project that at once imagines the present in terms of the future and the future in terms of the present. The urban politics of climate change has brought multiple visions of the possibilities (and limits) of urban futures. In this context, we find urban responses taking experimental form – creating sites through which to explore and experience different futures. They provide spaces in which utopian visions can be imagined, enacted and contested. Conceptualizing urban climate change experiments as heterotopic sites seems fruitful in at least two regards. Firstly, it captures their provisional and ambivalent relationship with the broader urban milieu. Secondly, and even more critically, it opens up the dialogues between the future and present which are at the heart of the climate governance project, and highlights the spatial form of these politics. We examine both with reference to two examples of climate experimentation in Berlin and Philadelphia.
Affect holds the promise of destabilizing and unsettling us, as organizational subjects, into new states of being. It can shed light on many aspects of work and organization, with implications both within and beyond organization studies. Affect theory holds the potential to generate exciting new insights for the study of organizations, theoretically, methodologically and politically. This Special Issue seeks to explore these potential trajectories. We are pleased to present five contributions that develop such ideas, drawing on a wide variety of approaches, and invoking new perspectives on the organizations we study and inhabit. As this Special Issue demonstrates, the world of work offers an exciting landscape for studying the ‘pulsing refrains of affect’ that accompany our lived experiences.
Ever since Michel Foucault shared a number of intuitions on ‘other spaces’ at a conference in 1967, a growing number of studies in social sciences have been focusing on what he then called heterotopias. Over the past 10 years, organization scholars have started to use the concept in their analysis, from leadership and marketing to queer practices and critical management studies (CMS). This article presents the origin and diffusion of the concept of heterotopia in management, using social movements as an illustration of its heuristic potential. We conclude by presenting two promising future avenues of research in our field: heterotopic entrepreneurship and organizational heterotopology.
This article aims to review and synthesize work that is currently going on in human geography and other areas of social science which addresses the questions of space, place, and time as cultural processes of spatial and temporal formation. It addresses key questions that arise when space and time are treated as constitutive elements of the work of political relation and argues that treating space and time as active constituents of political relation points towards new kinds of politics which are not just derivative of political forces but represent new and vibrant political terrains and gains. It discusses the continuing importance of political invention and suggests that hat contextual political analysis is the only meaningful form of political analysis and that this principle should be engrained in the practices of political theory.
This article examines a ‘deprived’ UK community to identify how (dis)connections between context and enterprise are produced within accounts of a particular locality. We used a discursive psychological approach to examine how the community depicted itself as a context for enterprise. Our analysis identified three discursive repertoires mobilised by a range of voices in the community which combined to portray an unenterprising community and create a conceptual deadlock for enterprise. We suggest it is too deterministic to assume context is fixed and controls the potential for entrepreneurial development. Instead, we should consider social practices, including talk, that help construct the contexts in which entrepreneurship is expected to occur.
L’utopie, aujourd’hui, a mauvaise presse. Elle est réduite, très souvent, à sa forme littéraire – le rêve ou la fiction – qui pourrait paraître inoffensive ou prêter à sourire, si le xxe siècle ne l’avait pas discréditée par les expériences totalitaires. L’utopie serait une notion désuète dont il conviendrait de se débarrasser, pour accepter une restriction du champ des possibles. Contre ces préjugés, le présent article insiste sur la figure de l’utopie pratique, et sur sa force critique pour contester un ordre social donné, dans les sociétés contemporaines, à partir d’une étude comparative des travaux de Michel Foucault et de Paul Ricœur, qu’il est intéressant de faire pour souligner l’importance d’espaces autres – des hétérotopies – en démocratie.
I will draw on the contributions of Courpasson (2016) and Hardy (in press) to reflect on the nature of resistance in contemporary organizations and extend the discussion by focusing on why and how actors might resist today. In particular, I propose that some types of resistance are motivated by what I label post-recognition politics rather than traditional struggles to be recognized, heard, and listened to. Hence the prominent theme of exit, escape, and social independence in emancipatory discourses designed to refuse work and employment today.
In Vibrant Matter the political theorist Jane Bennett, renowned for her work on nature, ethics, and affect, shifts her focus from the human experience of things to things themselves. Bennett argues that political theory needs to do a better job of recognizing the active participation of nonhuman forces in events. Toward that end, she theorizes a “vital materiality” that runs through and across bodies, both human and nonhuman. Bennett explores how political analyses of public events might change were we to acknowledge that agency always emerges as theeffect of ad hoc configurations of human and nonhuman forces. She suggests that recognizing that agency is distributed this way, and is not solely the province of humans, might spur the cultivation of a more responsible, ecologically sound politics: a politics less devoted to blaming and condemning individuals than to discerning the web of forces affecting situations and events.
Bennett examines the political and theoretical implications of vital materialism through extended discussions of commonplace things and physical phenomena including stem cells, fish oils, electricity, metal, and trash. She reflects on the vital power of material formations such as landfills, which generate lively streams of chemicals, and omega-3 fatty acids, which can transform brain chemistry and mood. Along the way, she engages with the concepts and claims of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Darwin, Adorno, and Deleuze, disclosing a long history of thinking about vibrant matter in Western philosophy, including attempts by Kant, Bergson, and the embryologist Hans Driesch to name the “vital force” inherent in material forms. Bennett concludes by sketching the contours of a “green materialist” ecophilosophy.