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- Bill, Frederic, 1972-
(författare)
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The Apocalypse of Entrepreneurship
- 2006
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This monograph represents an attempt to rethink some of the fundamentals of entrepreneurship research, arguing that an entrepreneurial method for going about research ought to be about trying hitherto unthought-of perspectives. Apocalypsing, the method proposed and deployed in order to carry out this rethinking, deals simply with venturing beyond the already perceived. Drawing on the structuralism of the renowned anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, societal discourse on entrepreneurship is animated by analysing articles from a Swedish news agency. This analysis forms the foundation for a rereading of a North American myth, the Story of Lynx, as it is retold by Lévi-Strauss. The reinterpretation is aimed at demonstrating how this myth could also be perceived as an entrepreneurship narrative. This build up then culminates in a reframing of an academic monograph dealing with learning in an industrial district, a culmination in which the apocalyptic apparatus is shown, demonstrating the lack of a true signifier. Thus, something normally seen as familiar with regard to entrepreneurship is read/written ‘out of’ the taken for granted perception. Then something normally seen as very exotic, that is the story of Lynx, with regard to entrepreneurship is read/written ‘in to’ the field, thereby folding the phenomena in a new way, making the apparent inside an outside and the apparent outside an inside, elaborating in this way on the possibility of a cosmological perception of entrepreneurship. Next follows a rereading of another scientific text, one that is powered mainly by a case study of an industrial district. Using this story, an attempt to tear away the veil that obscures entrepreneurship is made, demonstrating how entrepreneurship can be seen as a part in a series of substitutable elements. Instead of a ‘true’ meaning, entrepreneurship links up with other labels, arranging itself into a series of substitutable explanations regarding why the world is the way it is. In the next step, drawing upon the colourful descriptions in the Book of Revelations, attempts are made to present other entrepreneurships. Inspired by Gilles Deleuze, various understandings, various horsemen of the apocalypse, are allowed to emanate from the material presented by Gustafsson (2004). Thus, it is shown how entrepreneurship could be multiplied beyond the apocalypse. Thus, Gustafsson’s field-accounts are used to elaborate on the four horsemen: who they are, what they do – which is perhaps somewhat surprising – and what they do not do. That is, the Apocalypse or apocalyptic apparatus is moved through the region and it leaves in its wake another understanding. Finally venturing back into the field of entrepreneurship research, this study elaborates on what the apocalypse and its aftermath would imply for our understanding of the various attempts to research the phenomena of entrepreneurship. Surprisingly, this leads us to the discovery that entrepreneurship research resides in Limbo.
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| 2. |
- Forslund, Magnus
(författare)
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Det omöjliggjorda entreprenörskapet : Om förnyelsekraft och företagsamhet på golvet
- 2002
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- There is nothing particularly revolutionary about the assertion that organisations today must be more entrepreneurial. However, one could rightly claim that interest was previously directed primarily at the anonymous organisation (as in Corporate Entrepreneurship) or executives at various organisational levels (as in intrapreneurship). Now, the focus is on production personnel. The question is: what happens in an organisation when one attempts to mobilise production personnel to engage in entrepreneurship? The little that has been written about this issue in established research has been relatively uncritical. For this reason and in an attempt to go beyond established concepts, I begin this dissertation with social constructionism and an ethnographic study, which consists of a number of narratives about Termos, a Swedish company with 200 employees. This study is not one that illustrates successful change. If anything, it discusses the issue of how both the production personnel and management made entrepreneurship impossible on the shop floor. A core question revolves around male and female images, and how women's self-images prevent them from taking the steps necessary to implement innovations. Another key point treats the issue of how management, in a confusion-inducing manner, mixes the vocabularies and actions of two different ideologies-managerialism and entrepreneurialism. One moment, management is talking about the importance of taking initiative; next, it is punishing personnel who do not "follow the system". Add to this the fact that both managerialism and entrepreneurialism threaten the ideology that guides the actions of production personnel. In turn, different types of resistance strategies are set in motion A critical reading of the literature on entrepreneurship reveals that it is also rendered impossible on the shop floor since these texts neglect production personnel. Only "real" entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial managers are discussed and honoured, while production personnel are just an exploitable resource. In this way, the ideologies of both entrepreneurship and management are understood as being "bad". Nevertheless, it is possible to see entrepreneurship on the shop floor at Termos. To do this, one needs to understand entrepreneurship that focuses on the organisation of resources into new patterns stemming from perceived possibilities, without the introduction of restrictions regarding type or size. It is also an understanding that rejects the idea of the entrepreneur as a subject position who prevents the production personnel from practicing entrepreneurship. Instead, it puts forth the notion that it is individuals who lend themselves to entrepreneurship. Furthermore, proximity is vital to understanding entrepreneurship in context, where we can "see" it. In conclusion, the dissertation maintains that there is every reason to demystify entrepreneurship if we wish it to happen everywhere, even on the shop floor.
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| 3. |
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| 4. |
- Lundberg, Hans, 1967-
(författare)
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Kommunikativt entreprenörskap : Underhållningsidrott som totalupplevelse före, under och efter formeringen av den svenska upplevelseindustrin 1999-2008
- 2009
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In 2003, sixteen Swedish humanists proposed the idea of a communicative democracy. Same year, leading Scandinavian organizational theory scholars proposed that Scandinavian welfare states efforts to revitalize their democracies can be understood as ”a movement toward the development of a more charismatic and communicative model of leadership [where] focus has shifted to the organization of communication processes and the necessity of including several viewpoints in decision processes and public debates” (Byrkjeflot, 2003). The sixteen humanists proposed that the core of this way of making sense of post-industrial ICT societies could be understood trough the concepts of technology, democracy and academy (Kylhammar & Battail, 2003).In agreement with such line of thinking, the point of departure for this study is that a communicative democracy hardly can be generative without a fourth concept, the entrepreneur, which infuses agency to the humanist’s promising but rather structurally oriented conceptualization. The entrepreneurial agency is far from being an unproblematic one, though. As a celebrated form of agency in contemporary societies, to such an extent that the entrepreneur ”stands as a powerful creature capable of summoning the energies of the market society through sheer will power, creating the magic of entrepreneurship” (Rehn & Taalas, 2004), one better think twice about the sort of magic brought in.Invited here, with the purpose of empirically describing and theoretically introducing communicative entrepreneurship, is the rough-and-tumble secular magic of sports as entertainment. Guttmann (1978) declared sports being ”among the most discussed and least understood phenomena of our time”, a catchy but relevant slogan for an industry that at one hand generates an intense communicative presence in contemporary societies – “Sporting metaphors saturate everyday language […] sporting expressions pepper political, economic, educational and social discussions” (Booth, 2004) – but on the other hand is in the outskirts of the nowadays so embraced creative industry, as sports was excluded from the formative efforts undertaken by the Knowledge Foundation (KK-stiftelsen) when the Swedish version of the creative industry, the experience industry, was generated via innovative forms of communicative entrepreneurship.This tension between the proper and the grotesque is intriguing. Therefore – being a life philosophy for thousands of athletes and millions of their followers, an extremely detailed applied science, a globally omnipresent form of popular culture, a practice that since the rise of Olympism discursively is rooted in religion, and a multibillion dollar industry in which many stakeholders invest and extract their shares – the multidimensional practice of sports and entertainment and its communicative capacity is scrutinized via a close reading methodology termed genealogical storytelling (Hjorth, 2004).
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| 5. |
- Ramírez-Pasillas, Marcela, 1971-
(författare)
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Global Spaces for Local Entrepreneurship : Stretching clusters through networks and international trade fairs
- 2007
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Many of the insightful writings on clusters identify the role of entrepreneurs as key agents in the formation of firms and clusters. This thesis argues instead that local entrepreneurship is not ceased once firms and clusters are established; local entrepreneurship is about the continuous (re)creation of both businesses and clusters in global spaces. Global spaces for local entrepreneurship emphasises how firms collectively become an agent of continuous renewal. Firms enact an organising context materialising in networks that stretch relations and collaborations according to the issues being dealt with. These networks are localised but are extended beyond the geographical boundaries of clusters. One important example of this, which is in focus in this doctoral thesis, is that firms operating in clusters often interact with actors whom they have met at international trade fairs (ITFs). ITFs are those attractive events that individuals, firms and institutions attend temporarily to exhibit and trade products in foreign and national markets.This thesis is based on the work contained in a cover and five papers. Each paper contributes to the research objective and questions brought forward in the thesis cover. The empirical evidence has been mostly drawn from several case studies conducted in the Lammhult cluster in Sweden. The findings show that firms build their organising contexts in order to stretch the reach and accessibility to local and non-local actors; they jointly co-create potential opportunities. The organising contexts are mapped in networks using three proximity orders. The empirical findings report three types of situations in which there is a potential opportunity for continuous renewal. By emphasising the opportunities that can be originated when a business is not realised or when a new or improved product or process has not been generated yet, this thesis aims to stimulate a theoretical reappraisal of global spaces for local entrepreneurship. With the conceptual development of global spaces for local entrepreneurship, we put forward the idea that such spaces enhance an ability to renew firms and clusters. The underlying reason is that local entrepreneurship is centered on the social interaction between individuals, firms and/or institutions; it materialises in intended and unintended dialogical situations when there is a commitment to the continuous renewal of firms and clusters. Such dialogical situations carry with them an opportunity for co-creating new businesses, new products and new processes.
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| 6. |
- Tidasen, Christine, 1971-
(författare)
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Att ta över pappas bolag : En studie av affärsförbindelser som triadtransformationer under generationsskiften i familjeföretag
- 2009
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The family firm sector is volatile due to for example challenges associated with management and ownership succession. Family businesses in Sweden, as well as globally, make an important part of the economy. It is well known that successions are critical transition processes for these firms. While this problem has been approached mainly as an internal managerial or financial challenge, this dissertation discusses the social dimensions of how successors transform family firms and especially personal networks during successions. Triads are used to create understanding for succession processes; the successor and the C.E.O. always contribute to triads. The third (wo)man is another family member, a co-worker, or an external actor, frequently a customer. To make sense out of the triad, one must understand the individuals and their relations. Particularly the relation between the C.E.O. and the successor is being analyzed. Further internal and external relations and how they are being transferred and transformed in a triadic context during successions provide a context for the triads and are considered as well. Accounts from four Swedish manufacturing family firms and their business partners show that the C.E.O.’s personal network infiltrates the environment, both internally and externally, and that the successor must earn trustworthiness to be able to transform the companies and the C.E.O.’s network. The trustworthiness seems to be easier to create on an external arena where the C.E.O. is not present. On that arena the successors can build their own platforms from where they can conquer other relations. It appears that the successor first has to show capability of creating their own external business relations before they can transform the existing internal and external network. Successors should also focus on working, for the family business, in new projects that contribute a new competence to the firm. When a family business is transformed identity development is crucial. The “child” must change its identity from being the next generation to be an obvious C.E.O. on own merits. Keywords: family business, succession, trust, relation, triad, network, identity
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