From Dust to Buzz: Reconfiguring space for organization-creation

• In this paper, we examine the relationship between space and entrepreneurship, understood as organization-creation, by drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's spatial theorizing. Building on an ethnographic study of the Nordic Start-Up Incubator, we focus on the ongoing material, discursive and affective reconfiguration of space to promote entrepreneurial 'buzz'. We show how emancipatory promises (smoothings) are entangled with a logic of enterprise (striations), and how this ambiguity is enacted (folds) as organization-creation emerges spatially. This allows us to problematize the distinction often made between entrepreneurial spaces of emancipation and managerial spaces of control and to consider how they may co-constitute each other through subtle twists and turns. We conclude by discussing this multiplicity and ambiguity with regard to the politics of entrepreneurial spaces.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Ekonomi och näringsliv -- Företagsekonomi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Economics and Business -- Business Administration (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Deleuze and Guattari

entrepreneurship

ethnography

organization-creation

space

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)