Critical Perspectives on Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Development

A critical perspective can help unveil, disclose or realise what is often buried beneath or contained within the more 'taken for granted' assumptions underpinning entrepreneurship studies and in doing so can be a positive and liberating force that revitalises, repositions and reconceptualises what might otherwise seem paradoxical. Each of the papers in this ebook explores an under-discussed, problematic and fascinating aspect of entrepreneurial effort, and each gives attention to context, and to relations of power, oppression and meaning making in the different enterprising worlds being addressed. The first paper explores how gender stereotypes and practices are at work in positioning 'Him' and 'Her' in the (same) firm, and by doing so problematizes the rhetoric positing of entrepreneuring as an individual or isolated activity. The second paper provides an empirically based, rich portrayal of the interplay between women's entrepreneurial and social identity formation in France. The paper reveals how these women's social and entrepreneurial identities do not exist on parallel tracks in neat and non-connected trajectories, but rather that they continuously interact, overlap and at times clash and create tensions. The third paper provides a fascinating postcolonial feminist analysis of the construction of entrepreneurial identities in the high-technology industry sector. The paper reveals processes of gender exclusion, domination and discourtesy serving to bring young and older Turkish men into 'knowing', while marginalizing Turkish women as 'Others', in the potent networking spaces of Silicon Valley. The fourth paper examines business failure as 'the other end of entrepreneurship'. It denaturalizes the understanding of insolvency practitioners as impartial actors who safeguard the smooth operation of the economy by disclosing how insolvency practitioners struggle to narrate their work in a coherent and unified manner. The fifth paper also addresses entrepreneurial failure, by arguing how failure is a paradoxical secret, an idealized representation which seems predominantly to conceal the traumatic reality of real 'failure' for so many people. The editorial essay connects the five papers by offering a tentative conceptualisation of dimensions of criticality in relation to one particular contradiction inherent in entrepreneurship: its oppressive/destructive versus its emancipatory potential.