CALL FOR PAPERS
Enterprising Cultures
CMS6: The Sixth International Critical Management Conference
July 13-15, 2009
Warwick Business School, The University of Warwick, UK
Stream Description:
To date the political economy and socio-cultural aspects of enterprise development and
entrepreneurship have been under-discussed themes in critical management studies. Our stream aims to
highlight entrepreneurship and enterprise development as a rich field requiring theoretical attention from
critical management studies. We believe the new forms of entrepreneurial effort emerging, which cross both
cultural and geographic boundaries, is an exciting area for critical and theoretical attention. We seek in this
stream to explore ways in which socio-cultural factors and political context influence entrepreneurial
processes, identity and activity: how entrepreneurs and new enterprises ‘become’, instead of ‘are’ (Essers and
Benschop, 2007). We think entrepreneurship is also about power, resistance, identity and diversity and can
involve maintaining or reclaiming of culture and community (Bryant, 1999; Paredo and Chrisman, 2006).
CMS6 presents a timely opportunity for critical management scholars to come together around analyses that
draw attention to the dynamics of power and the ways power connects, intersects, transforms or disrupts
subjectivities, such as ethnicity, Indigeneity, gender, sexuality and geographies of place in relation to
entrepreneurship (Wolkowitz, 2006; Fletcher, 2003). By inviting papers around the theme of Enterprising
Cultures we aim to provide this space for scholars to share critical perspectives in this growing field of
contemporary interest.
Entrepreneurship and enterprise development have been areas of increasing interest to management
and organisational scholars over the past four decades (see Steyaert and Katz, 2004). The entrepreneurial
studies field is popularly couched in terms about risk, innovation, people, discovery, processes and
opportunities. Entrepreneurship has become somewhat of an iconic mantra or metaphor for innovation
across a broad range of settings, spaces and places. However, there’s often a normative base to presumptions
about the ‘naturalness’ of values about individualism and competition embedded in discourses about
entrepreneurship. Growth and development is viewed in relation to wealth generation rather than in socio
political terms. Most analyses are primarily informed by western values and ‘Eurocentric’ epistemologies,
using western methodologies that reproduce western theoretical frameworks (Chakrabarty, 2000).
Globalisation is generating new shifts not only in the transnational operations of International businesses but
also in the movement of population groups across the world. New enterprise development is a contextdependent process involving both social and economic dimensions (Reynolds 1991; Low & Abrahamson 1997)
and can embrace social change and transformation in ways that go far beyond simple commerce or economic
growth (Czarniawska, 2003; Steyaert and Katz, 2004). We argue there are issues of power, the political
economy of place and discursive constructions of culture here that require timely consideration within the
critical management studies ‘space’.
Discourses about the entrepreneur as personality ‘type’ favour stereotypical constructions of a
‘heroic’, charismatic, risk-taking, rugged masculinised individualism which underpins what it means to be
enterprising (Chell, E. et al 1991; Marlow and Patton, 2000; Ogbor, 2000). Hence, most entrepreneurs featured
in mainstream accounts are ‘white’ males (Bruni et al., 2004; Essers and Benschop, 2007). Recent research has
started to unsettle such imaginings and reveal the multiplicity of reasons why and the many ways in which,
people engage in enterprise development activities. These more pluralistic perspective destabilise hegemonic
‘white’ patriarchal standpoints (Chakrabarty, 2000; Banerjee and Prasad, 2008). The dimensions of gender,
ethnicity, sexuality, religion, class, culture and geographic context in these studies are revealing the under
discussed rich diversity of motivations, purposes and meanings of entrepreneurship and wide variation in
ways people construct both themselves and the enterprising activities they engage in (see McDowell, 1999;
Skeggs, 2004; Down and Reveley, 2004;).
Recent studies explore how ethnic minority and Indigenous entrepreneurs often rely on cultural
networks of shared language, family relationships and the accumulation and exchange of communal social
capital, to reveal how social and cultural factors play an essential role in defining not only the nature of the
enterprise activity itself, but also in shaping governance and management arrangements (see for example:
Anderson and Jack, 2002; Portes et al. 2002; Rehn and Talaas, 2004; Peredo, et al, 2004; Pio, 2005; Frederick
and Foley, 2006; Lee-Ross and Mitchell, 2007; Bruton et al; 2008; Cahn, 2008; Banerjee and Tedmanson, 2007).
In developing third and fourth worlds entrepreneurial activity leads to enterprise development which builds
not only capacity but resilience against externally imposed, often colonially driven oppressions of the past. A
postcolonial perspective would analyse minority entrepreneurship and community enterprise development as
part of the ways ‘subaltern’ groups can ‘speak back’ (Spivak, 1988) against the historic legacies of past and
continuing (neo) colonial dominations (Frenkel and Shenav, 2003; Storr and Butkevich, 2007; Banerjee and
Tedmanson, 2007). We envisage strong interest in CMS6 Stream: Enterprising Cultures from scholars
concerned with questions of class, political economy, post-colonialism, gender, sexuality, development studies
and Indigenous enterprise development. We welcome practice based and theory presentations which
deconstruct mainstream ideologies in this field and address questions such as:
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How do ‘mainstream’ entrepreneurial discourses both constrain and enhance enterprising cultures?
How do the dynamics of power, gender, resistance, sexuality, identity, space, emotions, ethnicity interplay to shape (or be shaped by) entrepreneurial activity?
In what ways does culture shape entrepreneurial activity and/or its organizational form?
Do emergent ‘minority’ enterprises generate new hybridities of cultural and social entrepreneuring in
either developing or ‘host’ nation contexts?
We call for papers that address these questions and/or explore the following themes:
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Socio-cultural dynamics of entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurial ‘identities’: the entrepreneurial ‘others’
The political economy of local enterprise development
Socio cultural factors in entrepreneurial activities
Geographies of entrepreneurship
Issues of: gender, class, ethnicity, locality, Indigeneity, sexuality – in enterprise activity, organisation
and management
Critical reflections on management and power relations in enterprise development and/or
entrepreneurship – including insights drawn from:
o feminist theory;
o postcolonial theory;
o ‘whiteness’ theory;
o cultural perspectives;
o action research; narratives; story telling; discourse analysis or other innovative perspectives
Stream Convenors:
Deirdre Tedmanson
deirdre.tedmanson@unisa.edu.au
University of South Australia
+61 43 999 0889
Caroline Essers
c.essers@fm.ru.nl
Radboud University Nijmegen
+31-24 3611740
Lia Bryant
lia.bryant@unisa.edu.au
University of South Australia
+61 8 830 24363
Key Dates:
1st November 2008
Submit Abstracts (<1000 words, A4, single spaced, 12 point font) to:
deirdre.tedmanson@unisa.edu.au
31st December 2008
Notification of selection
1st May 2009
Full papers submitted
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