What does it mean to be against entrepreneurship? From antagonistic to agonistic critique.

I will use the liberty that comes with writing an afterword to reflect on whether the binary opposition between for or against, as well as the implicit understanding of critique as a purely oppositional gesture, still has purchase in contemporary critical entrepreneurship scholarship. While it is no secret that I wholeheartedly identify with the critical entre- preneurship community, this chapter takes it upon itself to argue that critical research could reach a dead end if it continues to reduce its mis- sion to an antagonistic confrontation with (a however defined) main- stream of entrepreneurship research. At the heart of this contention is the realization that the mainstream of entrepreneurship research has changed so much in recent years that it has become superfluous to conceive of critique solely as an act of pure negativity (Noys 2012). Thus, given how entrepreneurship is studied and theorized today in mainstream entrepre- neurship scholarship leads me to purport that being against—in the oppositional sense of the term—is hardly appropriate for leading our critical enterprise into the future. Using the first part of this short reflec- tion to delineate and challenge the prerogative interpretation of critique as oppositional engagement with mainstream research, this leads me, in a second step, to ponder the possibility of an alternative interpretation of critique based on Chantal Mouffe’s (1999, 2013) notion of agonism. I thus use the article by Olaison and Sørensen (2014) on entrepreneurial failure to exemplify the potential inherent in agonistic critique.