A critical understanding of entrepreneurship

In lieu of an abstract, here a short extract from the introduction:

... when using the term “critical” in CES (Critical Entrepreneurship Studies), we have in mind research which deliber- ately goes against the grain of functionalism and its deterministic view of human nature, reality and research, with the aim of opening up space to critique the canon of accepted knowledge and to create the conditions for rearticulating entrepreneurship in light of issues pertaining to freedom, emancipation or societal production. We seek to challenge and destabilise existing knowledge to open up new and different understandings that may change society for the bet- ter; we seek to critique in order to create. In this way, CES can be thought of as a double move- ment which critically engages with the mainstream of entrepreneurship only in order to break it open so that novel possibilities, be they practical or conceptual, can take flight. As we write this text, research that challenges the mainstream of entrepreneurship research clearly outnumbers studies which set out to rearticulate entrepreneurship as a society-creating force whose broader effects have emancipatory purchase, not merely economic utility. To carve out the unique poten- tial of CES, we would like to sketch out, if only tangentially, different strands and research tradi- tions which bear relevance for a critical understanding of entrepreneurship.