A Critical Agenda of Entrepreneurship Studies: From Dystopian Oppression to Heterotopian Emancipation

This paper examines entrepreneurship in its relationship to criticalness. Though conceding that ‘critical' is a slippery term without a singular meaning, we contend that an explicitly critical agenda of entrepreneurship is needed to decenter the commonsense which notoriously prevents us from understanding entrepreneurship outside of the ‘hegemony of the positive' (Bill, Olaison & Sorensen, forthcoming). Critical is hence used here as a sensitizing concept to emphasize entrepreneurship's assumed role in overcoming extant relations of exploitation, domination and oppression. So far, critical approaches have been instrumental for creating insights into how entrepreneurship is connected with, for instance, the favoring of sectional interests, the ideological support of capitalist hegemony or the selective appropriation of profits. However, whilst this ‘dark side' approach has gained some currency in entrepreneurship studies (Spicer, 2012), it is our conviction that critical analyses must also comprise a commitment to how entrepreneurship can bring about new openings for liberating forms of individual and collective existence. Consequently, following the example of Rindova, Barry and Ketchen's (2009) special issue on ‘Entrepreneuring as Emancipation', we sketch out a critical agenda of entrepreneurship research based on different conceptualizations of emancipation. Concretely, drawing on Laclau's (1996) dualism of emancipation - oppression, we chart four forms of emancipation, and in line with these, four forms of critical entrepreneurship research. Based on illustrations from the extant literature, we demonstrate how each perspective champions a different conclusion with regard to what the emancipatory or oppressive potential of entrepreneurship may consist of.