This article questions the unreflexive use of English in academic practices by highlighting the paradox of multilingual scholarship and the need for practices that may help both scholars and journals to become inventive in performing multilingual scholarship. Even when academic outputs are only in English, language multiplicity exists and needs to be reflected upon. To do so, we introduce the three strategies of scandalization, scrutinization, and invention which respectively
document and question the naturalization of English as lingua franca, inquire into linguistic negotiations and its effects, and make multiplicity visible. It is our belief that there is currently too little agony about and critique of the hegemony of English based on a kind of pragmatism; this situation prevents us from being more imaginative and experimental in the ways we include other languages and language differences.
In this introductory article, we explain the purpose of this special issue that is set up as a Festschrift in honour of the (editorial) work of Bengt Johannisson. Inspired by Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium, the special issue is structured along six essays that are both commemorative and affirmative, that is we use the work of Johannisson to explore fresh waters and invent new practices of performing scholarship in entrepreneurship studies. In the special issue, six practices are proposed that keep entrepreneurship studies imaginative: othering words and concepts, exploring boundaries, affecting community scholarship and entrepreneurship education, contextualizing through participation and reconceptualizing method. In the conclusion, we emphasize for the future the importance of a curious and imaginative scholarship in entrepreneurship, a utopian movement that attracts investment of intensity and mobilizes the idiosyncrasies of the multiple
