infonet-economy

In lieu of an abstract, here is the introduction:

In their critical analysis of entrepreneurship Jones and Spicer (2009: 115) end their study by suggesting that perhaps "what we find when we unmask the entrepreneur is the face of the other"; the face that, in the work of theorists like Levinas, Derrida or Badiou, symbolizes the par excellence ethical moment or event. Jones and Spicer further argue that "[e]thics is in fact absolutely central to debates about the entrepreneur" even though entrepreneurship studies "rarely comes clean about . . . the ethics of entrepreneurship" (p. 102). Indeed, it is uncommon for the ethical ‘question' to be so clearly brought centre stage in debates of entrepreneurship. Jones and Spicer's work is also notable for how it establishes ethics (whose teleological focus is the ‘good life') and critique (which is preoccupied with denaturalizing, unmasking and problematizing self-evidences, myths and political truth-effects; Dey and Steyaert, 2012) as inextricably intertwined. Indeed, Jones and Spicer's hint at the co-implication of the ethical and the political moment of entrepreneurship is significant insofar as even though there is a burgeoning literature of critical studies of entrepreneurship (e.g. Tedmanson et al., 2012; Verduijn et al., 2014), these critical analyses all too rarely go all the way by linking up political with ethical questions (Calás et al., 2009). As the ethics and politics of entrepreneurship are dealt with in separate academic debates, this results in a zero-sum logic where an emphasis on one phenomenon necessarily leads to the exclusion of the other. Given this situation, in this chapter, we try to untangle the ethico-political "conundrum' of entrepreneurship studies by asking how ethico-politics can be related to an understanding of entrepreneurship as imagination (Gartner, 2007; Sarasvathy, 2002). A central contention of our argument is that ethico-politics as imagination takes shape through narrative practices rather than (merely) through a position of judgment based on normative principles and rules.

To enact the conjunction of ethics and politics in entrepreneurship research, we believe that conceptual creativity and philosophical anchorage are crucial. When it comes to ethical theories, which we will look at in more detail in the following section, there is no need to re-invent the wheel. Rather it is paramount to "re-mind" us of and retrospectively appreciate (Hassard, Cox & Rowlinson, 2013) the many theoretical possibilities which are available already and which permit us to counter the often a-theoretical set-ups and to arrive (with them) at some conceptual creativity. To this end, in this contribution we engage with Paul Ricoeur to develop a "critical hermeneutic of imagination" which creates a conceptual framework attentive to the ethico-political dynamic of language. Furthermore, we believe such a Ricoeurian approach allows us to redraw the current stalemate between critical approaches (focusing on political dynamics, processes and ideologies which "limit', "restrict', "mask', etc.) and affirmative approaches (whose focus are practices and spaces of becoming, social creativity and emancipation) in entrepreneurship studies (Weiskopf & Steyaert, 2009). In our view, a critical project (premised on a logic of "nay"-saying; ibid.) alone will not suffice to set free the potentiality of entrepreneurship, wherefore we propose an approach that relates critical reflection with creative possibilities and which can be named an "[a]ffirmative politics [that] combines critique with creativity in the pursuit of alternative visions and projects" (Braidoitti, 2013, p. 54).