Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- one New openings
- two Driving democracy
- three Radicalising entrepreneurialism
- four The rise of plural control
- five A different view: organic meta-governance
- six The concept of adaptive strategies
- seven Embodying change
- eight Degrees of democracy
- nine Practice in the making
- ten Energies for change
- Notes
- References
- Index
three - Radicalising entrepreneurialism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- one New openings
- two Driving democracy
- three Radicalising entrepreneurialism
- four The rise of plural control
- five A different view: organic meta-governance
- six The concept of adaptive strategies
- seven Embodying change
- eight Degrees of democracy
- nine Practice in the making
- ten Energies for change
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
Screw it, let's do it! (Richard Branson, 2007)
A politics of entrepreneurship is … not (only) about ‘the economic benefits certain successful entrepreneurs bring to our region or country, but about how citizens co-create the society they take part in … Entrepreneurship can … make a difference … where existing situations have stiffened, in all fields of a society where we feel involved and want to contribute … There is a saying that all the beauty of winter can be found in any single snowflake. Perhaps … we have the potential to find the beauty of entrepreneurship in almost any interaction we see. Indeed, the space of entrepreneurship in society is about nothing less than beauty. (Chris Steyaert and Jerry Katz, 2004, p 182)
Entrepreneurialism and entrepreneurial leadership have come to be viewed as essential to improving the capability of organisations to innovate and improve performance in the face of 21st-century demands and turbulent times. Innovation is typically seen as ‘the core capability for organizational success’ (Gratton, 2007, p 5). As one educational analyst puts it, entrepreneurialism is advocated as ‘a bet on human ingenuity’, its ‘secret’ of success being ‘to summon the best within us’ (Hess, 2010, p 151). Governments, pulled by the promise of entrepreneurialism as an invigorator of organisational success and by perceived pressures of global economic competition, put a high priority on enhancing enterprise. Creating a more enterprising society has become an integral part of the dominant policy discourse in the UK to plug what is seen as an ‘enterprise gap’ (HM Treasury, 2004, 2008), with a clarion call being issued most recently to ‘light the fires of entrepreneurialism in every corner of our country’ (Cameron, 2010).
In the post-bureaucratic organisation (Maravelias, 2009), organisational members are expected to behave as if they are entrepreneurs and ‘owners’ of the organisation they work for. As a consequence, a new organisational and policy actor is being fashioned: the entrepreneurial subject, acting ‘upon one's self and others in a specific, calculative and maximizing way’; and the employee is being ‘re-imagined … as a strange hybrid, a mixture between “employee” and “entrepreneur” – an “entreployee”’ (Weiskopf and Steyaert, 2009, pp 185, 186).
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- Information
- Transforming Education PolicyShaping a Democratic Future, pp. 31 - 44Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2011