Theorizing the processes and practices of entrepreneuring at work

Abstract

As the boundaries of ‘work’ extend to include work that adapts to or brings about new organization, social value and alternative futures, it intersects with entrepreneurship studies in intriguing yet under-developed ways. This special issue focuses on developing this intersection by advancing process and practice theory research on entrepreneuring. Entrepreneuring is a concept that captures the processuality and relationality of entrepreneurship, and its emancipatory potential, that occurs amidst existing organizational conditions of work. Entrepreneuring thus poses hitherto missing questions relating to how new forms of work are actually enacted in concrete practices, the tensions from which it emerges and that it triggers, the ambivalence it conveys, and the metamorphoses it goes through. In turn, entrepreneuring conceives of work as fluid and permeated by open-ended possibility, providing space for scholars of entrepreneurship, work and organization to come together to ‘imagining-with’ practitioners alternative political, social, technological and ecological futures that have yet to come into being. The articles in this special issue illuminate the various processes and practices of entrepreneuring at work and provide novel conceptualizations, vocabularies and methodologies that can advance this budding but increasingly important domain of research and practice.