Book review: Strategies for Distributed and Collective Action: Connecting the Dots

Entrepreneurship stands at a critical juncture. Responsible, as the prevailing neoliberal consensus will have it, for shaping and driving economy and society in the second half of the 20th century, it is uncertain as to whether and to what extent it will continue to do so in the different circumstances of the 21st century. Critics of the state of researching entrepreneurship argue that to date this has been characterised more by activity than by analysis, more by research than by reflection, more by exhortation than by (critical) examination, more by advocacy than by censure. The discourse of entrepreneurship (or of enterprise more generally) is for the most part an ineluctably positive discourse of change, growth, innovation, transformation (of individuals, communities, organisations, technologies, industries and markets), self-actualisation, identity formation and emancipation. This is a discourse that has transcended the economic-based notion of the entrepreneur as founder/ innovator of an enterprise (a la Schumpeter, Kirzner, von Mises, etc.) to become a metaphor encompassing a wide variety of social practises as a general model of social subjectivity (Marttila 2013): as Pozen (2008) has expressed it, ‘we are all entrepreneurs now’, and members of this increasingly entrepreneurialised society have become ‘entrepreneurs of themselves’ (Rose 1996). But this is a discourse fundamentally predicated on a cognitive bias, captured in the ‘law of the instrument’ variously attributed to Abraham Kaplan or Abraham Maslow, who observed in The Psychology of Science (1996, 15) that ‘I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail’. Whatever the problem – post-disaster reconstruction, peacebuilding in conflict and post-conflict societies, social exclusion by gender, race, social status, the digital divide, labour market exclusion, economic marginalisation (e.g. of refugee and forced migrant communities) and so on – ‘entrepreneurship’ appears to be the answer. There is, however, another, emerging, discourse that challenges this entrepreneur-hype bubble. This is reflected in growing awareness of and interest in the dark side of entrepreneurship and its harmful effects on individuals, organisations and communities (Baumol (1990), and in critiques of the pursuit of theoretical casuistry at the expense of practical relevance and impact, a concern with the ‘what’ rather than the ‘why’ of entrepreneurship (Landström andHarirchi 2019).More generally, this has been extended in an emerging critical perspective on entrepreneurship which takes a poststructural and postmodern perspective to question the regimes of domination constructed and perpetuated in the name of the entrepreneur (Jones and Spicer 2009), challenges the glorification of entrepreneurship in the prevailing overwhelmingly proentrepreneurship narrative and its associated exaggerated enthusiasm (Örtenblad 2020), and critiques the neoliberal essence of the contemporary celebration of the entrepreneurial subject discourse (Marttila 2013). revie