دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی کارآفرینی و آسایش: بحث از دست رفته - الزویر 2018

ABSTRACT

In this article, we seek to open a debate within entrepreneurship scholarship around a prevailing reductionist view when it comes to non-western or alternative contexts. We argue it is incapable of capturing behavioral differences across contexts without making ethnocentric, narrow and simplified theoretical assumptions about ‘the rest’. Drawing on the sociology of absences, we explain why the concept of entrepreneurship, as it relates to development, has remained captive and constrained by western economic and cultural assumptions, which has been boosted by a worrying absence of self-criticism. This is problematic but equally full of missing opportunities. Drawing from cultural relativism and the sociology of emergences, in this paper we propose a refreshed agenda for advancing research at the intersection of entrepreneurship and development, marked by the possibility of alternative futures and the potency of hidden causes.

Escaping the entrepreneurship iron cage: Towards a refreshed research agenda

Building on the theoretical critique of de Sousa (2012), we have suggested the mechanisms through which entrepreneurship research makes knowledge claims that can be exclusionary. Extant research follows a particularly ethnocentric perspective of entrepreneurship which, in the context of most non-western cultures, renders entrepreneurial behavior as oftentimes ignorant, residual, inferior, local or non-productive. By doing so, such an approach has retained enterprise-related activities as culturally captive, yet interestingly, enterprise refers not only to those units of economic organization (we are mostly familiar with), but can more broadly relate to any particularly difficult, complicated or risky undertaking, or even more to being ready to engage in an audacious or difficult action. Given the critique outlined above, we argue here for a refreshed agenda for those of us interested in this space. In order to escape the entrepreneurship iron cage, we suggest that a position of cultural relativism would be beneficial for advancing research at the intersection of development and entrepreneurship. The logics espoused by de Sousa (2012) suggest that by not conducting entrepreneurship research with western assumptions in mind we portray ‘the rest’ as being absent of those qualities: “ignorant, backward, inferior, local or particular, and unproductive or sterile” (P.52).