Critical Entrepreneurship Studies

Speaker

Dr Caroline Essers (Radboud University Nijmegen and IAS Distinguished Visiting Fellow)

Overview

Critical Entrepreneurship Studies (CES) takes issue with the popular assumption of entrepreneurship being an individual-based form of organising with purely economic finalities. It insists that entrepreneurship, rather than forming a value-neutral means for promoting wealth and prosperity, is a gendered, classed, and socio-economically situated activity with distinct political and ethical implications and ramifications.

Today there is already a rich literature that pushes up against normative assumptions of entrepreneurship research as they pertain to, for instance, the practical and ideological privileging of maleness over femaleness, whiteness over coloredness, or Westernness over Africanness. On the other hand, we have a scarcity of research that pushes entrepreneurship beyond its current boundaries and into new, more radical and affirmative realms of social imagination. Hence, in this seminar, Dr. Essers will present various examples of research that go beyond traditional ways of looking at entrepreneurship.

To this end, she will elaborate on the usefulness and innovativeness of combining perspectives such as post-colonial feminism and the method of deconstruction with entrepreneurship research, and she will furthermore by showing examples of her own  research explicate how such perspectives may be applied on empirical  material.

Registration

This promises to be an interesting and popular event, so please register early via the eventbrite page.