Controversies in an information technology startup: A critical actor-network analysis of the entrepreneurial process

Abstract

This article critically investigates the controversies involved in the entrepreneurial process of an IT venture using the Actor-Network Theory (ANT). While ANT and other processual approaches have been used to assess entrepreneurship, little emphasis has been placed on addressing the controversies involved in the entrepreneurial process. To overcome this bias, we used the Cartography of Controversies (CC), an ANT's applied method, to highlight the impacts of conflictual relationships on the organizing process of an IT venture. We based our analysis on a pluralistic corpus of primary data, including interviews, focus groups, field journals, and other documents. We found five main critical issues related to the entrepreneurial process, being them: sociodemographic biases, reproduction of economic and cultural inequalities, conflicts among organizational elites, disputes between owners and workers, and overdependence of startups on larger technological firms. In line with the ‘ANT and After’ literature, we demonstrated how the critical use of ANT sociological approach avoids excessively aggregated categories often present on other critical studies. Finally, we conclude that the critical use of ANT can contribute to more sophisticated and well-built forms of criticism, orienting the research empirically and considering the critical capacities of the actants themselves.