“Do as we say and you’ll be successful”: Accelerators as Organizations of Entrepreneurial Dressage

Abstract

Entrepreneurs in educational organizations such as accelerators are those who create the new, the yet-to-come that differs from the here-and-now. But how do these organizations actually help them to accomplish this process? This paper extends the burgeoning literatures on accelerators and entrepreneuring by exploring the practices of becoming an entrepreneur in an accelerator. Based on a Foucault-inspired discourse analysis of ethnographic data gathered at a Berlin-based startup accelerator, we identified three practices—observing, exercising, and punishing—through which the accelerator’s staff ensured that startup founders would adopt a specific dominant style of entrepreneurship, one that reproduces growth-oriented and profit-focused themes. Through such powerful disciplining, they were able to make founders comply with such a style of entrepreneurship. The main contribution of our study is to advance an understanding of accelerators as organizations of entrepreneurial dressage. Furthermore, we add to the understanding of the mundane power dynamics of entrepreneuring through which actors mobilize dominant entrepreneurship themes to help others learn to become entrepreneurs.