Entrepreneurship, incongruence and affect: Drawing insights from a Swedish anti-racist organisation

Abstract

In recent years, entrepreneurship has been reconceptualised as social change. Understood as such, entrepreneurship can be viewed to disrupt and disturb the social order. We argue in this article that Foucault’s notion of heterotopia and Lacan’s concepts of the real and anxiety help us to conceptualise the disturbing aspect of entrepreneurship as social change and understand why the latter may encounter social resistance. Our contribution to critical entrepreneurship literature is to, first, emphasise that entrepreneurship instigates social change by introducing incongruence and, second, to highlight that this process can be affective: it can create anxiety. This article uses an illustrative historical case example of a Swedish anti-racist commercial magazine (Gringo) to elucidate these points. We conclude by pointing out that anxiety may be necessary for the provocation of social transformation.