Organising for entrepreneurship: How individuals negotiate power relations to make themselves entrepreneurial

Abstract

Recent years have seen an increasing interest in latent and emergent entrepreneurship and a desire to understand the conditions by which entrepreneurship comes to be. Whilst research on contextual influences has helped shed light on this area, the influence of power in determining who and what gets to be entrepreneurial has been underexplored. In this study, I address how power relations – in the form of more and less intensive connecting strategies – enable and legitimate some individuals as more entrepreneurial while simultaneously disabling and delegitimating others as less entrepreneurial. The context of this study is Science Gallery, an art/science public engagement space where entrepreneurship is held to be an integral part of its activities, underlying the Science Gallery ‘way’ of being creative. My findings show that power, in the form of more and less intensive connecting strategies, makes participants in Science Gallery programming ‘more’ or ‘less’ entrepreneurial depending on how they are connected to significant organisational actors and the benefits that stem from this connectivity. As such, my study contributes to research on latent and emergent entrepreneurship by addressing the role of power in determining not just how entrepreneurship happens, but why it happens – and who benefits as a result.