The Social Effects of Entrepreneurship on Society and Some Potential Remedies: Four Provocations

Abstract

A rapidly growing research stream examines the social effects of entrepreneurship on society. This research assesses the rise of entrepreneurship as a dominant theme in society and studies how entrepreneurship contributes to the production and acceptance of socio-economic inequality regimes, social problems, class and power struggles, and systemic inequities. In this article, scholars present new perspectives on an organizational sociology-inspired research agenda of entrepreneurial capitalism and detail the potential remedies to bound the unfettered expansion of a narrow conception of entrepreneurship. Taken together, the essays put forward four central provocations: 1) reform the study and pedagogy of entrepreneurship by bringing in the humanities; 2) examine entrepreneurship as a cultural phenomenon shaping society; 3) go beyond the dominant biases in entrepreneurship research and pedagogy; and 4) explore alternative models to entrepreneurial capitalism. More scholarly work scrutinizing the entrepreneurship–society nexus is urgently needed, and these essays provide generative arguments toward further developing this research agenda.

A history of racial imaginaries: Mainstreaming the illicit industry of interracial porn in the United States (1916–2022)

“…Entrepreneurship-as-emancipation scholars also emphasize positive articulation possibilities. Socio-economic imaginaries of entrepreneurship as emancipation challenge practices of economic exploitation (Laine and Kibler, 2022; Tedmanson et al, 2012; Weiss et al, 2023) and remove the stigma of sex industries (Ruebottom and Toubiana, 2021). By constrast, feminist scholars problematize contemporary imaginaries of sex and gender.…”

“Doing inequality, doing intersectionality”: intersectionality as threshold concept for studying inequalities in entrepreneurial activity

“…Nonetheless, it is relatively rare for the entrepreneurship literature to elaborate the social ontology and causal mechanisms by which multiply minoritised entrepreneurs experience exclusion and disadvantage. Mainstream acknowledgement of the disadvantages produced by class, race, and gender has only recently come to the fore (Weiss et al, 2023), with much of this work appearing outside of entrepreneurship or even business and management journals (e.g., Valdez, 2020;Villares-Varela et al, 2022). Our objective in presenting intersectionality as a threshold concept is to draw feminist theory building on intersectionality deeper into feminist entrepreneurship studies, to propel theorising in a more critical direction.…”