Entrepreneurship As Practice

This innovative book takes seriously the ordinary activities of entrepreneurship and maps out new pathways for scholars to understand the nature, properties, and implications of studying practices for entrepreneurship studies.

Entrepreneurship is neither an art nor a science, but a bundle of practices, as Peter Drucker once observed. Curiously however, academic research on entrepreneurship mostly abstracts away from practical activity. In contrast, Entrepreneurship As Practice takes ordinary activities of entrepreneurship seriously by mapping out new pathways for scholars to consider the everyday practices through which entrepreneurship occurs. Each chapter draws on contemporary theories of practice to illuminate the nature, properties, and implications of studying the practices of entrepreneurship.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Entrepreneurship & Regional Development.

Neil Aaron Thompson is Assistant Professor of Organisation and Entrepreneurship Studies at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His research interests include integrating practice theories into entrepreneurship studies, including ethnographic studies of entrepreneurial practice and creativity.

Karen Verduijn is Senior Lecturer at the School of Business and Economics of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her main research interests typically revolve around organizational emergence, dynamics of in- and exclusion, processual approaches, and critical theorizing.

William B. Gartner is the Bertarelli Foundation Distinguished Professor of Family Entrepreneurship at Babson College and a Visiting Professor in Entrepreneurship at Linnaeus University in Sweden.