The efficiency of business incubators is disputed, but they have attracted significant attention from policy-makers and are a part of economic policies worldwide. To ensure their efficiency, it has been suggested that more involvement in the ventures by the incubator management would be beneficial. The purpose of this thesis was to inquire into the relationship between entrepreneurial processes and managerial practices in business incubation. Drawing upon research about entrepreneurial processes and the management of entrepreneurship and creativity in other organizational contexts, the thesis problematizes the suggestions of increased managerial interventions in entrepreneurial processes in business incubation.

The purpose was achieved through an analysis of entrepreneurial narratives from two Swedish incubators with different levels of managerial involvement in their ventures. The theoretical frame of reference used for the narrative analysis was based on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts for studying varying possibilities and groundings for becoming in narratives. Entrepreneurship is understood as a creative process characterized by dialogue, polyphony and carnival, which has implications for our understanding of business incubation as a phenomenon.

The narrative analysis generated four genres of entrepreneurial narratives and two models of incubation with different conceptualizations of entrepreneurship, the role of the incubator management and the incubation process. The result from the analysis of the incubator management from a creative process view was that the managerial approaches to coaching and clustering favored by the two incubators had different implications for entrepreneurship by providing varying possibilities for creativity due to aspects such as control, standardization and specialization. This study shows that business incubation, regardless of the model, includes a larger variety of entrepreneurial processes than previously recognized.

This study contributes to our understanding of how managerial involvement in business incubation is conducted in practice and how it is understood from the entrepreneur’s perspective. The theoretical contribution of this study is a Bakhtinian framework, which allows us to observe and to understand business incubation differently. The study shows how the Bakhtinian concepts can be adapted and be made useful in studying the relationship between entrepreneurship and management in business incubation by emphasizing entrepreneurship as the product of social interaction.

The papers in this issue were first presented at the interdisciplinary conference “Applied Cultural Heritage: How telling the past at historic sites benefits society” held at Linnaeus University in Kalmar, Sweden, 17-19 November 2010. The conference was organised jointly by Linnaeus University, Kalmar County Museum and Bridging Ages, International Organisation in Historic Environment Education and Time Travels. The aim of the conference was to explore how cultural heritage and stories about the past benefit society today. Given the major changes of society in recent decades and a fast developing globalisation, we proposed that it is no longer self-evident which historic sites are meaningful (and to whom), which stories about the past should be told (and why), and how cultural heritage can best benefit society (and what that means). It was therefore time to ask these questions anew and explore them together with practitioners in the heritage sector from around the world.

Bookkeeping and accounting is a prevalent feature of small organizations, which has changed face quite substantially with the advent of personal computers and, later, the Internet. The emergence of digitalized accounting procedures has taken place in a nexus of different types of actors (e.g., software developers, accountancy firms and the businesses themselves), regulatory frameworks (e.g., bookkeeping laws and accounting standards) and technical frameworks (e.g., standards for software interactions with banks and tax authorities). Altogether, this has made the paths taken in this process to be largely national. In general, this process of digitalization is largely undocumented and untheorized in research despite its profound impact on practice. Against this backdrop, this chapter has a descriptive and forward-looking approach, documenting the case of how Swedish bookkeeping practices of small organizations became digitalized, which can work as a reference case for comparisons with other national contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to add to the broader field of feminist organization and entrepreneurship scholarship by introducing and theorizing girlhood as a distinct enterprising femininity. More specifically, we investigate how girlhood, now enjoying a prominent role in commercial culture, impacts the relationship between enterprising self and femininity due to girlhood's many non-entrepreneurial features. We draw on the scholarship from the field of cultural studies to present the core politico-aesthetical categories, used to express girlhood as a distinct form of femininity. Empirically, we present and analyze an illustrative case of two large women-only professional networks that use girlhood and enterprising as their core message to their audiences. Our contributions render visible and provide a theoretical framework for studying girlhood as enterprising femininity, and add to the theorization of gendered and intersectional tensions and struggles between the market pressures to conform to the prevailing ideals of individualized success and the political ambition to challenge the status quo. More so, our theorization of girlhood as enterprising femininity allows us to raise question of what facets of femininity remain excluded - and thus in need of further theorization and critical feminist interventions - within the economic domain.

In this article we develop the analysis and the conceptualization of the relationship between play and work within the increasingly aestheticized working life, drawing on the scholarship of Jacques Rancière and using images of playful office interiors as our empirical case. In doing so, we are able to add to the theorization of the uneasy relationship between the subordination of employee imagination and self to the agendas of the employer, typical of wage labor, and the strive for heteronomy and refiguring of the social order, characteristic of play.

In this chapter, we discuss the entrepreneurial university as a part of the entrepreneurialisation of society. To investigate how this affects the University we take inspiration from Mazzucato´s discussion about the entrepreneurial state. Based on a rich empirical case where entrepreneurship has been introduced in a different way than described in extant literature (and policy), two conceptualisations of the entrepreneurial university are elaborated on. In “The Entrepreneurial University” (TEU) focus is set on how existing technology can be used in a new context or turned into innovations. In contrast, in the “Alternative Entrepreneurial University” (AEU) processes and practices are introduced to facilitate reflexivity with regards to the role of entrepreneurship in late capitalism. It is proposed that, rather than choosing one of these two ‘idea(l)s’, it may be beneficial to find ways to unite the two approaches, finding ways to create stability for knowledge production that can feed into both new technologies and novel ways of organizing society for the betterment of its constituents. Further it is suggested that the two conceptualisations can help to advance research approaches on the entrepreneurialisation of universities in order to learn how this sets and shifts boundaries for democracy and our understanding of knowledge production.

The authors use the analogy of the Argentine Tango to illuminate entrepreneurial effectuation as a process of becoming. Drawing on the metaphor of dance, the authors highlight seven areas for theory development that could further a performative theory of effectuation. These include the study of the micro-level movement and flow in the dance as “intimate steps,” and understanding the interplay between entrepreneur and ecosystem as “contextual rhythms.” They further propose that the study of changing leadership in the dance could illuminate how causal processes “become” effectual and suggest a concept of “attunement” to consider how inexperienced entrepreneurs learn contextual rhythms and, therefore, benefit for effectuation processes. Finally, they posit that the intimate steps leading to creativity in the dance relative to different levels of proximity and distance between the dancers should be understood alongside the movements and flows through which dancers maintain their individuality during such intimate movements and flows.

Purpose

This paper contributes to entrepreneurship theory by studying entrepreneurs' and local innovation support system actors' visions on rural sustainability. We see that not only entrepreneurs, but also local innovation support system actors, shape the context and thus influences entrepreneurial processes and policymaking.

Approach

This study focuses on rural Southern Sweden, using qualitative narratives from entrepreneurs and local innovation support system actors. These narratives provide reflections and insights that inform their perceptions on addressing challenges of sustainability and innovations in rural contexts. By employing rural proofing to assess context, we identify various factors influencing the entrepreneurship process.

Findings

The preliminary findings suggests that entrepreneurs and local innovation support system actors envision different sustainable futures for rural areas in Sweden. Both rural entrepreneurs' perceptions and local innovation support system actors’ perceptions have the same objective in relation to long-term sustainable rural enterprises such as ecologic farming versus short-term solutions. However, their perspectives on sustainability and innovative ways of doing entrepreneurship differ.

Originality

We are contributing to the growing interest in context, agency, and policy. The interviewed entrepreneurs and local innovation support system actors does not talk the same language when it comes to rural sustainability. This hampers efforts for a sustainable rural future. To foster innovation and sustainability in rural settings, we must systematically assess context and involve both entrepreneurs and local innovation support system actors.