Disclosing Entrepreneurship as Practice: The Enactive Approach

This is an ambitious and engaging book. It lays the foundations for a methodology that bridges entrepreneurship researchers’ need to provide explanations and practitioners’ need to make their local world comprehensible – by calling the researcher to also practise as an entrepreneur.Disclosing Entrepreneurship as Practice outlines and demonstrates this `enactive’ approach and its outcomes in terms of a proposed practice theory of entrepreneurship. Presenting entrepreneurship as a sense-making, stabilising force in a liquid and ambiguous world, accordingly addressed as `entrepreneuring’, Bengt Johannisson argues that the duality of shrewdness and prudence provides the appropriate knowledge needed to practice entrepreneurship. By generalising entrepreneurship as creative organizing in multiple arenas beyond just the market, and conceptualising entrepreneurship as practice, this book presents a compelling rationale for considering entrepreneuring as `routinized improvisation’ dealing with situations as they arise.Reflective and thoughtful, this book will be of interest to researchers in the field of entrepreneurship concerned with theoretical and methodological matters, as well as those engaged with qualitative methodology in the social sciences.

Reviews of Disclosing Entrepreneurship as Practice: The Enactive Approach

`Bengt Johannisson's strength as a scholar and researcher is his ability to push the boundaries of what entrepreneurship is, as a process, as well as his keen sense of how and why entrepreneurial processes should be studied. Please acquire this book and, then, carefully explore the ideas and methods he proposes for entrepreneurship scholars to engage in enactive research as "entresearchers" – scholars who are actively involved in entrepreneurial activities who use these experiences as the basis for generating insights into enterpreneuring (entrepreneurship as a verb – as "organizing" is to "organization".) I enthusiastically support the "entresearcher" paradigm and the methods Bengt Johannisson describes for scholars to engage as "entresearchers" as part of their everyday practice. I believe that the "entresearcher" approach is the most fruitful way for scholars to gain profound insights into the nature of entrepreneurial processes.' — -William B. Gartner, Bertarelli Foundation Distinguished Professor of Family Entrepreneurship, Babson College, US `In his new book, Bengt Johannisson develops the concept of entrepreneurship as practice (entrepreneuring). The contribution is original, relevant and valuable for both researchers and practitioners.The book's objectives appear particularly important. The first is to provide the intellectual/theoretical foundations for our understanding of entrepreneuring. The second objective is to offer a methodology that can enhance the dialogue between researchers and practitioners. As Kurt Lewin claimed, there is nothing more practical than a good theory. Thanks to the author this statement makes sense in entrepreneurship?' — -Alain Fayolle, Emlyon Business School, Frabce