Organizational entrepreneurship : an art of the weak?

Summary, in English

It seems to me that the late-modern emblematic subjectivity of industrial economy – the manager – emerged as the emblematic manifestation as well as guardian of these ‘agents of production’ Foucault mentions in the opening quote. From F. W. Taylor onwards (although inherited from much earlier sources), the manager’s agency was constituted by the power to negate disorder, to instigate control, and to say ‘yes’ to carrying the ever-greater load of adjusting to modifications in the environment for the purpose of greater efficiency. Establishing the manageable organization and employee, central to the industrial age, ‘gave rise to a series of knowledges – a knowledge of the individual, of normalization, a corrective knowledge – that proliferated in these institutions of infrapower, causing the so-called human sciences, and man as an object of science, to appear’ (ibid.) How can we think organizational entrepreneurship differently as we are now, at the dawn of postindustrialism, looking for the creative/innovative rather than merely ‘manageable organizations’ (Taylor, 1911; Mayo, 1923; 1924; 1933; 1945; Simon, 1945; Becker, 1964; Chandler, 1977; Porter, 1980; 1985)? Rather than engaging in a critique of the complex matrix of knowledge/power that has shaped practice and understanding of organizations in late-industrial economy, I want to write for a new understanding.

• Author: Daniel Hjorth
• Editor: Daniel Hjorth
• Publishing year: 2012
• Language: English
• Pages: 169-190
• Publication/Series: Handbook on Organisational Entrepreneurship
• Links: http://dx.doi.org/10.4337/9781781009055.00019
• Document type: Book chapter
• Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
• Topic: Business Administration
• Status: Published
• ISBN/ISSN/Other: ISBN: 9781781009055; ISBN: 9781849803786