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This article uses the concept of style to rethink sustainable entrepreneurship. Our point of departure is the conceptual distinction between organization as style made durable and entrepreneurship as the disruption of style. We show that style is not simply an aesthetic category, but rather what ties different social practices together. While organization makes the connections between social practices durable, entrepreneurship disrupts such patterns. We further elucidate how organization and entrepreneurship are two intermingled processes – those of durability and disruption – that together enable the creation of new styles. In order to conceptualize this creative process, we explore how play can create disharmonies within the organization, but we also maintain that any new practice will remain marginal without a collective assemblage capable of adopting it. On this basis, we argue that sustainable entrepreneurship consists of making an environmentally friendly and socially conscious style durable, but also of disrupting such a style. In order to illustrate our argument, we use the example of the sustainable smartphone producer Fairphone. In conclusion, we argue that the concept of style may strengthen the dialogue between entrepreneurship studies and organization studies.

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.

Scholars adopting a relational ontology of organisational creativity have shifted attention away from a preoccupation with individual minds towards that which is enacted, emergent, shared, unpredictable and contingent. This article follows suit, yet breaks new ground by reconsidering how the mind plays an active role in unfolding creative interactions by building a bridge between literature on organisational creativity, aesthetics and philosophy of imagination. I draw on English Romanticism to craft a theoretical model of organisational creativity as an aesthetic and relational process of shared imagining. This model demonstrates how organisational members use primary and secondary modes of imagination and creative expression to develop, materialise and share perceptions and images of possible futures. By elaborating on their interplay, this article contributes to literature by theorising an active and generative role of mind that does not have the ontological shortcomings of leading theories. In turn, this has a number of implications for literature on entrepreneurship and organisational creativity in terms of situating and embodying creative thinking, explaining the intentionality and motivation for creative actions, overcoming perceptual differences and changing practices and routines.

Drawing on how Marx reverses consumption perspectives (C-M-C) to capture the money-orientation of entrepreneurs (M-C-M), the paper addresses ways the ‘ecological press’ of creativity is affected by money-orientations becoming internalised deeply into institutions. Accepting Hjorth’s critique that managerialism aims at producing ‘today’s ideal of self-managing enterprising employees’, the pressing issue is to understand how organisation, when re-configured around budgets, targets and other metrics, can be opened up to passion, carnival and play without augmenting the ‘power of place’. Asking how ‘spaces of play’ get foreclosed by the ‘ecological press’ of creativity being turned towards money-making, particular scrutiny is given to the ways in which ‘institutional logics’ get altered by internalising money-orientations. Three paradigm cases of reverse-thinking in innovation are examined: namely, Edison’s supply of electricity, Sloan’s use of ROI to grant autonomy, and JIT’s lead towards the flexible factory. While suggestive of the role money may play in limiting creativity to the possibleand the potential, the analysis shows how change towards the virtualcan be triggered by complex modes of reverse-thinking. While the analysis challenges ‘market logics’ that put creativity in the hands of the ‘chance and caprice’ of internal competition, I conclude that negative effects on the ecological press of creativity, such as ‘making play pay’, might be better countered by more research over how money’s presence and absence is created and tempered.

Despite the fundamental role customers play in entrepreneurial creation processes, little is known about how value emerges from interactions and collaborations between entrepreneurs and their customers. We begin to address this question by exploring the relational and embodied processes through which entrepreneurs and their customers interact to co-create aesthetic value. On the basis of an 11-month multi-sited micro-ethnography of arts entrepreneurs, we abductively derive three interrelated processes: imagining, contemplating, and consensus building. Our key insight is that the customer plays a vital role throughout the entrepreneurial creation process: neither the entrepreneur nor the customer has the final say; rather, their embodied experiences combine with an evolving product to co-create aesthetic value.

This article aims to re-conceptualize entrepreneurial creation in the context of New Public Management. While the latter has sought to ‘entrepreneurialize’ public sector employees by creating incentives for greater engagement in optimizing outcomes, the article departs from the premise that such an entrepreneurialization may more precisely be described as an ‘enterprising up’ of employees, placing strong emphasis on predefined outcomes and on eliminating the risk that input will not lead to the prescribed outcomes. Noting that this reasoning is fed by a prescriptive/retrospective logic, which tends to marginalize the openness of the ear-body, the article activates auditory concepts to (re)theorize entrepreneurial creation in the empirical context of a strong outcome focus. From ‘rhythm’, ‘composing’ and ‘crescendo’, entrepreneurial creation is theorized as a playful variation, which stays with process and allows the alterity of the other(ness) to resonate – and hence opens up a space for the qualitatively different to emerge. Hereby, the article seeks to contribute to a processual conceptualization of entrepreneurship as the creation of new in-betweens by providing (auditory) concepts that help us grasp this in-between as an emergent relational field of unactualized potential.

This paper contributes to creative entrepreneurship studies through exploring ‘liminal entrepreneuring’, i.e., the organization-creation entrepreneurial practices and narratives of individuals living in precarious conditions. Drawing on a processual approach to entrepreneurship and Turner’s liminality concept, we study the transition from un(der)employment to entrepreneurship of 50 nascent necessity entrepreneurs (NNEs) in Spain, the United Kingdom, and Ireland. The paper asks how these agents develop creative entrepreneuring practices in their efforts to overcome their condition of ‘necessity’. The analysis shows how, in their everyday liminal entrepreneuring, NNEs disassemble their identities and social positions, experiment with new relationships and alternative visions of themselves, and (re)connect with entrepreneuring ideas and practices in a new way, using imagination and organization-creation practices to reconstruct both self and context in the process. The results question and expand the notion of entrepreneuring in times of socio-economic stress.

This article considers a number of issues hampering the application of arts-based ‘playful’ methods in organization studies once the close relationships between ethnography and aesthetic research, and the connections between art and everyday experience, are recognized. Drawing particularly from the creative ethnographies of Kathleen Stewart, Dwight Conquergood and H. L. Goodall, Jr. it suggests that the performative nature of artistic cultural texts lies in their intention to move their audience towards new sensitivities, awareness, and even learning. Critique is not oppositional to such development, being essential for fully creative movement. The article therefore suggests that what is needed are critically affective performative texts. For such texts to be socially, politically and epistemologically defensible, and thus a viable form for researchers to consider adopting, it is necessary to understand how they work to generate critical momentum, and what possible lines are available for justifying and evaluating creative approaches that challenge orthodox organizational research in being neither objective, representational nor expressive. The article outlines four ‘moments’ of critical leverage – aesthetic, poetic, ethical and political – that work in play with each other to create powerful artistic texts, and illustrates them by drawing on work-related literature, music, poetry and art, including workplace ethnographies. This framework enables the location of artistic and ‘playful’ methods epistemologically and ontologically relative to other modes of research and offers a robust justification for their further use in the field of organization studies.

In this paper, we develop a framework that conceptualizes organizational creativity as an attributional process in which organizational creativity is constantly negotiated between an organization and its environment through ‘entre-relating activities’. Based on an empirical analysis of this process in the haute-cuisine restaurant Rutz in Berlin, we explore four entre-relating activities – surprising, satisfying, stimulating and savouring – through which ‘being creative’ and ‘being considered creative’ are set in relation to negotiate the attribution of organizational creativity. Our findings demonstrate how the sequential performance of these entre-relating activities is consequential for the gradual transition of external evaluations of an organization’s outcomes, from being considered ‘different’ to ‘one of a kind’, and thus the increasing attribution of organizational creativity over time. Our study contributes to the literature on organizational creativity by exploring the interplay between ‘being creative’ and ‘being considered creative’ through entre-relating activities, which is foundational for understanding organizational creativity. Furthermore, our findings put aesthetic responses at the centre of organizational creativity and demonstrate the playfulness of the process through which the attribution of organizational creativity is produced.

Most studies on the links between secrecy and creativity have focused on individual sources of creativity and the impact of organizational management on creative initiatives. However, because of their very focus on individual practices of concealment and personal creative capacities, they have paid scant attention to collective interactions occurring around secrets. In this paper, we illuminate some mechanisms through which the creative work achieved in secret by scientists is enhanced by the exceptional character of their situation within the company. Coping with these exceptional circumstances leads the group to increase commitment, cohesion and efficiency. We theorize creativity as a result of the multiplication of social interactions among individuals and the social consequences of working and cooperating in secret. We show that secrecy can help rather than be detrimental to organizations when it is analysed as a social fabric of interactions around work and common feelings triggered by the risks of working in secret.