Creativity, Play and Listening: An Auditory Re-Conceptualization of Entrepreneurial Creation in the Context of New Public Management

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.