Power as Practice: A Micro-sociological Analysis of the Dynamics of Emancipatory Entrepreneurship

• Goss, D., Jones, R., Betta, M., & Latham, J. (2011). Power as practice: A micro-sociological analysis of the dynamics of emancipatory entrepreneurship. Organization Studies, 32(2), 211-229. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840610397471

Case study. I guess this counts as original research. Goss et al use an autobiography of a social entrepreneur--or maybe it's a diary--in order to theorize about the nature of entrepreneurship itself. It seems like the point of the article is to re-theorize entrepreneurship. 

This paper contributes to a recent movement to reframe entrepreneurship theory into a more critical and reflexive mode. It builds on the processual notion of entrepreneuring-as-emancipation to theorize a balanced conception of agency and active constraint rooted in the notion of power rituals. We develop a micro-sociological analysis of power rituals that conceives power reproduction and entrenchment as a ‘practice-based’ activity that focuses on what power holders and subordinates concretely do, think and feel. This makes emotion a key dimension of entrepreneurial agency and redefines constraining barriers to agency in terms of a social process of ‘barring’.This novel approach is illustrated using an autobiographical account of a social entrepreneurship project. On the basis of this analysis, a number of insights are provided into the ways in which the power-as-practice approach can inform wider debates in organization studies where the notions of agency and constraint are linked to issues of power and resistance. 

So yes, this is a theory paper about entrepreneurship that lands in organization studies. 

Using Collins, Goss et al develop a macro-sociological account of power. They take issue with the macro-micro distinction and work to show how what we think of as the macro is really just an accumulation of interactions in situations?

A lot of this paper is about gender and power. The girl in the autobiography is, well, a girl. I don't know what happened to her because I didn't read that part but the Collins is about emotion, about how deviant emotions can constrain as well as enable resistance to power, to the order-givers. I got the feeling that Collins was saying something like, if you have all of these fragmented, say, uber drivers who are resentful and with all of these feelings, those feelings can be mobilized for change. So it's that focus on the situational, on how situations can give rise to emotions which can themselves lead to emancipation, that sociology should focus on. 

Like Steyaert, Goss et al wanted to focus on verbs rather than nouns, on entrepreneuring and on barring rather than barriers. 

The most interesting part for me was the part on social entrepreneurship.

...social entrepreneurship has traditionally been regarded as different from business entrepreneurship by stressing the generation of social value, rather than private or share- holder profit (Austin et al. 2006). By focusing on the mechanisms that underpin the entrepreneuring- as-emancipation argument we show that social entrepreneurs’ role in driving social change (Leadbeater 1997; Thompson 2002) is inherently linked to their ongoing social relationships. In this sense, social entrepreneurship is not just about an individual’s moral commitment to helping people or performing good deeds (valuable and noble as such activities may be) but is rooted in particular patterns of relationships – those that constitute an individual’s biography and those that are unfolding on a minute-by-minute basis. The nature of the vision and the extent of the energy that makes a social entrepreneurship project successful, or a failure, need to be located within the situational configuration (of the sort we have illustrated above) within which the key actors move. The interplay of active constraint and agency helps to explain why, most of the time, the change that aspirant social entrepreneurs pursue is so difficult to achieve and, occasionally, so spectacu- larly successful. The power rituals and variants we have outlined above suggest that whilst a discomfort with the status quo (Bornstein 2004) may be a necessary condition for social entrepre- neurship, it is unlikely to be sufficient to secure long-term social transformation (Perrini 2006). 

Def sounds like it could help out in a TCQ article or something. 

Oh, and this shift from the individual to the situational. 

...we contend that a more fruitful approach towards theorizing the process of entrepreneuring lies within the social dynamics of situations, rather than the conventional emphasis on individual personality types and normative considera- tions (the social entrepreneur as ‘saint’; the business entrepreneur as ‘frontier hero’) still prevalent in much entrepreneurship thinking (Nicholls 2010: 1). A power-as-practice approach lays emphasis on the contexts and processes through which individuals construct their projects – the fluctuating balance between agency and constraint – rather than on the essential properties of an individual or deterministic structural forces. 

Looking at my notes, I was struck by the word backstage--as in backstage emotions--and it got me thinking of the extra-textual dimensions of uptake. 

https://utexas.box.com/s/zb7rmhu0ab3c4ihvnjkk8hc09q0omorv