Critical Entrepreneurship Studies

CES takes issue with the popular assumption of entrepreneurship being an individual-based form of organising with purely economic finalities. It insists that entrepreneurship, rather than forming a value-neutral means for promoting wealth and prosperity, is a gendered, classed, and socio-economically situated activity with distinct political and ethical implications and ramifications. Today there is already a rich literature that pushes up against normative assumptions of entrepreneurship research as they pertain to, for instance, the practical and ideological privileging of maleness over femaleness, whiteness over colouredness, or Westernness over Africanness.

On the other hand, we have a scarcity of research that pushes entrepreneurship beyond its current boundaries and into new, more radical and affirmative realms of social imagination. Hence, in this seminar, Dr. Essers will present various examples of research that go beyond traditional ways of looking at entrepreneurship. To this end, she will elaborate on the usefulness and innovativeness of combining perspectives such as post-colonial feminism and the method of deconstruction with entrepreneurship research, and she will furthermore by showing examples of her own research explicate how such perspectives may be applied on empirical material.

Dr Essers is an Assistant Professor Strategic Human Resource Management at the Radboud University Nijmegen, Faculty of Management and an Associate Professor Entrepreneurship at VU University Amsterdam and is hosted as a University of Birmingham Institute of Advanced Studies Distinguished Visiting Fellow by Professor Monder Ram OBE. Caroline’s research focuses on the social dynamics of entrepreneurship, such as the identity constructions of female migrant entrepreneurs and their networking.

This seminar is free to attend but registration is recommended.