It all starts with a story: questioning dominant entrepreneurial identities through collective narrative practices

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Abstract

Taking a multiple-practitioner perspective on entrepreneurial identity construction, we explore how identities can be co-constructed through social interactions. In the context of a social entrepreneurship course at a Belgian business school, we stress the role of collective narratives in breaking free of dominant frames of reference and shaping emancipatory ones. As the stories unfold, collective narratives provide opportunities to perform and negotiate dominant identities as discursive resources: to ‘thin’ certain parts and ‘thicken’ other preferred traits. Through collective narrative practices, practitioners can disrupt the dominant individual heroic entrepreneur myth and develop new entrepreneurial identities reflecting an understanding of entrepreneurship as collective action. Our original intervention method, scaffolding conversations, shows how narratives can be collected and analysed at the individual and group levels, providing members with opportunities to reflect on their shared experiences, struggles and hopes.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)90-123
Number of pages34
JournalInternational Small Business Journal
Volume42
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 12 Feb 2024

Keywords

  • collective action
  • conversational experiential learning
  • entrepreneurial identity construction
  • entrepreneurship as practice
  • narrative identity
  • social entrepreneurship

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