Absolutely fabulous! Fabulation and organisation-creation in processes of becoming-entrepreneur

Abstract

Purpose

This paper seeks to apply a processual thinking of subjectivity in the study of “becoming entrepreneur”.

Design/methodology/approach

Through analysing Foucault's idea of subjectification, by the help of Deleuze's comments and elaborations, the paper seeks to clarify one opacity in entrepreneurship research – the “vanishing presence” of the entrepreneur in processual studies of entrepreneurship. To avoid performative contradiction, the paper seeks to contextualise this attempt in guiding principles provided by process philosophy.

Findings

Without a process view, “the subject” as entity and self-constitutive res cogitans (thinking thing or mind) will take priority over subjectification, and the paper will loose the possibility to think and study the process of becoming-subject in its own terms.

Originality/value

Understanding entrepreneurship as organisation-creation, the paper here adds a processual conceptualisation to the study of such processes by focusing on the arrangements (agancements as Deleuze called this, or dispositifs as Foucault preferred to use) in which subjectification into “entrepreneur” happens.

Citation

Daniel, H. (2013), "Absolutely fabulous! Fabulation and organisation-creation in processes of becoming-entrepreneur", Society and Business Review, Vol. 8 No. 3, pp. 205-224. https://doi.org/10.1108/SBR-02-2013-0020