Entrepreneuring as provocation and its critical capacity: problematizing and establishing meanings of entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship is an elusive phenomenon and its meaning has been vigorously debated. This study seeks to contribute to critical perspectives on entrepreneurship by investigating how entrepreneuring participates and intervenes in the dominant discourse, and thus, in the practices that constitute meaning. To explore this crucial question, I use the framework of entrepreneuring as a mode of critical engagement. This perspective is supplemented by the performative notion of provocation, which helps in conceptualizing entrepreneuring and its artefacts as critical participants of the discourse. Next, I build a case around a video game as an artefact produced by an entrepreneurial venture. The findings reveal three practices that emerge from entrepreneuring: caricaturing, metaphorizing, and devaluing. I develop a model that illustrates how entrepreneuring provokes (i.e. problematizes and establishes) different versions of entrepreneurship. This study contributes to entrepreneuring and its critical capacity by theorizing entrepreneuring as provocation. Provocation highlights the various practices of critical engagement, draws attention to the involved material artefacts, and informs our understanding of the implicated ethics.