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Dear Colleagues,
Good news! The Entrepreneurship as Practice Conference Organizing Committee has decided to extend the deadline of abstract submission to the 4th EAP Conference, which will take place from 3-6 April 2019 (see info below). The new deadline is now on 15 December 2018.
In addition we are happy to announce that we shall be selecting 12 of the best papers submitted during the Conference to participate in the Organization Studies Special Issue ("Organizational and Institutional Entrepreneuring: Processes and Practices of Creating in an Organized World") Paper Development Workshop scheduled on the 6th of April 2019.
Participants will also be offered to submit their paper to the "Research Handbook on Entrepreneurship as Practice", Research Handbooks in Business and Management series, Edward Elgar Publishing.
Looking forward to your submissions!
All the best,
Claire Champenois & the EAP 4 Organizing Team
Claire CHAMPENOIS
Audencia Business School
Associate Professor in Entrepreneurship & Management
Business & Society Department Head of Research
CALL FOR PAPERS
4th Annual Entrepreneurship as Practice
Conference and PhD Symposium
3-6 April 2019
Audencia Business School, Nantes, FRANCE
eap4.
ABOUT THE CONFERENCE
The 4th version of this conference aims to advance understanding of entrepreneurship-aspractice,
foster network ties, facilitate collaborative writing relationships, and build a strong
community of practice scholars. To do so, we have developed a Research Conference and
PhD Symposium that educates interested scholars as well as develops empirical and
conceptual papers regarding the 'practice turn' taking place in entrepreneurship studies.
Building on the first (February 2016 at VU Amsterdam), second (February 2017 at University
College Dublin Quinn School of Business) and third (April 2018 at Linnaeus University)
Entrepreneurship-as-Practice conferences, this conference and PhD symposium bring
together the growing community of researchers who embrace the "practice turn". Initiated by
such calls as Steyaert (2007) and Johannisson (2011), the entrepreneurship-as-practice
movement is now gaining traction, witnessed by such contributions as De Clercq & Voronov
(2009), Tatli et al. (2014), Goss et al. (2011), Keating et al. (2013), Chalmers and Shaw (2017),
Dimov (2018) and Matthews et al. (2018).
Practice theorists of entrepreneurship studies share a number of common assumptions. First,
instead of thoughts and ideas hidden inside individual entrepreneurial minds, the central
focus of inquiry are the spontaneously expressed, living, responsive, relational practices
occurring out in the world between us for all to see. Second, practices are seen as the relevant
unit of analysis for the exploration of entrepreneurial phenomena. Although there is no one
definition of practice possible, they are fundamentally collaborative and relational activities,
not solely reducible to the agents who carry them out. As they are defined by Schatzki,
practices are organized by the enactment of sequential bodily activities, mediated by 'things'
and their use, and drawing upon practical knowledge. Practices bring together actors,
activities and contexts, thus interrelating social structures and human agency (Dodd et al.,
2016; Hill, 2018; Tatli et al., 2014). Consequently, EaP research aims to observe, theorize and
unfold the practices―as ways of doing and saying things―carried out by practitioners
(entrepreneurs and their partners).audencia.com (under construction) Drawing on these shared assumptions, recent scholarship has advanced entrepreneurship
research in several ways. First, entrepreneurship-as-practice continues to move away from
understanding 'who' an entrepreneur is towards the importance of collaborative activity,
performance, and work in the creation and perpetuation of entrepreneuring (Gartner et al.,
2016; Keating et al., 2013; Matthews et al., 2018). Second, theories of practice help us
understand the critical role of the body, practical know-how and material objects in
organizing entrepreneurship. Third, theories of practice help us perceive and better
understand the reproduction and transformation of practices and practical knowledge related
to entrepreneurial phenomena across time and space.
However, emphasizing the intricate socially-situated nature of practices comes with
considerable ontological, theoretical and methodological implications. These will be
addressed during the Conference and PhD Symposium.
For background and information on EaP literature, prior conferences and other pertinent
STRUCTURE OF THE CONFERENCE AND PhD SYMPOSIUM
The Conference will be held over three and a half days: The first day, April 3rd will focus on
theoretical issues, the second day April 4th on methodological issues, and April 5th on a
paper development workshop. The conference will include keynote lectures and workshops,
a panel session on publishing entrepreneurship as practice research and a working paper
development session.
Publication Opportunities (Download Calls for Paper)
• Following the Conference, on the 6th of April, we will run a PDW for the Organization
Studies Special Issue "Organizational and Institutional Entrepreneuring: Processes and
Practices of Creating in an Organized World". Best papers will be selected for
participation in this workshop.
• Participants will be offered to submit their paper to the "Research Handbook on
Entrepreneurship as Practice", Research Handbooks in Business and Management
series, Edward Elgar Publishing
Participating scholars are welcome to choose one or more days of the conference when
registering.
PhD candidates who want ECTS credits for their participation are required to attend all three
days of the conference, as well as generate additional work beyond what is required by other
participants in the conference.
We welcome papers addressing theories of practice and creative organizing
from a variety of disciplinary and methodological perspectives.
Entrepreneurship, management, strategy, social sciences, humanities studies
are all welcomed.
Potential although not exclusive topics that may be addressed include:
Theoretical Challenges:
What are the differences between the individualism, structuralism and practice traditions
of entrepreneurship research and how can they be combined?
How is the process approach to entrepreneurship (entrepreneuring) similar and different
from practice approach?
How can we carve out insights and theories without the traditional aim of reification and
generalization, given practice theories' phenomenological roots?
How can we theoretically cope with the enormous diversity of practices in which
entrepreneurship is implicated?
How can entrepreneurship studies help to theorize the reproduction and transformation
of practical knowledge?
How can we incorporate embodiment and sociomateriality into our understanding of
practices related to entrepreneurship?
How can an EaP perspective rejuvenate our thinking about traditional entrepreneurship
related topics of innovating, creating opportunities, networking, venturing, strategizing,
financing and organizing?
What is the value of existing theoretical frameworks of practice for entrepreneurship
research, and when should we employ or go beyond them?
How can EaP be used as a platform for critical studies of entrepreneurship?
Methodological and Empirical Challenges:
How does one begin an EaP study, such as selecting and entering a site for observation?
As theories of practice guide us to study the real-time and unique instances of practices
related to entrepreneurship, how can we observe, analyze and theorize about these unique
instances, whilst still accounting for their relations to other practices?
What are some common research questions that can be formulated and answered using an
EaP perspective, and which practice theory is appropriate for which research questions in
entrepreneurship?
How can one catalogue and rigorously analyze large amounts of video-based ethnographic
data?
What can we methodologically learn from the history of the Strategy as Practice (SaP)
community?
Abstract / Paper Submission
All scholars who are interested in the paper development workshop and PhD candidates
wishing to attend the conference should submit an abstract (of less than 1,000 words) by
Abstracts should not exceed two single-spaced pages, and may not exceed the maximum
limit of 1,000 words. They should present the purpose of the research, the relevance of the
problem, the literature review, the methods and the main findings. 3 to 5 keywords and an
indicative Topic of the Conference should be included. Authors will be notified of acceptance
or otherwise by January 15, 2019. Full working papers are due for February 28, 2019.
Full working papers should have the following structure: introduction, literature review or
conceptual framework, methodology, results, discussion and conclusion. The text should be
10-15 pages, characters Times New Roman 12, single spacing. Abstracts and papers should be
written and presented in English.
All working papers will be assigned to discussion groups. Each group member will be
responsible for providing feedback on the papers received during the working paper session
on April 5.
Important Dates:
December 15, 2018 Abstract Submission Deadline
PhD Symposium and Research Conference
January 15, 2019 Notification of Acceptance
PhD Symposium and Research Conference
February 28, 2019 Full Paper Submission Deadline
March 1, 2019 Registration Deadline
April 3 - 6, 2019 Conference Dates
April 6, 2019 Organization Studies Special Issue PDW
Conference Fees:
Fees for PhD Symposium and Research Conference attendees are to be determined and
posted by December 1, 2018.
Organizing Committee (extract)
Claire Champenois (Audencia Business School), Miruna Radu-Lefebvre (Audencia Business
School)
William B. Gartner (Babson College and Linnaeus University), Bruce Teague (Eastern
University Washington), Neil Thompson (VU University Amsterdam), Ola Byrne (UCD
Dublin)
Audencia Business School & Nantes
EAP4 will be held at Audencia Business School, Nantes, France on April 3-6 2019. Founded in
1900, Audencia Business School is one of France's elite Grande Ecole higher education
institutions – ranked 6th in the nation (SIGEM). World renowned for education and research
in business and management, it ranks among the top 100 worldwide (The Economist).
Among the 90 tenured faculty members, seven focus on Entrepreneurship.
Nantes is a modern innovative and green city with old-world flair city. It is two hours from
Paris (by train), one hour from London (by plane), and 45 minutes from the Atlantic Coast (by
car or train).
References
Chalmers, D. M., & Shaw, E. (2017). The endogenous construction of entrepreneurial contexts: A practicebased
perspective. International Small Business Journal, September(1967), 19–39.
De Clercq, D., & Voronov, M. (2009). Toward a Practice Perspective of Entrepreneurship: Entrepreneurial
Legitimacy as Habitus. International Small Business Journal, 27(4), 395–419.
Dimov, D. (2018). Opportunities, language and time. Academy of Management Perspectives, in press.
Dodd, S. D., Pret, T., & Shaw, E. (2016). Advancing understanding of entrepreneurial embeddedness : forms
of capital , social contexts and time. In F. Welter & W. B. Gartner (Eds.), A research agenda for
entrepreneurship and context (pp. 120–133). Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Pub.
Gartner, W. B., Stam, E., Thompson, N. A., & Verduyn, K. (2016). Entrepreneurship as practice: grounding
contemporary practice theory into entrepreneurship studies. Entrepreneurship & Regional Development,
28(9–10), 813–816.
Goss, D., Jones, R., Latham, J., & Betta, M. (2011). Power as practice: A Micro-sociological Analysis of the
Dynamics of Emancipatory Entrepreneurship. Organization Studies, 32(2), 211–229.
Hill, I. (2018). How did you get up and running? Taking a Bourdieuan perspective towards a framework for
negotiating strategic fit. Entrepreneurship and Regional Development, 1–35.
Johannisson, B. (2011). Towards a practice theory of entrepreneuring. Small Business Economics, 36(2), 135–
150.
Keating, A., Geiger, S., & Mcloughlin, D. (2013). Riding the Practice Waves: Social Resourcing Practices
During New Venture Development. Entrepreneurship: Theory and Practice, 38(5), 1–29.
Matthews, R. S., Chalmers, D. M., & Fraser, S. S. (2018). The intersection of entrepreneurship and selling:
An interdisciplinary review, framework, and future research agenda. Journal of Business Venturing, (June
2016), 1–0.
Steyaert, C. (2007). 'Entrepreneuring' as a conceptual attractor? A review of process theories in 20 years of
entrepreneurship studies. Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, 19(6), 453–477.
Tatli, A., Vassilopoulou, J., Özbilgin, M., Forson, C., & Slutskaya, N. (2014). A Bourdieuan relational
perspective for entrepreneurship research. Journal of Small Business Management, 52(4), 615–632.