Rethink entrepreneurship for the Anthropocene! In today's podcast delves into Lauri Laine's paper, "Entrepreneurship as an Object of Hope: Affirmative Critique in the Anthropocene," a bold exploration of how our human-centric views of innovation might be failing our planet.

We challenge the traditional focus on human agency in both mainstream and critical entrepreneurship studies, examining why the idea of 'saving the world' through human-led ventures could be a "harmful hope". The paper argues that if the Anthropocene is a manifestation of human agency's hegemony and destructivity towards the Earth, it becomes urgent to affirm the entrepreneurial agency of nonhuman beings. Critical Entrepreneurship Studies (CES) traditionally emphasizes human agency to unlock alternative futures, but in the Anthropocene, this conviction might be part of the problem, given the materialization of human hopes as toxic layers, global warming, and mass extinction.

Instead, we explore the paper's radical call for more-than-human entrepreneurship, drawing on "end-of-the-world" theorizing and object-oriented ontology. The "end of the world" here refers not to a future collapse, but the impossibility of peaceful harmony between humans and nature, suggesting the drama has already completed. Object-oriented ontology, particularly from Graham Harman, provides a baseline for affirming what exists beyond the human, proposing that ontological change involves all kinds of objects and that humans are not ontologically special.

Discover how acknowledging the irreversible impact of human activity can shift our focus from what 'could be' to what 'is,' affirming the entrepreneurial agency of nonhuman beings and even the Earth itself. This includes viewing entrepreneurship through a "ruin optic" where deorganization creates possibilities for new organization, focusing on survival rather than profit. It also involves a "temporally scaled" perspective, recognizing that nonhuman entrepreneurial agency might operate on scales ungraspable by human time.

This episode will transform your understanding of how organization creation can foster coexistence rather than perpetuate anthropocentric dominance. Tune in to explore a truly 'different' future for entrepreneurship, embracing a nonanthropocentric and posthumanist understanding that extends solidarity across life forms.

Ref:

Laine, L. (2024). Entrepreneurship as an Object of Hope: Affirmative Critique in the Anthropocene. SSRN. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4937267