Forthcoming talk at LSE

On Tuesday 11 October 2011 I will be opening this year’s IS554 Research Seminar series at ISIG, Department of Management, with a presentation entitled “The Prominence and Order of Things: Describing E-Commerce Entrepreneurship.” It will be an overview of my research project on e-commerce entrepreneurship in the South of England. I will reflect on the empirical data collection process and review ways to order my findings into a final narrative. The title is meant to suggest that my approach to describing entrepreneurship is an object-orientated one, where I’m attempting to describe how the elements of a new enterprise are assembled, which involves tracing them to marketplaces where the construction of these elements begins as a collective process. But it is also meant to express that the challenges I face in the writing-up stage of the PhD have to do with deciding which things should be more prominent and how to order them. The talk will take place between 3-4pm in room 2.06 of the New Academic Building.

Interview in BH Business Magazine

There is an interview with me in the forthcoming September-October 2011 issue of BH Business, the official magazine of Bournemouth Chamber of Trade & Commerce. I discuss the Surviving Startup website, for which I had developed the concept and content as part of an EU-funded research project.

New entrepreneurship blog

I have decided to launch a new blog called New Combinations to focus on the social aspects of entrepreneurship, especially as they’ve been studied through sociological and anthropological approaches. My hope for the blog is to turn into a community of people who share these interests in the social studies of entrepreneurship, especially in the way the insights of the so-called ‘new’ new economic sociology of Michel Callon and colleagues can be used for the study of new venture creation. The theme of innovation is of course closely related to entrepreneurship (and indeed for some intellectual traditions the two mean the same thing), so that is a secondary underlying theme.

So a warm welcome to future readers and contributors of the New Combinations blog!

Peter

Extracting PDF comments for NVivo

I’m in the analysis stage of my research process and so a lot of my work in recent months had revolved around translating or transposing data from one type of medium into another (such as transcribing audio and video recordings). One specific problem I had encountered was how to digitise and analyse my handwritten participant observation notes recorded in nine A5-size, 192-page notebooks. These notebooks also included some other reflections that were unrelated to the participant observation events, so I also needed a way to separate the empirical observations from the theoretical observations. I wanted to digitise this body of text in order to be able to import it into the NVivo qualitative analysis software, for coding and linking it to other data about the observed events or objects, such as transcripts of recordings, images and other relevant digital documents.

My logistical challenge therefore was twofold: 1) how to separate the text with the empirical observations from the text with the unrelated theoretical observations, and 2) how to select the material from both sets of texts that is worthwhile to be imported into NVivo for further analysis? The ideal solution would have been to simply scan all the notebooks as PDFs and import them into NVivo 8 and do the coding within NVivo, as the way of extracting useful material from those files. The problem with that solution is that NVivo 8 is simply not capable of dealing with large PDF files (the way for example Atlas.ti 5 can). So I needed to introduce some kind of an interim step to identify the interesting pages in the scanned PDF documents and then extract those as image files that can be eventually imported into NVivo for further analysis and coding.

An Ethnography of E-commerce Entrepreneurship

I’ll be presenting my work-in-progress PhD project in the annual IS554 PhD Conference at the LSE on Tuesday 15 June 2010, between 10:30-11:15, in the Graham Wallas Room (5th Floor, Main Building). Here is the abstract of my talk:

Joseph Schumpeter famously defined entrepreneurship as the creation of new combinations out of existing resources (that can be resolved into labour and land), in contrast to the mere repetition of existing combinations that managers generally engage in. Building on this definition, he had also anticipated the coming of a knowledge-based economy. What happens however if we resist Schumpeter’s reductionism and examine through ethnographic detail how entrepreneurial firms acquire their means of production that are themselves considered to be knowledge-based economy goods? I will explore this question by reviewing the emerging themes of my ethnography of e-commerce entrepreneurship in the South of England. I will focus on the organisational, technological and market mechanisms involved in the acquisition of e-commerce services – as means of production – by online retail micro-enterprises. While metaphors of knowledge and learning are still relevant, the knowledge-based economy that emerges from this description is better characterised as a “test society,” driven by qualification trials that connect organisations and markets. Schumpeter’s categorical distinction between entrepreneurship as difference and management as repetition itself needs to be qualified.

The Matter­ of Entrep­reneurial ­Learning

I will be presenting a paper at the International Conference on Organizational Learning, Knowledge and Capabilities (OLKC) 2010, Northeastern University, Boston, USA, on 5 June 2010. Here are the title and the abstract:

The Matter­ of Entrep­reneurial ­Learning: ­A Literatu­re Review

Situated in the context of the “material turn” in the social sciences, this paper is a comprehensive review of the entrepreneurial learning literature and its engagement with the material aspects of entrepreneurship. We draw on actor-network theory to construct a classificatory scheme and an evaluative matrix to order the literature on the basis of its material concerns. We find that this field is dominated by an anthropocentric bias and cognitivist approaches which largely ignore issues of materiality in entrepreneurship. However we also identify some heterogeneous network-based conceptualisations of entrepreneurial learning which could provide the foundations for more materially aware approaches. We conclude by calling for a material turn in entrepreneurial learning and outline possible avenues for it.

Update: a PDF copy of the paper is now available from the conference website.

What is entrepreneurial learning?

I’ll be giving a seminar talk entitled “What is Entrepreneurial Learning?” at the Centre for Research in Management (CRiM), Bournemouth University, at 4pm on 26 May 2010. Here is the abstract:

“Entrepreneurial learning is an observable practice, something entrepreneurs engage in; it is a notion that has started to receive increasingly explicit articulation in academic literature in the past decade; and it is a key policy objective in the United Kingdom, implemented through funded programmes targeted at entrepreneurs. Despite its relatively short history, the entrepreneurial learning literature consists of a variety of theoretical approaches focusing on a diverse range of phenomena. In this talk I will provide a comprehensive overview of existing conceptualisations of entrepreneurial learning and evaluate them on the basis of their contribution to understanding entrepreneurship as a thoroughly material process of new venture creation.”

Location:

Room EB202

Executive Business Centre

The Business School

Bournemouth University

89 Holdenhurst Road

Bournemouth BH8 8EB

Best Paper Award, ATMC 2009

Peter Lugosi and I had just presented our paper, “From Marketing to Market Practices: Assembling the Ruin Bars of Budapest” [PDF], at the Advances in Tourism Marketing Conference in Bournemouth yesterday morning, so it was a very pleasant surprise to find out at the end of the day that we won the Best Paper Award! And yes, the picture on the cover of the book is of lovely Bournemouth beach…

Update: In the meantime I also managed to dig out our original abstract for this paper, here it is:

In this paper we turn our attention to the classical marketing problems of product/service launch and development, by examining the emergence of the so-called ‘ruin bars’ in Budapest between 1999 and 2009. Traditionally the marketing discipline has been content with adopting the abstract notion of the market from neoclassical economics and restricting itself to operations that concern the marketing of products into that abstract space, such as segmentation, positioning and targeting. Heeding recent calls for a practice turn in marketing theory, we abandon the abstract notion of the market in favour of an empirical description that does not make an a priori distinction between marketing practices and market-making practices. Drawing on the social studies of markets in economic sociology, we deploy actor-network theory as a methodology for re-describing the emergence of Budapest’s ruin bars. The marketplace that emerges out of this description is a fragile arrangement of heterogeneous actors that is painstakingly assembled and maintained to allow for the development and survival of this new service. The ruin bar format itself defies prior categorisations of a hospitality service, as it evolves into a hybrid marketplace that combines a pub with a cultural institute in which the seemingly worthless is transformed into something worthy.

From Marketing to Market Practices

Our paper with Peter Lugosi, “From Marketing to Market Practices: Assembling the Ruin Bars of Budapest”, has now been published as Chapter 24 in Marketing Innovations for Sustainable Destinations. The individual chapter is also available directly from the publisher’s website (PDF). Here is an extract, by way of an abstract:

In a recent special issue of Marketing Theory, Araujo et al. (2008) call on the marketing discipline to embrace the insights of the social study of markets in economic sociology as a promising avenue for revitalising the classical concepts of marketing. Drawing on the research programme launched by Michel Callon’s 1998 volume, The Laws of the Markets, they suggest that one traditional disciplinary distinction be abandoned in particular: “Although convenient, a distinction between market-making practices – defined as activities that shape the overall market structure – and marketing practices – defined as firm-based activities aimed at developing an actor’s position within a structure – is misleading” (Araujo et al., 2008: 8).

In this paper, we take up Araujo et al.’s (2008) call to deploy such a constructivist economic sociology perspective in the study of an empirical case. The case study concerns the emergence of the so-called romkert (meaning ‘ruin garden’) or romkocsma (‘ruin pub’) phenomenon in Budapest between 1999 and 2008 (see Lugosi and Lugosi, 2008). A ruin or rom bar, terms we use interchangeably in this paper, is a hospitality venue that incorporates its ruinous surroundings (such as dilapidated courtyards and other distressed material goods) as part of its service concept and the consumer experience. We re-describe this case using the actor-network theory (ANT) perspective of Callon and colleagues.

Entrepreneurial learning and qualification

On Wednesday 3rd June 2009 I will be presenting a paper summarising my research on e-commerce entrepreneurship at the Quadrangular Conference at the University of Cambridge. The paper is entitled “The Qualification of E-Commerce Services: A Case Study of Entrepreneurial Learning in the Technological Economy.” As I’m approaching the end of the field work phase, this is an attempt at articulating some emerging findings and situating them in relation to relevant debates.