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

Peter

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.

The solution came to me while I was daydreaming during the scanning of the notebooks (which took days, incidentally – not the daydreaming, the scanning). I recalled that on one of the internet forums I frequent, someone mentioned a few months ago a way of extracting comments from any number of PDFs by using a specialist software, A-PDF Comment Collector, that extracts and outputs the pages with comments into a single PDF document. And suddenly I saw the light: after scanning the notebooks as PDF files, I could annotate them by using the regular note tool in my PDF reader, and then use Comment Collector to extract the annotated pages only. This way I would end up with a single PDF document (instead of the original nine) that would be a lot smaller in size, containing only the pages that I need, which could then be turned into image files for NVivo.

Here is the workflow I came up with in the end:

1. Scan 9 notebooks as separate PDFs. (I was suddenly very happy that I used A5-sized notebooks during my field work, as I could scan 2 pages at a time in landscape format, which then displayed very well on my 22” widescreen monitor – as opposed to an A4-size page in portrait view, which wouldn’t have been able to display the whole page.)
2. Save one version of the scanned PDF file as the original scan (in case it might be needed for something else in the future), and then save two additional versions in separate folders (for the empirical comments vs. the theoretical comments).
3. Add bookmarks to each PDF file using Adobe Acrobat Professional, in order to identify where the relevant participant observation notes or theoretical reflections were for each event within the given 98-page PDF file.
4. Annotate the relevant passages and pages in the PDF files using PDF-XChange Viewer‘s annotation features, such as highlighting, sticky notes and the various drawing tools. Alternatively use GoodReader on the iPad to do the same.
5. Extract the annotated pages in the empirical folder from all the 9 PDF files into a single PDF file, using A-PDF Comment Collector (repeat this process for the 9 files with theoretical content).
6. Save the extracted PDF document’s pages (for both empirical and theoretical material) as JPEG image files using Adobe Acrobat Professional.
7. Import JPEG image files into NVivo and code them as usual.

Phew, no wonder it took me a few days to figure this out! But this process wouldn’t have been possible if I hadn’t come across the A-PDF Comment Collector during my travels several months ago. It’s a brilliant piece of  software and just the perfect solution in my case, especially as I couldn’t find any other programme that could do this. It extracts not only the pages that have the yellow sticky note comments on, but literally any kind of highlighting, drawing, arrows, shapes or freehand scribbles that you add with Adobe Acrobat, PDF-XChange Viewer (my preferred PDF reader and annotating tool) or GoodReader on the iPad. In fact if you go to the developer’s website, A-PDF, you’ll find that they have more than 60 products for solving various PDF-related tasks. They even write custom-made software if you can’t find a solution to your PDF problem, and, indeed, that is how the Comment Collector came into being. My thanks go to the good soul who commissioned this one, as he or she saved me from a lot of trouble!

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: ­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.

“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:

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.

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.

References

Araujo L, Kjellberg H, Spencer R. 2008. “Market practices and forms: Introduction to the special issue.” Marketing Theory 8(1): 5-14.

Callon M. 1998. The Laws of the Markets. Oxford: Blackwell.

Lugosi P, Lugosi K. 2008. “Guerrilla hospitality: Urban decay, entrepreneurship and the ‘ruin’ bars of Budapest.” Hospitality Review 10 (2): 36-44.

My object of study can be described as the innovation called online retailing and which can be understood as part of the large-scale societal, political, economic and technological transformation referred to as the “information economy,” “knowledge-based economy,” or “service economy” in the United Kingdom of the first decade of the 21st century. At the same time, e-commerce technology adoption or e-commerce entrepreneurship, in each and every case, is also a very singular affair of a particular firm. The questions “How does e-commerce innovation take place in the knowledge-based economy?” and “How do e-commerce entrepreneurs acquire the technologies and the competence to build their online retail organisations?” are therefore two sides of the same coin.

I approach these research questions by way of a qualitative case study of an e-commerce community in the South of England between 2007 and 2009, and in particular by focusing on the entrepreneurial learning practices of three focal companies. “Entrepreneurial learning” is a concept that emerges out of both the literature on entrepreneurship and the actors’ own descriptions of what they understand to be engaged in. However, in contrast to the literatures on organisational learning, knowledge, competences and capabilities, which tend to focus on the cognitive activities of individuals or groups of individuals, I pursue an object-orientated description of these learning practices. Drawing on actor-network theory and in particular the work of Michel Callon and his colleagues in economic sociology (Callon, Méadel et al. 2002; Callon & Muniesa 2005; Callon & Millo et al. 2007), I trace the processes by which these e-commerce enterprises emerge as heterogeneous assemblages.

This pursuit of the assembling practices of e-commerce entrepreneurs had identified the acquisition of e-commerce services (services required to sustain an e-commerce firm as such) as a central matter of concern for these entrepreneurs. I argue that the various entrepreneurial learning groups and conferences that emerged locally to deal with this matter of concern can be understood as marketplaces for the qualification (Callon, Méadel et al. 2002) of e-commerce services. Qualification is the process by which products or services acquire their qualities and values as economic goods. My main claim is that the qualification of e-commerce services is simultaneously an “internal” firm process and an “external” market process, which connects not only the site of the firm and the site of the market, but also the micro-enterprises with the macro-actors that take part in the construction of these technological economy marketplaces. Entrepreneurial learning and qualification of services are thus one and the same thing in the technological economy (Barry & Slater 2005).

References

Barry, A. and D. Slater (2005). The Technological Economy. Abingdon; New York, Routledge.

Callon, M., C. Méadel, et al. (2002). “The Economy of Qualities.” Economy & Society 31(2): 194.

Callon, M., Y. Millo, et al. (2007). Market Devices. Oxford, Blackwell.

Callon, M. and F. Muniesa (2005). “Economic Markets as Calculative Collective Devices.” Organization Studies (after Jan 1, 2003) 26(8): 1229-50.