Emancipation and/or oppression? Conceptualizing dimensions of criticality in entrepreneurship studies

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to use the attribute “critical” as a sensitizing concept to emphasize entrepreneurship's role in overcoming extant relations of exploitation, domination and oppression. It builds on the premise that entrepreneurship not only brings about new firms, products and services but also new openings for more liberating forms of individual and collective existence. Design/methodology/approach – Honing in on Calas et al.'s (2009) seminal piece on critical entrepreneurship studies, and building on Laclau's (1996) conceptualization of emancipation as intimately related to oppression, the paper explores different interpretations of emancipation and discuss these from a critical understanding of entrepreneurship. The paper then employs these interpretations to introduce and “classify” the five articles in this special issue. Findings – The editorial charts four interpretations of emancipation along two axes (utopian-dystopian and heterotopian-paratopian), and relates these to vari...

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