Reframing Entrepreneurship via Identity, Techné, and Material Culture

Abstract

Entrepreneurship is typically understood as capitalist, but new models are emerging; these new models, like Welter et al.’s “everyday-entrepreneur,” can be understood in the tradition of techné, in which entrepreneurship is an embodied practice balancing the sociality of identity politics and the materiality of objects and infrastructures. With no English equivalent, techné is typically understood as either art, skill or craft, but none of the placeholders provide a suitable encapsulation of the term itself (Pender). Examining identity against the backdrop of entrepreneurship illuminates the rhetorical ways entrepreneurs cultivate and innovate the processes of making, especially in terms of the material cultures that this process springs from and operates within. Intersectional issues related to entrepreneurial identity present opportunities for diversification and growth in the existing scholarship. A reframing of entrepreneurial identity and continued development of Welter et al.’s everyday-entrepreneurship is argued for, showing how social biases render gender and objects invisible. The article uses data from an on-going study to demonstrate how reframing entrepreneurial identity uncovers the ways in which systemic biases are embedded in the relationship between identity and everyday things. The case study delves into connections between identity, technology, and innovation illustrating how entrepreneurial identity can be seen as a kind of techné, which helps readers better understand identity in relation to material objects and culture—including the biases at work there.