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CfP: Developing Entrepreneurialism

Journal of Business Venturing Innovation

Stephanie Decker FAcSS FBAM

Nov 12

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Submission deadline: 31 October 2026

Guest editors:

Léna Prouchet, Copenhagen Business School, Email: lep.bhl@cbs.dk
Seungah Lee, HEC Paris (Doha), Email: lees@hec.fr
Arun Kumar, King’s College London, Email: arun.1.kumar@kcl.ac.uk
Christina Lubinski, Copenhagen Business School, Email: cl.bhl@cbs.dk

JBVI Editor

Pablo Muñoz, Durham University Business School, Durham, United Kingdom

For more information: https://www.sciencedirect.com/special-issue/327015/developing-entrepreneurialism

Special issue information:

Rationale

Entrepreneurialism today is more than a set of business practices. It has become a pervasive ideology that shapes how societies think, organize, and act (Eberhart et al., 2025; Lubinski & Tucker, 2025). Entrepreneurialism now frames political choices, legitimizes institutional norms, and structures aspirations. Its logic of constant disruption, self-optimization, and market-driven progress (Bröckling, 2016; Eberhart et al., 2025; Eberhart et al., 2022; Freeman, 2014) increasingly extends into domains as varied as education, public governance, social development, and geopolitics.

This special issue uses developing in a double sense: first, to examine how entrepreneurialism itself has developed historically, conceptually, and discursively; and second, to interrogate how entrepreneurialism shapes what counts as “development”, broadly conceived as personal or collective, material or symbolic, political or cultural progress or improvement. In doing so, we aim to rethink entrepreneurialism not as a neutral or inevitable force, but as an ideological formation that directs aspirations, legitimates certain futures, and forecloses alternatives. This aligns with the many critical perspectives espousing entrepreneurialism as reproducing disadvantages and fragilities, particularly in resource-poor contexts (Essers et al., 2017; Morris, 2020; Morris et al., 2022). These works build on earlier insights, such as Baumol’s (1990) distinction between productive, unproductive, and destructive entrepreneurship, to underscore that entrepreneurial action can both enable and constrain development.

Entrepreneurialism has been defined as “an ideology that extends entrepreneurial logic into social life, directing aspirations and actions toward the relentless pursuit of entrepreneurial ideals” (Lubinski & Tucker, 2025, p. 7). This framing emphasizes entrepreneurialism not merely as an outgrowth of neoliberalism but as a distinct ideological formation with its own internal logic, histories, and consequences. With Chalmers et al. (2025), we view ideology as the taken-for-granted beliefs, values, and prescriptions that structure entrepreneurial thought and practice.

The societal spread of entrepreneurial thought has long been recognized as contingent on cultural, institutional, and historical conditions (Brandl & Bullinger, 2009). More recently, scholars have advanced conceptual history approaches to trace how key concepts of entrepreneurialism gain meaning through shifting contexts and processes of contestation (Jepsen & Eaton, 2025; Wadhwani & Lubinski, 2025). This perspective underscores entrepreneurialism not as a fixed essence but as a dynamic concept whose mobilization changes across time and place.

As a hegemony, entrepreneurialism reproduces itself discursively (Caliskan & Lounsbury, 2022). It shapes how agency is imagined and enacted, often at the expense of marginalized communities (Prouchet, 2025). In this way, entrepreneurialism legitimates some visions of development while foreclosing others. Lee (2024) highlights entrepreneurialism’s cultural authority as a “gospel” of development that promises empowerment and redemption through entrepreneurial activity. Irani (2019) demonstrates how entrepreneurship and innovation are mobilized as universal fixes for social problems, even as they obscure structural inequalities. At the same time, entrepreneurialism is increasingly framed as relevant for everyone and everywhere, a discourse of “entrepreneurship for all” that naturalizes it as the dominant horizon of personal and collective development crowding out alternatives (Lee, 2023).

Entrepreneurialism appears as both a cultural formation and a social force. Weiss and colleagues (2023) show how entrepreneurial activity reshapes communities, influences social norms, and reconfigures collective outcomes. Societal critiques call for “taming unicorns” by confronting entrepreneurial excesses and establishing a new normal of responsible entrepreneurship (Zankl & Grimes, 2024). As Eberhart and colleagues (2025) argue, entrepreneurialism today structures institutions, shapes governance, and reconfigures how inequality is produced, justified, or resisted. This highlights the urgency of interrogating entrepreneurialism because it influences how collective problems are defined, who is empowered to solve them, and which visions of the future become legitimate and at what costs.

This special issue builds on these conceptualizations while recognizing that entrepreneurial ideologies are not monolithic: they are contested, negotiated, resisted and vary across historical and geographic contexts (Barton et al., 2025). Scholars have called for engaging ideology as an analytic category rather than treating entrepreneurship as value-neutral (Chalmers et al., 2025; Lubinski & Tucker, 2025; Ogbor, 2000; Pedersen et al., 2025). We invite contributions that interrogate how entrepreneurialism has developed as an analytic category and its role in shaping development, broadly conceived. We particularly encourage work that examines how entrepreneurialism legitimates, reconfigures, or constrains possibilities across diverse historical, institutional, and geographic contexts.

Objectives of the Special Issue

This special issue seeks to:

Clarify the concept of entrepreneurialism and distinguish different ways it operates.
Explore the links between entrepreneurialism and development, broadly defined, and examine how entrepreneurialism legitimates particular visions of development, progress, or evolution, while obscuring or foreclosing alternatives.
Historicize entrepreneurialism by situating its rise and transformations within broader cultural, institutional, and political contexts.
Explore how different actors have contributed to entrepreneurialism’s rise or fall, including entrepreneurs, incubators, policy makers, educational institutions, non-profit organizations, trade organizations and unions, and the media.
Critically assess the consequences of entrepreneurialism on development goals, from its effects on inequality, governance, and institutions to its reconfiguration of communities, norms, and aspirations.
Examine ideological and empirical critiques of entrepreneurship that question its assumed benevolence, including perspectives highlighting its potential to reinforce exclusion, fragility, or structural disadvantage.
Engage counter-ideologies and alternatives, such as ecological, feminist, post-growth, post-colonial and community-based imaginaries, that challenge entrepreneurialism’s dominance.

We encourage methodological and stylistic innovation and welcome diverse approaches as well as non-traditional formats that broaden how entrepreneurialism can be studied and represented.

Potential topics and themes for the special issue

We invite contributions that critically examine entrepreneurialism’s implications for contemporary development and imagined futures. Specifically, we welcome work that explores entrepreneurialism:

As imagined community: How does entrepreneurialism create collective bonds, even while insisting on hyper-individualism? How do imagined communities support or hinder individual and collective development approaches and goals?
In historical context: How have distinct moments (e.g. neoliberal reforms, post-colonial development agendas, Silicon Valley’s rise) shaped entrepreneurialism’s ideological force and its link to development and progress?
As invented tradition: Which mythic pasts, iconic figures, or “entrepreneurial ages” are mobilized to legitimize entrepreneurial futures and goals?
As political imagination and power play: How does entrepreneurialism enable and/or challenge ‘othering,’ domination, or the naturalization of particular visions of progress?
As infrastructures of development: What are the linkages between the historical development of entrepreneurialism and its subsequent use as part of development agendas? How do such infrastructures enable or constrain alternative visions of collective progress?
In relation to inequality and global development: How does entrepreneurialism reproduce, mask, or challenge structural inequalities across gender, race, class, and geography? How are entrepreneurial approaches mobilized in under-researched or marginalized contexts, and what counter-visions of equitable development emerge in response?
In relation to its counter-ideologies, such as post-growth, ecological, feminist, post-colonial or community-based imaginaries that challenge entrepreneurialism’s dominance and open space for alternative notions of development.

Submission Formats

In addition to traditional research articles, this special issue experiments with unconventional scholarly formats that invite creative engagement. We are thus open to research papers as well as other types of contributions, such as

Videos with reflective essays on their scholarly and pedagogical value.
Paired debates that stage structured disagreement on provocative, unresolved, or controversial issues in entrepreneurialism.
Dialogues or roundtables involving academics, practitioners, and activists on entrepreneurialism’s role in shaping development agendas.
Critical reviews or visual essays that examine entrepreneurialism’s cultural representations, myths, or artefacts.

Please feel free to reach out to the guest editors if you have any specific suggestions or questions about the submission process for unconventional formats.

JBVI submission guidelines

Please follow the journal’s author guidelines: https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/journal-of-business-venturing-insights/publish/guide-for-authors. When submitting your manuscript to Editorial Manager, please select the article type “VSI: Entrepreneurialism”. Submissions will be peer-reviewed in accordance with the journal’s policies.

Paper Development Workshops and info session

We plan to offer an online Paper Development Workshop for authors. Participants in the workshop will have the opportunity to discuss the integration of non-traditional perspectives and methods to study entrepreneurial phenomena in their own research. The workshop will be offered online on 6 April 2025, 3pm.

Participation in the Paper Development Workshop will not influence the chances of acceptance for publication.