Lessons Fro Mi Ago

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Lessons from Iago: Narrating the eventof Entrepreneurship

Daniel Hjorth

Copenhagen Business School (CBS), Department ofManagement, Politics and Philosophy , (and affiliated to

Vxj University), Porcelnshaven 18A, DK-2000 Fredriksberg, Denmark

Abstract

To be able to demonstrate as well as argue for the possibilities of a narrative approach inentrepreneurship studies, this article focuses on some resonance between a story the Toy Story ofTerry Allen's, the Marvel Mustang story and a passage from Shakespeare's Othello, with particularfocus on the character of Iago. I argue that a narrative approach enables us to learn from the ways ofIago when analysing the Toy Story. In particular, we learn that we need to broaden the moreconventional focus on opportunity recognition/evaluation/exploitation (and the resource based view)

to include the time of opportunity creation. The article demonstrates how this can be done anddiscusses some consequences for entrepreneurship research. 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Narrating; Event; Opportunity creation; Lago; Desire

1. Executive summary

There is what one could describe as a narrativist turn in present social science studiesmore generally. This follows upon the so-called linguistic and postmodernist turns both ofwhich have upgraded the importance of attending to problems of language and

representation in doing research. Language, language-use and writing, have been problemswith wide-ranging consequences for understanding data, methodology, analysis, andpresentation of research results for enabling conversations with practitioners as well as theresearch communities. Social studies of science have concluded that all science is situated

Journal of Business Venturing 22 (2007) 712

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knowledge and it follows that we need an approach and a language that will allow for amore performatively defined knowledge, i.e., knowledge created from concepts and

experiences defined by local practitioners in our studies. A narrative approach, andnarrative forms of knowledge, holds much promise in this sense. It is in such forms thatknowledge has been carried forth. Narratives have always functioned as storehouses ofpractices and reflections thereon.

In entrepreneurship studies we find consequences from the changes described above, notthe least in terms of what is studied as entrepreneurship. For some time, focus has shiftedfrom individuals to processes or, more generally, from what something is to how itbecomes. This article participates in this change by intervening with one popular strand inentrepreneurship research, namely that of opportunity theory. The article performs the shiftfrom results to the process by arguing for attention to the opportunity creative time ofentrepreneurial processes. I suggest that this provides us with an opportunity (thus created

by this shift in focus and use of a narrative approach) to illustrate and argue for some pointswith applying a narrative approach in entrepreneurship research.

A narrative approach helps the student of entrepreneurship processes get at the playfuland dramatic nature of such processes, hitherto marginalised or simply silenced by thecommon focus on the managerial and economic sides. To make this point clearer I choose apiece of literature as the empirical material for this study. In Shakespeare's Othello we findthe character of Iago who displays a skill I believe we have studied too little and which isclearly paralleled by the central character(s) of the Toy Story: the skill of convincingthrough little narratives lightning fires/desire to create focus and share purpose. Iago notonly performs the skill of convincing others to join his entrepreneurial venture, he alsoshows how much is accomplished in what I call the opportunity creative time of the

entrepreneurial process. This time, the time before there is an opportunity, the genesis ofopportunities, I believe will complement opportunity theory with valuable insights.The lack of attention to an opportunity-creative time in entrepreneurial processes is not

simply following the lack of a narrative approach; this too narrow empirical scope is furtherargued. The dominance of managerial orientation in entrepreneurship research further pullsresearch into a focus on results and asks how this could best be managed (e.g. businessplans to steward start-up ideas). The point with a narrative approach is then not only tocomplement existing theory but also to problematise how the dominant (strategicmanagement oriented) approach a blend of new institutionalism and the resource basedview work when it comes to framing what is the proper scope of our studies and theproper concepts for our analysis. The article tries to construct an opportunity out of thisspecial issue so as to show how moving away from the modernist framework and its wider

anthropological context makes possible a new understanding of entrepreneurship. This timeassociated with the desiring, playful, creative person rather than the economic and modularcomposition of humans that has dominated modernist management theory.

From Iago we can learn about the opportunity-creative time of the entrepreneurial process.But I also make use of the language of analysing Iago (in literary studies) for developing ourunderstanding of entrepreneurship. The breakout of the entrepreneurial event is described interms of fire and as the release of creative social energy. It is the desire to achieve this event, tobe part of creating it, and to become part of this fire (to be lit) that attracts people into theentrepreneurial process. Using fire to understand entrepreneurial processes further highlights

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the role of passion and politics in such processes. It also highlights the drama of the event ofentrepreneurship. Both the events of entrepreneurial interventions/creations and their

dramatic side need to be recognised as important for an understanding of entrepreneurship.A narrative approach makes possible such a recognition. With the ways of Iago at hand Iventure into analysing the Marvel Mustang story to see what we might learn.

The Marvel Mustang story is rich of examples of Iago's ways: the subjectification ofpeople into co-creators of the central story, that of the toy-store-in-becoming, makes theminvest in this future image which they eventually desire to see actualised in the world. Theopportunity-creative time of the Marvel Mustang story shows how a relational reality isconstructed by narrative skills and how people are lured into becoming narrators of thisstory themselves, how they become a part of it, and how they became partners in thecreation process.

Narratives and a narrative approach do a lot for entrepreneurship research as well as

practicing entrepreneurs. In establishing a continuity between how we understandsomething and how we practice this understanding there are affirmative ways of engagingcloser and more passionately with what we study and what we practice. We learn theimportance of distinguishing between the managerial and the entrepreneurial function inbusiness processes, with implications for when to practice a managerial mode and when to practice an entrepreneurial mode of organising a creation process. We also learn theimportance of distinguishing between events and practices, between established/dominantorders and the interruption of such orders. Events, fires, need to be studied via thoseeveryday practices that prepare for them something that a narrative approach admits. Forthe study of entrepreneurship processes I elaborate on genealogic storytelling as a way tograsp both everyday practices and events.

2. Introduction

In this article I focus on the opportunity-creative time of the Marvel Mustang story. Thisprovides me with the possibility to argue and illustrate that a narrative approach in studiesof entrepreneurial processes opens up previously marginalised sides of such processes. Theresult being stories of entrepreneurship complementing dominating views shaped primarilyin the language of a rationalist science of (strategic) management. Positioning todiscussions of opportunity discovery/evaluation/exploitation and the resource based view,space is made for an understanding of entrepreneurship rather in terms of social creativity,of creating social energy, and as creation of organisation. By the help of Shakespeare'splay Othello and the character of Iago entrepreneurship provides an (extreme) illustration

sensitizing us before a hitherto silenced side of entrepreneurship as a desire to become theother, to change the style of one's practices of living and to create new orders, demandingnew forms of organisation. Approaching entrepreneurship via Iago's example as a plot-maker and a pyromaniac, we are provided with new ways of studying the Marvel Mustangcase. Following the key note of Shakespeare's Othello, I am guided in my conceptualisationby historical-literary authors Spinosa, Flores and Dreyfus (1997) and Greenblatt (1988) in a discussion of how a narrative approach can help us as students of entrepreneurship. Thepaper finishes with an attempt to affirm such a narrative approach in a style I have namedgenealogic storytelling (Hjorth, 2004).

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This paper proceeds according to the following structure: in the opening (Section 3) Iintroduce the need in entrepreneurship studies to focus also on opportunity creation; in

Section 4 I argue for a narrative approach in studies of entrepreneurial creation processes;Section 5 provides examples of entrepreneurship as lighting fires, from Shakespeare'sOthello; leaning on the example of the character of Iago, from Shakespeare's Othello,Section 6 describes the drama of the entrepreneurial event; the case of the Marvel Mustangis presented in Section 7; Section 8 discusses what a narrative approach can do for us inentrepreneurship studies, making use of the example of Iago and illustrations form theMarvel Mustang story; Section 9 points us in the direction of genealogic storytelling,something I develop as a way to proceed with a narrative approach in entrepreneurshipstudies; and, finally, Section 10 concludes on this study and suggests its implications.

3. Focusing on opportunity creation

What is the problem here, to which a narrative turn in entrepreneurship studies couldprovide an answer? I believe one problem is that dominant thinking on entrepreneurshipprevents us from studying entrepreneurship in relation to organisation in a way that affirmsthe playful, moving, creative and dramatic characteristics of entrepreneurial processes sooften lost in representations dominated by economism and managerialism1 (Hjorth, 2003a;Hjorth et al., 2003). In addition, I find a challenge in approaching processes of opportunitycreation as part of the everydayness life, and, as such, escaping the strategic purpose ofopportunity exploitation (being the telos of opportunity discovery or recognition). Thechallenge, we learn from de Certeau's (1984) discussions of everyday practices, would beto grasp opportunity creating life:

[B]efore life is a unified whole of purposes, meanings, and values, there is a joy ofaction for its own sake. Actions and practices do not begin as directed towards someend of form; there are actions and practices from which regular forms or ends areconstituted. The art of everyday life lies in the revelation of the act or geste itself.(Colebrook, 2002a: 700).

This reverberates with a more general remark: just like stories events immaterial,incorporeal, pure reserve (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994) do nothave a start, there is alwayssomething before. A start is always created as a narrative effect, as a response to theopenness of life's ongoingness, to delineate a beginning. I therefore suggest, as a responseto this openness, that stories of entrepreneurship start not from a focus on opportunityrecognition/discovery that is already locked into the anticipated and strategised process of

opportunity utilisation. Instead, we can start with tactical opportunity creation in everydaypractices, expressing a desire2 to become another, and to increase the productive/creative

1 Managerialism we define as a certain governmental rationality that orders the field of possible action forothers along lines of control and economic efficiency. Managerialism can also be described as: a set ofdiscursive moves that interpellates a particular type of subject [manager] and produces a particular world. (Deetz,1992: 222, my addition within square brackets).2 By desire I here mean a production of states of intensity or vibrancy/vitality in the field of practices

(cf. Massumi, 1992; Goodchild, 1996).



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powers of organising. That is, the opportunity of creating life would be life as potential(lifeas constituent power) rather than life as potestas (as a constituted power, an idea of life

presenting itself as a sovereign power). Our orientation towards the tactical in everyday lifeis directed by de Certeau's (1984: 2942) attentions to the gap in-between dominant/official discourses and how people make use of them to invent tactically in everydaycontexts.

Why would the opportunity recognition/discovery focus represent a problematic startand result in a too narrow empirical scope?

1. One reason is that strategised processes of opportunity utilisation will always loose itselfto a rationalism that fuels the dominant strategic management or organisational decisionmaking theories (for an early exception among the latter, see March, 1971). Theseframes have been extensively rehearsed in recent entrepreneurship and management

studies and as such they seem to represent an attractive blend of new institutionalism(Peters, 1999) and resource based approaches. Still resonating the discussions ofneoclassical economics (Pareto optimal equilibria), transaction cost theory (Williamson)and bounded rationality (Simon, and the Carnegie school) theory in decision makinghave refreshed this thinking (criticism of neoclassical economics) and paved the wayalso for the resource based view (RBV). The RBVaccepts transaction cost- and boundedrationality theories and bring these into a Porteresque framework for conceptualisingcompetitive advantages. Inimitable resources primarily knowledge, so new knowledgemanagement theories have been emphasised (see discussion of Hjorth, 2003b) increase the firm's possibilities at the competitive edge (Barney, 1991, 1995). The RBVfurther builds on Penrose's (1959) idea of resource heterogeneity (firms as bundles of

productive resources; different firms as different bundles), and the idea of resourceimmobility, i.e., that some now, primarily knowledge resources are costly to copyand/or inelastic in supply (Selznick (1957) and Ricardo (1817) respectively areinfluential theorists here).

2. However, new institutionalism3 and the RBV theorise order, i.e., have their focus set onthe existing organisation, organisations as entities. This misses the point withentrepreneurship when this is understood as a desire to become the other, to createe.g. opportunities for new orders demanding new organisation(s). Dealing with thisobvious mismatch between theoretical horizon and empirical processes, typical forresearch where an ontology of being (rather than becoming; see Chia, 1997, 1998) iseffective in the study, one can only invent an instrumentthat inserts change from outsidewhen trying to include dynamism4 or creation. The concept of entrepreneurial

orientation (Lumpkin and Dess, 2001; Covin and Slevin, 1991; Zahra, 1991) is oftensuggested as a drug or tool. This is how an entrepreneurial perspective is made tocontribute to the RBV. So, a second reason why an opportunity discovery/recognitionfocus is a problem refers to this theorisation of order, which by the end of the day will

3 Although Selznick in relation to the early Harvard school of 19101950 represented an interest in how changeand transformation is possible through institutional leadership attentive to the infusion of new values.4 Western thinking is still designed by the geometric thinking of ancient Greece and Aristotle's love of a

Parmenidean mindset, resulting in emphasis on stasis, form and permanence. ( Chia, 1998; Bergson, 1903/49).



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only set up the managerial subject as the emblematic (ideal and final) character in theanswer to the problem of running an organisation efficiently and in a controlled manner.

That is, this problem of order always has a managerial solution. Maintenance of thisorder in today's organisation, performing at the front-edge of competition, is a result of amanagerial process (cf. Wiklund and Shepherd, 2003) and is often conceptualised interms of structure, roles and decision making. Hereby entrepreneurship as creation isdecentred and silenced (Hjorth and Steyaert, 2003).

Emphasising entrepreneurship as a tactical process of differentiation, as a creativity(Hjorth, 2003a) challenge as suggested above, is to study opportunity creating lives. For thiswe need to move away from managerial approaches (cf. Hjorth et al., 2003) where we areasked to focus on occupational roles, consistent with absolutely central innovations inwestern modernity: 1) that of work as a distinct and dissociated realm of life; 2) work

organisations as resting on a set of premises on the basis of which individuals have come tobe related in terms other than inclusive (Kallinikos, 2001; 2003) roles and not persons; 3)and the bureaucratic organisation as the site where this distinct anthropology oforganisational man is played out.

As cogently put by Ernest Gellner, contemporary man is modular, that is, iscomposed by bits and pieces that are agglutinative and can be supplemented, butalso reshuffled, recombined, replaced and modified, as the circumstance maydemand. [] The distinctive character of the modern workplace is inextricably bound up with the anthropological construct of modular human, which thebureaucratic form of organization helps to embed. (Kallinikos, 2003: 608)

My argument here is that when approaching organisations with an interest inentrepreneurial processes5, we would benefit from an awareness of this modernistcharacteristic of organised work, understanding it precisely as a limited conceptualisationsetting the stage for managerial knowledge and the subject position as manager. Ourpossibilities for grasping, studying, and analysing entrepreneurial processes increases as wedissociate entrepreneurship from this modernist framework and its wider anthropologicalcontext in which the desiring, creating person is always already excluded by the focus onorganisations as entities, economic resources, costs, and instrumental roles. We can moveout of the appropriated place of the strategist, the managerial decision maker designingroles and objectives for a structure of work, where the Cartesian thinker is at home (theanalytical thinker of distance; Spinosa et al., 1997), and venture into organisational studiesof entrepreneurship as tactical organisation creation processes.

If we recognise how rarely entrepreneurship frequented mainstream economics andsociology during the 19th and 20th centuries (Schumpeter being one exception) as quite alogical response to the development of the modern society, centred on the modular man (asdiscussed above), it should come as no surprise that business administration has only beenable to relate to entrepreneurship as an externaly and instrumentally useful for managerialpurposes. Seeking instead to affirm the desiring person of creation processes in the contextof formal organisations, we here embrace a more vivid human than the modular man of

5 Or, indeed, entrepreneurship as creation of organisation.



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modernity for which homo oeconomicus stands as a fairly precise concept. More precisely,the manipulable homo oeconomicus of present-day HRM is an apparent re-invention of the

18th century liberalist (theoretical) model of economic agents6, this time, however, callingupon the whole person as the working self (denying a meaningful distinction of a life withpassions, faculties, projects outside the working self). This allows promoters of e.g. soft-control HRM, enterprise discourse, new public management, knowledge management torepresent their case as a story of the liberation from bureaucracy's rigidity and slownessrelated to its involvement of humans qua roles. HRM calls for an involvementqua person,furthering the managerialization of personal identity and personal relations whichaccompany the capitalization of the meaning of life (Gordon, 1991: 44; Steyaert andJanssens, 1999; Hjorth, 2003a,b; Kallinikos, 2003; Zanoni and Janssens, 2003). The wholeperson, silently reduced to an economic asset, is represented as a bundle of resources thatmust be made accessible, continuously developed and effectively utilised in work. Self-

representations and techniques for taming the employee make up a new disciplinary system(cf. Foucault, 1988; Townley, 1995).

In this system and language of managerialism we find little room for neitherrepresentations nor imaginings of entrepreneurship other than in its managerial forms (cf.enterprise discourse). For entrepreneurship the art, politics, ethics, aesthetics of organisationcreation is, I suggest, central. This is simply cut off by the reality constituting assumptionscirculated in management writings and in theorisations of order an apparently successfulsynthesis of economism and behaviourism. We need an alternative and potentiallycomplementing approach. One that will allow us to tell hitherto silenced stories ofentrepreneurship.

4. Arguments for a narrative approach

Lack of attention to how opportunities are created, and the subsequent arguments forstudying entrepreneurship as creative social energy, as a desire to become the other, can also be arguments for using a narrative approach. The distinction between purpose andopportunity is fruitful for this discussion. You might have a purpose but no opportunity tostart a business. Living life in a tactical way, affirming its creative potentials, movingthrough immediacy, and directed by the everyday passional wisdom of affects (Hardt andNegri, 2001: 358) would then, in its openness towards life as a constituent power, energizethe becoming of opportunities. Such opportunities are easily and quickly aligned with apurpose to start a business, and such processes are often streamlined by ideals, metaphors,models, norms and values imposing itself on this process through business school expert

knowledge, and through institutional players as financiers and consultants. Soon enoughcreation processes are taken over by the strategic concepts and definitions of what a start-upis and how it should be managed, efficiently circulated in most capitalist economies. Thismeans, simply, that start-up processes soon enough become proper targets for managementknowledge and practices as well as academic representations and conceptualisations ofthese processes, recently influenced primarily by institutional theory or resource based

6 This time not untouchable as the autonomous economic agent of the 18th century liberalism, but preciselymanipulable, i.e., the result of management discourses remarkable influence on society.



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perspectives. Such knowledge and practices can be useful for managing createdopportunities. However, this paper places focus on the process of creating opportunities

and suggests that this time is a time we can study through narratives rather than throughconcepts of management knowledge proper. I argue not against but to complement such amanagerial approach to entrepreneurship.

Studying creation we want to get at the relational consequences of what people do; wewant to study what what they do does (as Foucault put it: 1982: 187). In the context offormal organisations, this puts us in the time of everyday practices, in tactical spaces in-between existing orders. Of central interest are the ways people make use of existing ordersto open up new possibilities. We are then located in-between on the one hand the productivediscourses of expert knowledge and strategic models for ordering work, official languagesof common sense and economic rationality, and on the other everyday talk, tactical stories,little narratives, whispers and murmurs that search for cracks in the smooth surface of the

official story. We would have to listen to that which the official story backed up by expertknowledge and common sense qua economic rationality has had to silence in order to beitself. Narratives, precisely for operating with the tension between the discursive and thenon-discursive, are crucial as a form of social fabric, as a landscape in which our culturalstyles and practices take place (Hjorth, 2004).

A style, characteristic of a certain culture (a Swedish, or of teaching, or ofskateboarding), Spinosa, Flores and Dreufys (1997, pp.1921) say, acts as the basis onwhich practices are conserved and also the basis on which new practices are developed.They can therefore suggest that: [S]pecial sensitivity to marginal, neighbouring, oroccluded practices [] is precisely at the core of entrepreneurship (Ibid., p. 30). Theyalso conclude that this sensitivity generates the art, not science, of invention in

business

(Ibid.). Entrepreneurship, studied as opportunity creation, and as organisationcreation, would then be understood as affecting the field of practices so as to open up fornew styles, i.e., new bases for everyday practices. These might be styles of doing businessor styles of living: selling computers over the web, creating new styles of communicating asthe mobile phone does, or creating new styles of listening to music as the mp3-players have.

Narratives keep practices in their culturally soaked form which in their everydaynessmanifest a marginal language. Such small stories have the possibility to subvert andsurprise dominant discourses, official orepistemologised knowledge. The local, everydaylittle stories are also the form in which imagination proliferates and through whichinventions emerge. They create opportunities that are unimaginable and relationallyimpossible/illegitimate in systems of control oriented expert knowledge or firm strategies(limiting ourselves here to the business context; Lyotard, 1984). Marginal or silenced

stories, apart from carrying a transformative force are also political and collective (cf.Marks, 1998; Deleuze and Guattari, 1986) as they disturb reigning orders and demand neworganisation. They grow like fungi in-between what dominant discourses say and howpeople make use of them.

5. Energizing: the tactical life of pyromaniacs

In an organisational world saturated by a managerial order, dominated by successfulstrategies for change, entrepreneurship seems to increasingly disrupt those strategies,



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moving into their cracks, with the right timing, and intervene there and then like atransformative event:

Occupying the gaps or interstices of the strategic grid, tactics produce a difference orunpredictable event which can corrupt or pervert the strategy's system. (Colebrook,1997, p.125).

The event is an incorporeal transformation, like the I do in a wedding ceremony:Before you open your mouth you are one thing. By the time you close it you havelanded in another world. Nothing touched you, yet you have been transformed.(Massumi, 1992: 28). Looking for examples of such times of the tactical life I turnto one of the most historically validated stories of burning desire, and tactical creativity,where the creation of an opportunity demands the human as a person includingpassion, grief, envy, joy, still there in everyday narratives. Acknowledging the ethical

problems of the full image of this character, I still turn to Shakespeare's Iago, in theplay Othello.

Iago certainly has a purpose after being denied the position that he believes he has sowell deserved through his military life alongside Othello to revenge what he believes isOthello's betrayal of his (Iago's) loyalty. Much of the drama of the play Othello can,however, be found in Iago's attempts to create an opportunity to fulfil his purpose: to get ridof the moor. In this process, Iago not only plays brilliantly on Othello's sense of insecurityand negative self-image, based upon his fear that he would not be able to live up to theexpectations imposed upon him by the Christian society of Venice. To Venice he is nothingbut a stranger (Pieters, 2001). He also insinuates transformative plots into people's self-narratives in an idle time oflife, devoid of a sense of meaning for these men ofwar. In order

for Iago to create his own opportunity he, like most entrepreneurs we study, needs to enact awhole network of people and spark a desire in their life to achieve a purpose serving Iago taking revenge on Othello. The play illustrates Iago's ways of luring and charming storiesout of his fellow-citizens, setting them up for deeds they did not know they wanted: hecreates an opportunity that opens the road to his success. One key to the mystery howentrepreneurs are able to make people join their projects I believe we find in their ways ofenergizing/fire by telling stories. From an opening scene we can see how Iago energizes thefire of Roderigo's:

Roderigo Iago,Iago What say'st thou, noble heart?Roderigo What will I do, thinkest thou?

Iago Why, go to bed, and sleep.Roderigo I will incontinently drown myself.Iago If thou dost, I shall never love thee after. Why, thou silly gentleman!Roderigo It is silliness to live when to live is torment; and then have we a prescription to die when death is our

physician.Iago O villainous! I have looked upon the world for four times seven years; and since I could distinguish

betwixt a benefit and an injury, I never found man that knew how to love himself. Ere I would say, Iwould drown myself for the love of a guinea-hen, I would change my humanity with a baboon.

Roderigo What should I do? I confess it is my shame to be so fond; but it is not in my virtue to amend it.Iago Virtue! a fig! 'tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus. Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills

are gardeners: so that if we will plant nettles, or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up thyme, supply it



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with one gender of herbs, or distract it with many, either to have it sterile with idleness, or manured withindustry, why, the power and corrigible authority of this lies in our wills. If the balance of our lives had

not one scale of reason to poise another of sensuality, the blood and baseness of our natures wouldconduct us to most preposterous conclusions: but we have reason to cool our raging motions, our carnalstings, our unbitted lusts, whereof I take this that you call love to be a sect or scion.

Roderigo It cannot be.Iago It is merely a lust of the blood and a permission of the will. Come, be a man. Drown thyself! drown cats

and blind puppies. I have professed me thy friend and I confess me knit to thy deserving with cables ofperdurable toughness; I could never better stead thee than now. Put money in thy purse; follow thou thewars; defeat thy favour with an usurped beard; I say, put money in thy purse. It cannot be thatDesdemona should long continue her love to the Moor, put money in thy purse, nor he his to her: itwas a violent commencement, and thou shalt see an answerable sequestration: put but money in thy

purse. These Moors are changeable in their wills: fill thy purse with money: the food that to him nowis as luscious as locusts, shall be to him shortly as bitter as coloquintida. She must change for youth:when she is sated with his body, she will find the error of her choice: she must have change, she must:therefore put money in thy purse. If thou wilt needs damn thyself, do it a more delicate way than

drowning. Make all the money thou canst: if sanctimony and a frail vow betwixt an erring barbarian anda supersubtle Venetian not too hard for my wits and all the tribe of hell, thou shalt enjoy her; thereforemake money. A pox of drowning thyself! it is clean out of the way: seek thou rather to be hanged incompassing thy joy than to be drowned and go without her.

Roderigo Wilt thou be fast to my hopes, if I depend on the issue?Iago Thouart sure of me: go, make money: I have told thee often, and I re-tell thee again and again, I hate

the Moor: my cause is hearted; thine hath no less reason. Let us be conjunctive in our revenge againsthim: if thou canst cuckold him, thou dost thyself a pleasure, me a sport. There are many events in thewomb of time which will be delivered. Traverse! go, provide thy money. We will have more of thistomorrow. Adieu.

Roderigo Where shall we meet i' the morning?Iago At my lodging.Roderigo I'll be with thee betimes.

Iago Go to; farewell. Do you hear, Roderigo?Roderigo What say you?Iago No more of drowning, do you hear?Roderigo I am changed: I'll go sell all my land.

(Othello, Shakespeare)Iago is a pyromaniac. Extending our previous language, we would exemplify how our

opportunity creation focus, our attention to a desire to become the other, leads us to describeentrepreneurial processes (in both Iago's and in Schumpeter's, 1991/1949: 2601, casedescribed as a collective-relational force) as the organisation-creation process connectingthe elements needed for a fire (the resulting eventof entrepreneurship) to break out: heatpassion/desire to create; oxygen the differentiating power in life, close to us as ourbreathing, continuously escaping attempts to formalise (attempts to transform nomos7, via

logoi8

into logic); fuel/fodder stories/narratives feed the fire and need to proceed withgreat timing. When these three are present, fire strikes as an event of difference, as anintensification of the real but until that point not actualised opportunity, that is,entrepreneurial processes create new organisation. The effect entrepreneurship is aname given to this elusive event of fire; a metonymy for the release of creative social energythrough energizing storytelling and organisation.

7 Free movements in open space.8 Taken here to be the social understandings (multiple) that forms a nexus with ethos, living traditions of

practices operating in defined places.



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This creative social energy refers to what was described in fairly similar ways bySpinosa et al. (1997) and Greenblatt (1988). I use them here as de Certeauian (1984)

thinkers sensitizing us to marginal-tactical creativity in everyday practices. Spinosa et al usea style to describe how cultural practices are held together9. Entrepreneurship (making useof history-making skills in Spinosa et al's terms) would then depend on our possibility tochange this style for dealing with people and things. Entrepreneurship, like an illuminationof our styles-in-use, increasing our sensitivity before the play of background andforeground in our lives, allows us to disclose things and practices so that they can bechanged. Changing styles creates new socialities in which we relate to people and things innew ways: the effect of newness. Greenblatt (1988), in his Shakespearean Negotiations,uses social energy to describe how our cultural practices are bound together. The notion ofsocial energy is associated with repeatable forms of pleasure and interest, with the capacityto arouse disquiet, pain, fear, the beating of the heart, pity, laughter, tension, relief, wonder.

(1988: 6). Taken together, style and social energy are created/changed through the creativesocial energy referred above as fire.

I have chosen this metonymy not only for its descriptive power when it comes toentrepreneurial processes of creation. Fire also points to the politics and passion ofentrepreneurship, aspects I find to be central for an understanding of entrepreneurship in itsopportunity creation phase. These aspects are also symptomatically marginalised in aneconomic-managerial perspective (as in mainstream organisation studies; see Cooper,1989). In addition, critics/discussants of Shakespeare's Othello in this article HaroldBloom is central do refer to Iago as a pyromaniac, as one who starts fires. To start a fireIago uses narratives that create resonance in people's lives. The promises of what Iago'slisteners might be able to do, i.e., the promise in the narratives of the future event/fire, has

the power to stop them in their tracks and convey

an arresting sense of uniqueness, toevoke an exalted attention. (Greenblatt, 1990: 170, describing the use of the term wonder),i.e., a sense of social wonder over the striking of an event.

Reality, in Othello's life, is continually negotiated, relationally constructed as what people make real through their interactions (Hosking and Hjorth, 2004). Iago's casetherefore reminds us of the need to think ethics back into our discourse on entrepreneurship.The choice of Shakespeare for this article emerges from an interest in the drama of thesubversive powers of entrepreneurial storytelling as energizing the creation of new orders,an event demanding new organisation of practices. We find a parallel to this interest inShakespeare's plays: Shakespeare's plays are centrally, repeatedly concerned with theproduction and containment of subversion and disorder (Greenblatt, 1988: 40).

6. The drama of the entrepreneurial event

Indeed, there is a drama of entrepreneurship that becomes almost completely neglectedthrough our attention to the economy of entrepreneurship. This drama, I believe, is possibleto study in narratives through a focus on events. Fire, or the event, creates effects that could

9 Style, the ground of meaning in human activity, is a coordination of actions, and opens a disclosive space,according to Spinosa et al. (1997) in a threefold manner: 1) by coordinating actions, 2) by determining how thingsand people matter, 3) and by being what is transferred from situation to situation.



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become utilised as opportunities. Fire, like Greenblatt's social energy produces, shapes,and organises collective experiences (1988: 6). This is the point where narratives comes in.

Narratives allow for a creative evocativeness (Carbaugh, 1991: 337) making readersexperience and not only understand what happened (Linstead, 1998: 240). Narratives andnarrative forms of telling, carries experiences performatively as in the poetic. Narratives cancommunicate the event, the break-out of fire; how the beginning is always a result ofpreceding beginnings flowing into a subsequent one, related not chronologically like rillsrelate to streams. Events are not moments within time but what allows time to take off froma new path (to use Deleuze's language; Deleuze described events as the energy of thought(1990: 208). Deleuze and Guattari (1994: 156) also use a similar language of movement asthey describe the event: in contrast with the state of affairs, it neither begins nor ends buthas gained or kept the infinite movement to which it gives consistency.

Deleuze: It definitely makes sense to look at the various ways individuals andgroups constitute themselves as subjects through processes of subjectification: whatcounts in such processes is the extent to which, as they take shape, they elude bothestablished forms of knowledge and the dominant forms of power. Even if they inturn engender new forms of power or become assimilated into new forms ofknowledge. For a while, though, they have a real rebellious spontaneity. This isnothing to do with going back to the subject, that is, to something invested withduties, power, and knowledge. One might equally well speak of new kinds of events,rather than processes of subjectification: events that can't be explained by thesituations that give rise to them, or into which they lead. They appear for a moment,and it's that moment that matters, it's the chance we must seize. []What we most

lack is a belief in the world, we've quite lost the world, it's been taken from us. Ifyou believe in the world you precipitate events, however inconspicuous, that eludecontrol, you engender new space-times, however small their surface or volume. It'swhat you call pietas. (Conversation with Toni Negri, Futur Anterieur, Spring 1990)

Iago is an interesting case as we find him in a situation, in the wake of an event, whichhas shattered the way he organised his experiences into a more or less coherent self. We findhim in a furious movement, as a larvar subject a multiplicity of perceptions andcontemplations not yet organised into a self (Colebrook, 2002b: 74) that experimentswith staging different self-images for people in his immediate surroundings all answering todifferent narratives, multiplying the possibilities for creating his opportunity and forgrounding himself on a new path, on which a new time could take off.

Iago narrates different plots for different people, and to the extent that he can energizethem, he lures them into processes of subjectification, where they become narratorsthemselves and identify with the position of the subject of their statement:

The process of subjectification takes place when a subject of enunciation, thespeaker, recoils into the subject of the statement (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 130).Its dominant reality is given by the range of statements which are possible for it. Onelearns the range of possible option that one is allowed to think, believe, want, or lovefrom those given within society; a subject of enunciation forms its consciousness of



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itself out of the statements which it is able to make as a subject of a statement. [ ]The speaker knows himself as a thinking substance. [] The self-consciousness of

human subjects is a simulated product of language. [] Yet the I expressed inlanguage is merely a syntactical marker; a product of language, not consciousness.[] Positions of subjectivity have an equivalent position within a statement;consequently, statements can easily be translated from one person to another. []Belief in those who issue statements is not a precondition for subjectification, but aproduct. (Goodchild, 1996: 1489).

Could we not think entrepreneurship as the desire to become the other, creatingperformances that multiplies the self, that is, which re-organises experiences in narratives soas to open up fields of possibilities for actions? Such a desire creates connections whichallows fire to strike; social energy is released and styles of how we relate to things and

people keeping practices together are changed and new organisation is needed.Iago, in Shakespeare's Othello would then provide an (extreme) example illustrating

this force of entrepreneurship. Literature is the power of becoming beyond any alreadygiven image of thought or any rule of art. (Colebrook, 2002b: 145). Literature (and art)helps us confront the formation, genesis and creation of ideas (ibid, p. 64) so that we canfocus on the flow of affects and experiences and learn how these in a multiplicity ofways are organised into characters, different narrative selves. Iago is fascinating not forpointing at some profound or fundamental aspect of human nature, but for the litera-ture of Othello's continuous production of its new context, how it produces in-vestments in new images today. Iago teaches us that there is no ground or core thatfixes persons in living arche-types of their Self. Rather, in creating multiple narrative

selves in stories that affect/energize people to act, we learn how storytelling is part ofcreating opportunities.In the play Othello Iago is facing the strategy of Othello as he (Iago) is passed over when

Othello is choosing his new lieutenant. Instead of receiving the kind of promotion he thinkshe has earned in wars alongside his boss, Iago for whom war is all can only watch themuch younger and inexperienced Cassio rise to the position he thought was his own. Iago'sreaction to this ontological loss (indeed, war was all, Bloom, 1998), this falling into a void,is responded to in most creative ways. He engages in a series of tactical moves throughwhich he knits a new world together, a world productive of desires for revenge, punishment, justice, honour, and morale.

7. The case of the Marvel Mustang

De Certeau's concept of tactics allows us to think and study the subversive nature ofentrepreneurship in the case of the Marvel Mustang and in the case of Iago. Narratives takeus into the ways of tactics as we follow the wit in everyday practices rather than thetheoretical rationality of the strategic. We are pushed to study life in practices rather thaneconomy in decision making, a shift in focus that allows us to bring out new sides ofentrepreneurship. In the Marvel Mustang story our interest as entrepreneurship studentscould be in the virtual company and the process of actualising it. That is, there is nocompany, Deleuze would say, without any assemblage of connected bodies desiring a



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company. It is the investments (by desire) and intensities (vibrancy, vitality) that producethis (the company that can produce, create, innovate, etc.):

Excerpts from the Marvel Mustang Story

1:John You know, this town needs a good toy store. I was looking at all the different toy stores in town and they

don't have any toys. Except at Xmas it's hard to find a toy department in any of the big stores like Sears orZayres. At Xmas it takes up half the stores, but prior to Xmas 9 or 10 months per year, you just can'tfind a toy department.Whatwe ought todo isget a whole pileof toyson consignment three monthsbeforeXmas, rentthe biggeststore we can find in town, sell the toys for the Xmas season and then shop them back to the manufacturer.

Myself I will drink to that. Good idea.Look, we're going to make money. We're not taking any risk whatsoeverWe get these toys onconsignment and if we don't sell them, we ship them right back. The only risk is in the rent we pay on the

building, because we'll run the store ourselves.

My wife hit the ceiling, but after some more discussion, she agreed.

2:Myself We're going to fill it up with toys.Local toy

distributorNo way!

3:Banker You know my wife and I have thought the same thing. Except at Xmas time, you can't buy toys

around here. We have eight children, and they all have birthdays throughout the whole year, and wecan never find them toys.How much money do you need?

John andMyself

$7000

Banker Great, what's your collateral?John and

MyselfNothing, just our signatures.

Banker I was afraid you were gonna say that I'm supposed to ask anyway.OK, but your wives will have to sign the note

4:Banker So I want to give these guys this loan.Superior I don't think this is a good idea. It is simply too thin, they are not covered. Banker They will bring businessto that emptyhouse across thestreet. You know we have alwaystalked about

how bad that is for the neighbourhood. That we would need some sign of a prosperous area there. Superior You're right about that. And you said you believe in these guys? Banker Yes I do. There is really no competition for toys except during Christmas. They're right about that.

So, $7000 is really no risk I believe.Superior OK, if you say so. But I want to see some calculations on this. They have a business plan I hope?

5:Myself And I learned something from the wholesaler there's this item called the Marvel Mustang (MM)

that's gonna be the hottest toy that ever hit the stores this year. About this long, this high, beigehorse, a child sits on it and holds these wooden things, as they bounce on it, it moves forward, onwheels at the bottom. Among the kids, there are two big items an MM and a Big Wheel

Wife After stopping to cry, OK, I'll agree.

One could see the Myself character in this story riding the story of the toy store-to-come, continuously trying to construct a relational reality in which the story is actualised inthe world.



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This, again, is how Iago's example is effective in the social field of practices: he createsdesires to cash out on the investments. And as we saw from the opening conversation with

Roderigo, Iago strongly emphasises investment both in the telos of his (Iago's) story, and inthe character he enacts for Roderigo in that story Put money in thy purse! Iago isplaying on the double possibility of images as narrated: they affect us to invest in futureconclusions andthey open possibilities for action. We become locally desiring bodies, thatcan also come together and generalise, over-code images and produce signs assuminglyof something more underlying, something more true which become regulative ideals:generalised interests.

Iago starts many fires, events that produce stages for characters that crave to becomeperformed. And he gets his performances! Through the resonance and intensities that hisenergizing narratives create people start to invest in an image of their future success. Thereis a drama in this resonance and a wonder in this anticipated actualisation. Iago plays with

this staging of self-images for others, always a self of action, bringing people into the centreof the power of living. People in Iago's immediate surroundings desire this self, this imageof their self as narratively set up, and become energized, part of, or as we put it describingstart-up processes partners in this process.

In the Marvel Mustang story, the Myself character stages the toy store through creatinga partner, convincing his wife, and assuring a banker, suppliers and customers that the toystore virtuality (the anomaly in the local context) is invested by such strong desires tobecome-a-company that this actualisation will take place. In excerpt 1 the central characterofthis first version of the story is relationally constituted as Myself qua business partner.This happens when the idea is articulated (John: You know, this town needs a good toystore.) and affirmed (Myself: I will drink to that. Good idea.). Articulation, Spinosa

et al. (1997) say, makes the implicit explicit through gathering from dispersion or retrievingwhat has been lost. In excerpt 2 we read how the anomaly again is articulated and affirmedas something demanding change in order to happen (No way!). Just like Iago creates anintensity in his hatred of the moor so that Roderigo desires to invest in his (Othello's)downfall, Myself and John, in the Marvel Mustang story (excerpt 3) happens to share theintensity of the toy store idea with the banker, who therefore invests in the idea-becoming-toy-store. The banker desires to become a financier of this store; his fire is lit whenMyself and John articulates the idea in a narrative tactically making use of the right localdominant scripts. Excerpts 4 and 5 are examples of: 1) how the idea is invested by desire asa result of being appropriated for new reasons: the bank does not want an empty houseacross the street; and 2) how the articulation of the idea using the power of dominantdiscourses (in excerpt 4: business plan and calculation; in excerpt 5: reference to customer

demand) gathers from dispersion and thereby makes the story of the future store resonantwith other stories, which makes it real but not yet actual.

8. What do narratives do for us as students of entrepreneurship?

There is a specific element in Iago's plot-making which I believe captures the skill ofhow entrepreneurship is performed. It is, like most entrepreneurship narratives, an invertedversion of Descarte's doubt-tale (arriving at what he suggests is the self-grounded subject):they are believe-tales, affirmative rather than negative. Narratives try to get us into the



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event, to bring us the experience, and in doing so they break a rule of science established byGalileo that knowledge proper is possible only through detachment, self-denial and

disinterest (we are dying to know; cf. Levine, 2002). In addition, entrepreneurship-narratives illustrate how a desire to become the other can create connections with otherpeople and/or bodies (of thought) in order to enhance the productive power. It also gives usways to think entrepreneurship as tactical insinuations with transformative power ofcreating new worlds something thatallows time to take off on a new path, an event.Such transformative events release additional creative social energy through whichadditional opportunities are created, and through which signs are produced that becomeregulative ideas or interests defined by expert knowledge primarily (strategic)management theory. Thus, every entrepreneurial process become targets for managementknowledge and subjected to normalising discourses. Management seeks to increase controland secure economic efficiency. Entrepreneurship is in this way tamed.

Narratives help us to place focus on the tension between events and practices, that is,between the interruption of established relations of power that alters and reconfigures theforce operating in a discursive formation (such as a business strategy; a start-up plan; HRM;the business school) and what such interruptions do in the field of practices. Narratives helpus escape the separation between ideals and their particular incarnations in that they requireattention to the embodied, the corporeal, to how corporeality is created rather than howuniversal claims can be induced. A narrative approach denies the dualism of mind/bodyestablished in Descarte's strangely narrativist story evoked as a foundation for modernistepistemology. Narratives give us our bodies back, and with them our passion, desire, andsensitivities. Again: [S]pecial sensitivity to marginal, neighbouring, or occluded practices[] is precisely at the core of entrepreneurship (Spinosa et al., 1997: 30).

Iago is also chosen for the obvious illustration of how power relations

strategies

areeffective in the field of practices. A little speech at the wrong/right moment, in the wrong/right place could change everything (Foucault, 1993). Science struggled with thepotentialities of life's playful/carnivalesque sociality in order to prepare a place for it inthe popular culture/writings (Findlen, 1998). Passions were to be ruled by interest(Hirschman, 1977) and bodies controlled by rational minds. The stories of the unofficial,the silenced, the popular, mere folly, interests the genealogist who analyses the relations tothe official, proper, dominant discourses and shows how they have become possible as wellas how things could become totally different. As entrepreneurship researchers we recognisesomething familiar in this approach, which describes also entrepreneurial movements from what is to what could become. (Hjorth, 2004)

In order to clarify the relationship of theory with those procedures that produce it aswell as with those that are its objects of study, the most relevant way would be astorytelling discourse. Foucault writes that he does nothing but tell stories (rcits).Stories slowly appear as a work of displacements, relating to a logic of metonymy. Isit not then time to recognize the theoretical legitimacy of narrative, which is then tobe looked upon not as some ineradicable remnant (or a remnant still to be eradicated) but rather as a necessary form for a theory of practices? In this hypothesis, anarrative theory would be indissociable from any theory of practices , for it would beits precondition as well as its production. (de Certeau, 1997, p.192).



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A narrative approach provides us with the possibilities to study practices in everydaylanguage. We would then engage with the full sociality of entrepreneurial processes,

embracing the passionate, immediate, spontaneous, as well as the strategic and calculating.We focus on the language of tactics, subverting the order of things from within. This ispolitical in Foucault's sense of focusing on relations of power and knowledge.

Instead of prioritising a description of rules governing discursive practices often forcingthe theoretician out on the centre court, Foucault's genealogical method prioritises practices over theory all the way and gives much more attention to cultural andinstitutional forces ordering the play of discourses. Instead of operating as if the analyst ofthe archives (systems of statements) could be free from the dominant discourses of her/hisday, the genealogist diagnoses practices from within.

Genealogy also establishes its difference from archaeology in its approach todiscourse. Where archaeology provides us with a snapshot, a slice through thediscursive nexus, genealogy pays attention to the processual aspects of the web ofdiscourse its ongoing character. (Foucault, 1981: 701).

Genealogy, in Foucault's words, here clearly resonant with de Certeau's interest in thegaps between the official/strategic and the silent/tactical, attends to erudite knowledge andlocal memories which allows us to establish a historical knowledge of struggles and tomake use of this knowledge tactically today (Foucault, 1980: 83). A genealogic approachwill therefore seek to cultivate a concern for the details and accidents that accompany everybeginning. Genealogists seek discontinuities and play (Hjorth, 2004: 2237). Studies thattry to bring the power-knowledge relation to the fore through attention to narrative andthrough writing tactically, we could call genealogic storytelling.

9. Genealogic storytelling and entrepreneurship studies

Narratives enable a study of events as they carry the events of the studied inlanguage. There is a historically mediated tendency to look for the result, the end, insteadof the process. Scholars have listened to the doubt-tale side of Descartes' story. But thestory as such describing a process of how he found this place and moment in time toconverse with himself is through its reception history transformed into a silenced story.If we, following de Certeau and Foucault, focus as genealogists on the cultural practices,we discover how narratives are the form/context in and through which those practicestake place.

Narratives efficiently dissolves the sharp distinction between the scientific and the

literary, precisely through showing how such an effect can be performed in telling. Asshown in the work of Descartes and Bacon, they are intimately intertwined (Levine, 2002;Banks and Banks, 1998). A genealogical approach moves upstream to ask how thecontemporary could acquire a status of necessary, and downstream to inquire into how itreproduces its necessary context today so as to secure its status (as true, normal, universal).

The little narrative, the folktale, no longer has the status of a document that doesnot know what it says, cited (summoned and quoted) before and by the analysis thatknows it. On the contrary, it is a know-how-to-say (savoir-dire) exactly adjusted



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to its object, and, as such, no longer the Other of knowledge; rather it is a variant ofthe discourse that knows and an authority in what concerns theory. (de Certeau,

1984: 78).

We can learn from this, as we can learn from de Certeau's (1984) discussion oneverydayness and tactics; from the subversive nature of Shakespeare's plays (Greenblatt,1988: 40); from the tactical moves of Iago's way of making use of dominant (strategic)discourses that we often find the central elements of a story in its margins. It is the silencedpart which contains the keys to the movements of the official version. The present absenceis a rich source to the experience of the event. This is how a genealogic-narrative approachhelps us write the transformative stories, the literature of entrepreneurship. In the MarvelMustang story the margins is where we sense stories on:

masculinityfemininity: the story is about active men and passive, even weeping women the construction of masculinity: the Marvel Mustang is found in the category of push

and pull toys, especially developed for boys and their active play, so the story of theMarvel Mustang, as it is written, seems to signify a boy-story

aesthetics: the central decision by the banker to give the second loan is legitimized withreference to the bad looking empty house across the street

rationality/irrationality: the idea/decision to start a business is taken after a couple ofdrinks, the storyteller's way of making space for an anomaly within dominant discourseon economic rationality.

The issues of gendered constructions, the relationship between aesthetics and economy,

and of how

the mad

or

adventurous

is represented could all be analysed so as to: 1)illuminate what styles that are used in this story for keeping practices together, for relatingto things and people; 2) and to increase our sensitivity before the play of background(normalities, dominant discourses) and foreground (what is made to differentiate) in a particular process of bringing an entrepreneurial process to its goal. By the help of agenealogic-narrative approach we would thus see that the Marvel Mustang story hardly is astory of entrepreneurship. If we reserve for entrepreneurship the skill of changing our style(s) of living the way we relate to people and things and the energizing of creative socialenergy in order to accomplish such events (as in the case of Iago's), we would have todescribe the Marvel Mustang story as exemplifying a business school representation ofmanagerial entrepreneurship: opportunity recognition/evaluation/exploitation (as exempli-fied by Drucker, 1985) and resource based views (as exemplified by Vesper, 1980). The

entrepreneurial story in this Marvel Mustang story is probably the silenced one whatgoes on in the margin. There, however, resistance against pervasive cultural practices isseldom accomplished.

10. Conclusion

The narrative of the Marvel Mustang as such allows us to ask questions rarely asked instrategic management influenced studies of entrepreneurship qua opportunity discovery/evaluation/exploitation: How is the idea (anomaly), in narratives and tactics, actualised in



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the Marvel Mustang case? How is the intensity, the vibrancy, vitality of the ideacommunicated? How are investments made by desires for the new relational reality? How

are these investments actualised through energizing people into social creativity? Thesekinds of questions are all requiring a study sensitive before power-knowledgerelationships in the field of practices. Such studies also need to study upstream anddownstream how the present context of the possible/necessary was formed. New sides ofthe entrepreneurship story, as it is written in Western business schools, are herebydisclosed, and we are invited to write a transformative literature on entrepreneurship. Aliterature occupied with the lives of passion, effect, wit, sensitivities and not onlyeconomy, calculation, scientific rationality and strategic decision making. I believe suchliterature on entrepreneurship, centering on opportunity creation, is a crucial complementto the still dominant story of opportunity discovery/evaluation/exploitation. A narrative-genealogic approach takes us there.

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