Entrepreneurship as Organizing Desire

Desire has been recognized as a crucial driver of entrepreneurial behavior and economic development for over a century, but despite its central position in the theorization of entrepreneurship, its underlying philosophical assumptions are rarely questioned. Seeking to pave the way for an understanding of desire as a quality of entrepreneurial practices, in this dissertation I uncover and problematize the prevailing understanding of desire in entrepreneurship research, which frequently entails viewing desire as a motivational force situated within the entrepreneurial subject.In the literature review I identify four different ways in which desire has previously been linked to entrepreneurship and used to understand entrepreneurial phenomena: (a) desire as a dispositional quality of the entrepreneur, (b) entrepreneurship as a means of producing desirable outcomes, (c) entrepreneurship as a desirable category in itself, and (d) entrepreneurship as a capacity to produce desiring. Against this backdrop, I suggest a framework of desire by looking to the theory of Pierre Bourdieu, drawing on his relational ontology and praxeology to understand desire as socially distributed and culturally constituted. I then use this Bourdieusian framework in a qualitative case study about the creation of a contemporary art exhibition venue, using the framework to explore entrepreneurial practices and to address the research inquiry into how desire is organized in the area of culture.The case study illustrates how desiring is deeply intertwined with entrepreneurial practices and demonstrates how a Bourdieusian perspective can be used to provide a more nuanced picture of the role desire plays in processes of organizational emergence. The dissertation ultimately brings forth a way of understanding desire through the metaphor of organizing desire, which I summarize in ten tenets. The study makes several contributions: Theoretically, it brings forth an understanding of organizing desire that can enrich entrepreneurship theory and give greater insight into entrepreneurial phenomena. Empirically, the study presents and analyzes a case of entrepreneurship situated within the area of arts and culture. Methodologically, the study offers a reflection on the challenges of studying organizations in emergence and adopts a Bourdieusian framework to arrive at an understanding of desire as a force that both organizes entrepreneurial practices and is organized by them. Finally, in practical terms this dissertation implies that desire need not be viewed as a quality exclusively belonging to individual entrepreneurs but can also be seen as part of the social world—an insight that comes with an ethical responsibility for other desiring beings.