Power as Practice: A Micro-sociological Analysis of the Dynamics of Emancipatory Entrepreneurship

Abstract

This paper contributes to a recent movement to reframe entrepreneurship theory into a more critical and reflexive mode. It builds on the processual notion of entrepreneuring-as-emancipation to theorize a balanced conception of agency and active constraint rooted in the notion of power rituals. We develop a micro-sociological analysis of power rituals that conceives power reproduction and entrenchment as a ‘practice-based’ activity that focuses on what power holders and subordinates concretely do, think and feel. This makes emotion a key dimension of entrepreneurial agency and redefines constraining barriers to agency in terms of a social process of ‘barring’. This novel approach is illustrated using an autobiographical account of a social entrepreneurship project. On the basis of this analysis, a number of insights are provided into the ways in which the power-as-practice approach can inform wider debates in organization studies where the notions of agency and constraint are linked to issues of power and resistance.