Christina, you are dedicated to thinking critically about the ways in which entrepreneurship influences our society by shaping our ideals, social action, and politics.   You’ve got a new article on entrepreneurialism as an ideology.  Can you explain what you mean by this?

We want to rethink entrepreneurship.  The starting point is that we see entrepreneurship everywhere:  in the military, government, and a range of other places, including of course business.   This raises the question:  What do we mean by “entrepreneurship”?  What are we talking about?   Is this a myth or a fantasy or an idea?

The article puts out these ideas.  There are many ways to rethink entrepreneurship, particularly by thinking beyond the individual.  Right now, in practice, entrepreneurship is a shared cultural playbook.  The glorification of the individual is choreographed by many people around a singular person.  This creates a way of understanding change in the world that we need to revisit.

Consider the military example, which is familiar to Anita as she comes in part from a military family.  We may be idealizing ways of doing things such as disrupting the organization.   Our ideas about this often emerge around technology.  Every time we do this, we de-emphasize the centrality of quiet maintenance.   What should we preserve from the past?  Certainly quiet maintenance is critical to stability.   How do we assure a lasting constructive impact of an organization?

Christina admires the work of Clifford Geertz, an anthropologist who advanced our thinking on maps of social reality.  We need these maps in times of crisis, such as now.   Entrepreneurship right now is often conceptualized as this map rather than as something to do with business formation.

Anita described the idea of the entrepreneur in Thomas McCraw’s thinking as the role of an arbiter of important social tensions.

Christina described McCaw’s book on Schumpeter called Prophet of Innovation as one of the best books she’s ever read.  Schumpeter got us to think about the agency of the individual entrepreneur.  At the time – in the 1950s – there was a lot of power to this suggestion.  

McCraw, writing in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, was conceptualizing the entrepreneur as a leader that embedded a set of values in a corporation.  

How did we get from McCraw to the cowboy entrepreneur?

Christina described how many early leaders in the Silicon Valley of the 1970s and 1980s were countercultural pacifists who saw the technology as at the edge of a broad social movement.   There was a California counterculture that shared some of the same broad imprinting effects as the early jazz movement did around creativity.    Rebellion and resistance were valued.  There was charm and energy in these ideas.  “Move fast and break things” made perfect sense in this kind of culture.

Christina also referred to the origins of the phrase “entrepreneurial hype,” which was of course critical of this counter-cultural movement.  “Hype” is derivative of the word hypodermic in “hypodermic needle,” which is a mechanism of delivering hallucinogenic drugs.   There’s a critique in the phrase “entrepreneurial hype” that reflects this movement.

Anita was blown away by the sophistication of this response, and then asked Christina how we rethink the kind of cowboy celebrity entrepreneurship that has emerged from Silicon Valley.

Christina emphasized that what needs more thought is collectivism.   What we mean about truly collective entrepreneurship requires understanding entrepreneurship differently than the journey of the individual hero.

Anita asked Christina if she shared an idea that we don’t want to put a stop to innovation and markets as a way of implementing change at scale.  

The two agreed that we want capitalism as a prevailing system.  So what does it mean to pursue collective entrepreneurship?  Christina described how history and historical understanding can help us to answer this question.   The great thing about history is that it contextualizes what we now consider normal in a trajectory that may also include other models for getting important things done.   It doesn’t help, Christina suggested, to slap the word “social” before “entrepreneurship” if we want to understand collective entrepreneurship.   

Anita then outlined a model of what might be construed as collective entrepreneurship by reflecting on the case of the Oaks Revitalization Association in Toronto, which works with the Toronto Police Services to support the introduction of training in the construction trades among young men – and especially young men who identify as from immigrant families, racialized minorities, and as Indigenous – who are at risk of incarceration for gang activity.   Does the orchestration across multiple types of organizations reflect what Christina means by “collective” entrepreneurship?

Christina discussed this model as at the heart of what she means.  We will continue to want individual agency and innovation.  But we want to think more broadly about what constitutes value.   There’s an order-of-value issue.  Do we want the public to avoid the expense of incarceration as the primary motive for ORA?  Or is this more about fairness and equal access to opportunity?   Do we need more construction in Toronto?  (Yes we definitely need more housing.)   That’s the interesting conversation for us to pursue.

What motivates Christina to do the work that she does?

Christina is inspired by the perspective that history gives us.  There’s an urgency to the agenda right now that drives her.   She is motivated to shape the next generation of entrepreneurship in ways that are meaningful and challenging.