Call for Papers

Call for short papers (pdf)

This sub-theme explores the growing influence of tech elite trickster-enterprisers in shaping not only markets but also democratic institutions, public discourse, and civic life. Figures such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Sam Bankman-Fried illustrate how enterprising-technological-media power extends into politics, ideology, and governance, by posing as entrepreneurship, raising urgent questions: When do such shifts in the rules of the game constitute state capture? What is the immanent tension between the reactionary and progressive in enterprising behavior influencing and influenced by politics? How is politically cooptive “politicopreneurship” presently affecting democracy? What playful, tactical forms of art-based entrepreneurship-as-resistance do we presently see as reactions to managerial enterprise taking over the state? How are such forms of playful resistance opening alternatives for civic responsibility, collective agency, and ecological awareness? This session engages art-based entrepreneurial tactics of resistance as new methods to engage with novel and significant threats to democracy.

This trend—where spectacle and eccentricity are (re)defining the norms of public life (Baudrillard, 1981, 1986; Debord, 1967)—raises urgent questions: How are fakes and playful manipulations used by enterprisers to rewrite the rules of the democratic game? If we understand entrepreneurship as an organization-creation process that results in value for users, consumers, and citizens, and enterprising behavior as the creation of a new organizational capacity to generate more profit, we are introducing greater nuance in handling what is too often lumped together under the concept of “entrepreneurship.” We invite contributions that critically interrogate entrepreneurship as an aesthetic and as a process or practice (Champenois et al., 2024) with both subversive and world-making potentials (Bureau & Ibrahim, 2025; Bureau & Zander, 2014). By focusing on civic responsibility, collective agency, and ecological awareness, we are able to diagnose cultural and societal challenges precisely and then aim to solve them entrepreneurially using art-based practices and heterodox approaches (Bureau, 2019; Whitaker, 2016). We welcome diverse perspectives, new materialist and posthumanist (Barad, 2003; Braidotti, 2018) included, that examine counter-hegemonic practices, ideological underpinnings, and art-based methodologies for reimagining entrepreneurship as a playful tactic of resistance, for the benefit of democracy in the Anthropocene (Courpasson & Vallas, 2016; Hjorth, 2016). This includes problematizing the ironic centrality of the human in the Anthropocene; a human—white, male, Western, Vitruvian man-kind—that now needs to be decentered for inclusive and diverse life with companion-species to emerge.

Already in 1985, Peter Drucker proposed that management creates profit whereas entrepreneurship creates customers. The importance of this distinction is perhaps greater than ever in a time where CEO compensation is 1,200% (!) larger today than in Drucker’s times (1978 as reference year) and worker salaries’ increase during the same time is on average 15% (!) (USA figures). The CEO-to-worker pay ratio was 31-to-1 in 1978 and is 281-to-1 in 2024 (!) (Gould et al., 2025). In recent years, we have witnessed the accelerated influence of elite tech enterprisers beyond markets and product innovation on broader societal and democratic systems. Theories of the individual entrepreneur (through Gartner, 1988, made somewhat obsolete) and of entrepreneurship did not anticipate how it would become integrated into enterprising management as a “profit-formula” and ontological shift (employees-becoming-enterprisers, du Gay, 2004) in the digital platform-economy of the 2000s (Richardson, 2020). However, this is also where playful tactics of resistance often kick in.

This sub-theme seeks to explore such often art-based, playful-tactical forms of entrepreneurial resistance against enterprising grifters that pose as entrepreneurship but focus on profit-making (Bureau et al., 2025). How is this enterprising trickstery entangled with organizational politics and the political (Farias et al., 2020; Rancière, 2004), exploiting democratic fragility? Can playful-tactical entrepreneurship processes, using art and/or art-based methods to create subversive forms of resistance, be reconsidered as aesthetic practices (Bureau & Zander, 2014; Courpasson et al., 2016; Dey & Mason, 2018; Hjorth & Steyaert, 2010; Thompson et al., 2020)? Such a perspective highlights how entrepreneurship “creates worlds,” shaping not only markets but also political imaginaries, institutional arrangements, and civic life (Farias et al., 2020; Steyaert & Hjorth, 2008; Verdujin et al., 2026).

• What playful games are presently created as an outcome of entrepreneurial resistance against threats to democracy?

• What are the forms and “genres” of entrepreneurial creativity, beyond a romantic view of it as inherently progressive, presently found in subversive resistance against enterprisers threatening the democratic state?

• How are art and art-based methods used in such playful, entrepreneurial organization-creation, making movements, communities, and interventions happen?

• Is there a political playfulness involved?

• How does enterprise become a vehicle for democratic destabilization, also when entrepreneurship is cloaked in the managerial language of enterprising innovation?

• How is the transformation of states into enterprisers playfully and subversively resisted today in tactical transformative insinuations?

• What forms of creative resistance do posthumanist and new materialist perspectives inspire in their emphasis on “coming communities”?

Pranksterism can be superficial and distracting, a form of controlling the news cycle and diverting attention, just like De Certeau’s (1984) “la perruque,” the wig that elegantly fakes it and distracts. The question arises: What playful entrepreneurial tactics of pranksterist diversions can help us, our institutions, and our communities of conversation against the dominant-strategic enterprising agenda? This sub-theme explores art as a process, counterintuitively, for approaching and entrepreneurially diverting the enterprising pranksters, because art is a method of committing to iterative question-driven inquiry. Art thinking—and the process of playful creation—offers an unexpected antidote to this slippery archetype of the charlatan managerial grifter-posing-as-entrepreneur. Exploring the improbable and engaging in methods of artists invites a deep level of noticing, which itself is an antidote to enterprising tricksterism. In addition, leading from questions invites structural redesign of systems—in short, focusing on the things from which we might be distracted.

These concerns are further intensified by recognition of the Anthropocene, new-materialist, and posthumanist perspectives on where techno-solutionist enterprising behavior often sidelines ecological and ethical imperatives, with known and unknown consequences for community and planetary health (Barad, 2003; Braidotti, 2018). Can art and art-based practices as forms of activist entrepreneurship (Dey & Mason, 2018) cultivate resistance, critique, and renewal? Facing calls to reimagine academia itself in the face of planetary crisis (Laasch, 2024), we also ask: Could practices such as Art Thinking (Bureau, 2019; Whitaker, 2016), arts-based pedagogies (Barry & Meisiek, 2010; Bureau & Komporozos-Athanasiou, 2017; Flamand et al., 2021), and other heterodox, transdisciplinary approaches rooted in creative processes offer alternative ways to imagine entrepreneurship-as-creative-subversive resistance? To what extent can art-based entrepreneurship foster civic responsibility, critical imagination, and collective agency—and act as bulwarks for freedom of expression, deliberative democracy, and social inclusion?

We particularly encourage submissions that:

• Critically examine the ideological underpinnings of contemporary enterprise cultures (e.g., neoliberalism, libertarianism, transhumanism, neo-reactionism, etc.);

• Investigate counter-hegemonic practices and forms of “entrepreneurship-as-tactical-subversive resistance”;

• Explore arts-based methodologies as means of teaching, researching, or practicing entrepreneurship beyond market logics;

• Explore aesthetics of business and its implications for a refined diagnosis of the politics of enterprise and entrepreneurship.

• Explore the implications of using the subversive lens to address mainstream approaches in entrepreneurship (e.g., opportunity theory, decision making, entrepreneurial motivation, etc.);

• Go beyond the trickster–prankster contrast to explore games and plays, faking and pretending, lying and fabulating, in the forms and genres of entrepreneurial uses of art, the artful, and artful methods as ways to resist.

• Creatively explore the political organizational creativity opened by posthumanist and new materialist perspectives.

This sub-theme welcomes diverse theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches, including critical management studies, political theory, sociology of art, design studies, and research creation.

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• Braidotti, R. (2018). A theoretical framework for the critical posthumanities. Theory, Culture & Society, 36(6), 31–61. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276418771486
• Baudrillard, J. (1981). Simulacres et simulation. Éditions Galilée.
• Baudrillard, J. (2020). America. Verso Books. (Original work published 1986)
• Boltanski, L., & Chiapello, E. (2018). The new spirit of capitalism. Verso Books.
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• Bureau, S. (2019). Art thinking: A method for creating the improbable with certainty. Entreprendre & Innover, 42–43(3), 88–103. https://doi.org/10.3917/entin.042.0088
• Bureau, S. P., & Komporozos-Athanasiou, A. (2017). Learning subversion in the business school: An ‘improbable’ encounter. Management Learning, 48(1), 39–56. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350507616661262
• Bureau, S., & Zander, I. (2014). Entrepreneurship as an art of subversion. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 30(1), 124–133. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scaman.2013.12.002
• Champenois, C., Drakopoulou Dodd, S., Hjorth, D., & Jack, S. (2025). The other organization: Heterotopia, management, and entrepreneurship. Journal of Management Inquiry, 34(1), 41–56. https://doi.org/10.1177/10564926241281080
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• Courpasson, D., & Vallas, S. (Eds.). (2016). The SAGE handbook of resistance. SAGE.
• Debord, G. (2021). The society of the spectacle. Unredacted Word. (Original work published 1967)
• De Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life (S. Rendall, Trans.). University of California Press.
• De Monthoux, P. G. (2022). Curating capitalism: How art impacts business, management, and economy. MIT Press.
• Dey, P., & Mason, C. (2018). Overcoming constraints of collective imagination: An inquiry into activist entrepreneuring, disruptive truth-telling and the creation of ‘possible worlds’. Journal of Business Venturing, 33(1), 84–99. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusvent.2017.11.002
• du Gay, P. (2004). Against ‘Enterprise’ (but not against ‘enterprise’, for that would make no sense). Organization, 11(1), 37–57. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508404039777
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• Gould, E., Bivens, J., & Kandra, J. (2025, September 25). CEO pay increased in 2024 and is now 281 times that of the typical worker: New EPI landing page has all the details. Economic Policy Institute. https://www.epi.org/blog/ceo-pay-increased-in-2024-and-is-now-281-times-that-of-the-typical-worker-new-epi-landing-page-has-all-the-details/
• Gartner, W. B. (1988). “Who is an entrepreneur?” is the wrong question. American Journal of Small Business, 12(4), 11–32. https://doi.org/10.1177/104225878801200401
• Farias, C., Fernandez, P., Hjorth, D., & Holt, R. (Eds.). (2020). Organizational entrepreneurship, politics and the political (1st ed.). Routledge.
• Flamand, G., Perret, V., & Picq, T. (2021). Working with the potential of arts-based learning: Making sense and leaving ‘business as usual’ behind in an art seminar. Management Learning, 53(2), 190–211. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350507621990256
• Hjorth, D. (2016). Resisting the new: On cooptation and the organizational conditions for entrepreneurship. In D. Courpasson & S. Vallas (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of resistance (pp. 298–316). SAGE.
• Hjorth, D., & Holt, R. (2022). Entrepreneurship and the creation of organization. Routledge.
• Hjorth, D., & Steyaert, C. (Eds.). (2010). The politics and aesthetics of entrepreneurship: A fourth movement in entrepreneurship book. Edward Elgar Publishing.
• Holm, D. V., & Beyes, T. (2022). How art becomes organization: Reimagining aesthetics, sites and politics of entrepreneurship. Organization Studies, 43(2), 227–245. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840621998571
• Laasch, O. (2024). Radicalizing managers’ climate education: Getting beyond the bull**** fairy tale of eternal economic growth. Journal of Management Education, 48(1), 110–140. https://doi.org/10.1177/10525629231210524
• Rancière, J. (2004). The politics of aesthetics: The distribution of the sensible (G. Rockhill, Trans.; S. Žižek, Afterword). Continuum.
• Richardson, L. (2020). Digital and Platform Economies, Editor(s): Audrey Kobayashi, International Encyclopedia of Human Geography (Second Edition), Elsevier, Pages 317-321.
• Shane, S., & Venkataraman, S. (2000). The promise of entrepreneurship as a field of research. The Academy of Management Review, 25(1), 217–226. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2000.2791611
• Sigurdarson, H. T., Candi, M., & Dimov, D. (2025). The great pretending: Artistic logic for entrepreneurial action. International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research, 31(5), 1216–1233. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJEBR-05-2024-0464
• Steyaert, C., & Hjorth, D. (Eds.). (2008). Entrepreneurship as social change: A third new movements in entrepreneurship book (Vol. 3). Edward Elgar Publishing.
• Thompson, N. A., Verduijn, K., & Gartner, W. B. (2020). Entrepreneurship-as-practice: Grounding contemporary theories of practice into entrepreneurship studies. Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, 32(3–4), 247–256. https://doi.org/10.1080/08985626.2019.1641978
• Verduijn, K., Berglund, K., Ozasir-Kacar, S., & Olsson, A. (Eds.). (2026). Research handbook of critical entrepreneurship studies. Edward Elgar Publishing.
• Whitaker, A. (2016). Art thinking: How to carve out creative space in a world of schedules, budgets, and bosses. Harper Business.