Deflated in shame and puffed up in pride: How affective practices matter for entrepreneuring

Abstract

At the heart of the processual term ‘entrepreneuring’, lies something inherently optimistic: a belief that a better world could be reached beyond the actual. Embracing this perspective, we move away from a focus on entrepreneurial mastery and seek conditions for entrepreneuring understood as social change, foregrounding its affective dimension. We do so by researching and writing differently; in adopting (and adapting) the ethnography of practices (praxiography), we centre the body as the cause, subject, and instrument of the stories we tell. By reading affect with (posthumanist) practice theory, we expand the notion of affective practices to inquire how shame and pride matter for entrepreneuring within small family businesses. Employing a visceral, sensory, and embodied style of crafting our text, we invite readers to sense as well as interpret. The paper contributes to the literature in two ways: first, it proposes a novel methodological approach for studying and writing about affective practices; second, it builds an understanding of how affective practices disrupt the already organised and make room for better futures yet to come.