De-Linking Entrepreneurship from Profit-Motivated Capitalism: Some Lessons from an English Locality

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the entrepreneurship literature that has sought to deconstruct the normative view of the entrepreneur as a heroic icon of profit-motivated capitalism by developing a typology of the multifarious lived practices of entrepreneurship ranging from wholly social to wholly profit-motivated forms of entrepreneurship cross-cut by wholly informal to wholly formal forms of entrepreneurial endeavour. This is then applied by reporting evidence from a small-scale survey of the multiple forms of entrepreneurship in the English locality of Bassetlaw. The finding is that just 12% of the entrepreneurs surveyed in this locality are engaged purely in profit-driven entrepreneurship in the legitimate economy. The outcome is a call to more widely apply this typology that depicts the multiple forms of entrepreneurship in order to open up entrepreneurship to re-signification as demonstrative of the possibility of futures beyond legitimate profit-driven capitalism.

Keywords: entrepreneurship, enterprise culture, social entrepreneurship, informal economy, shadow economy, underground sector, capitalism, England

JEL Classification: H26, J46, J48, K34, K42, O17, P2, P3