Whatever the problem, entrepreneurship is the solution! Confronting the panacea myth of entrepreneurship with structural injustice

Keim, Jan; Müller, Susan; Dey, Pascal (2024). Whatever the problem, entrepreneurship is the solution! Confronting the panacea myth of entrepreneurship with structural injustice Journal of Business Venturing Insights, 21, e00440. Elsevier 10.1016/j.jbvi.2023.e00440

Preview

Text Keim, Mueller, Dey (2024)_Entrepreneurship and structural injustice_JBVI_published.pdf - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons: Attribution (CC-BY). Download (534kB) | Preview

A topic of growing interest in entrepreneurship research is how entrepreneurial ventures address grand challenges. This literature, we argue, tends to produce a panacea myth by suggesting that entrepreneurship is the universal remedy for existing social and environmental ills. Starting from the claim that the persuasive power or ‘stickiness’ of the panacea myth depends not only on what it explicitly says (in terms of ideas and beliefs) but also on what it leaves out, we suggest that the exclusion of explicitly political and holistic explanations of grand challenges such as Iris Marion Young's theory of structural injustice, which we use as an illustrative example, precipitates a ‘constitutive absence’ whose mythic function is to sanitize the image of entrepreneurship as the preferred solution to grand challenges. In an effort to denaturalize the panacea myth, we first identify three ‘figures of thought’ – coined ‘extrapolation fallacy,’ ‘political agnosticism,’ and ‘positive acculturation’ – that define the content of the panacea myth while simultaneously excluding theoretical concepts and frameworks, such as structural injustice, that conceptualize grand challenges as structural, multidetermined, and inherently political problems that are not necessarily amenable to stand-alone entrepreneurial approaches and solutions. Second, to loosen the grip of the panacea myth, we suggest rethinking entrepreneurship research in terms of who is involved, what methods are used, and how we talk about it. Taken together, these tactics create an opening in entrepreneurship research for a more complexity-sensitive and political understanding of grand challenges that cultivates a more humble and realistic depiction of entrepreneurship's problem-solving capacity.

Item Type:	Journal Article (Original Article)
Division/Institute:	Business School > Institute for Innovation and Strategic Entrepreneurship Business School > Institute for Innovation and Strategic Entrepreneurship > Strategic Entrepreneurship
Name:	Keim, Jan; Müller, Susan and Dey, Pascal0000-0003-2792-0061
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) H Social Sciences > HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform
ISSN:	2352-6734
Publisher:	Elsevier
Language:	English
Submitter:	Jan Keim
Date Deposited:	06 Dec 2023 10:08
Last Modified:	06 Dec 2023 10:08
Publisher DOI:	10.1016/j.jbvi.2023.e00440
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Entrepreneurship; Structural injustice; Grand challenges; Panacea myth; Analytical myopia
ARBOR DOI:	10.24451/arbor.20557
URI:	https://arbor.bfh.ch/id/eprint/20557