Framing Organizational Emergence : Discourse, Identity and Relationship

The different discourses that pervade the stories of founders and owner-managers when talking about organizational emergence are explored, along with the ways in which these understandings, meanings, and concepts are socially constructed to envision, enact, and realize organizational emergence. First, the developments in entrepreneurship research are reviewed in terms of five movements.By paying particular attention to ideas of enactment and to the social constructive processes through which organizational emergence occurs, the fourth movement paved the way for social constructionist ideas (the fifth movement) to influence entrepreneurship research. Concerned with the meanings generated by people as they interact and engage in descriptions and explanations in language, researchers who study entrepreneurship from the social constructionist perspective do not try to identify the fundamentally "real" aspects of entrepreneurship; instead, they investigate the processes though which organizational emergence is socially constructed through language.Interviews were conducted in 1999-2000 with the founders and owner-managers of four small and medium-sized, United Kingdom-based enterprises (SMEs). The managers referred to a number of discourses that frame the emergence of their business in order to make sense of the past and to envision future scenarios for the business.The interviews include few references to "entrepreneurship." Instead, organizational emergence is couched in discourses that operate on notions of growth, innovation, networks, customers, luck, and trust.Business creation, in other words, is a means by which entrepreneurs nurture their relationships, achieve self-expression, and realize their ambitions.Notions of entrepreneurship provide framing concepts and categories through which meanings of entrepreneurship are constructed. (SAA)