Abstract
This book affixes entrepreneurship studies to workplace studies by advancing the analyses of authentic workplace conversations of innovative entrepreneurial teams. At the heart of the book lies the notion that ‘what people actually do in practice can be very different from what they think they do’. Campbell convincingly articulates that careful attention to actual ‘backstage’ interaction – rather than more common retrospective interviews, surveys or ‘frontstage’ performances – enables entrepreneurship researchers to unravel the link between observable exchanges and the organizing of a new venture. Although not a definitive source on the subject matter, this makes for fascinating reading and provides a solid foundation for the analysis of real-time conversation in entrepreneurship scholarship.
Part I details the conceptual and methodological foundations for the remainder of the book. Citing the recent practice ‘turn’ in organization, leadership, strategy and entrepreneurship studies (Golsorkhi, Rouleau, Seidl, & Vaara, 2010; Nicolini, 2012; Raelin, 2016; Thompson, Verduyn, & Gartner, 2019), Campbell contends that entrepreneurial phenomena are essentially interactional matters. While scholars acquainted with ethnomethodology will recognize her argument in other works (Rawls, 2008), its application to entrepreneurship studies breaks new ground for the field. Part I concludes with a chapter that sketches the theoretical importance of material objects (like a whiteboard), technologies (like scheduling software) and physical settings (like seating and lighting arrangements), which are regularly found in accelerators and incubators, in encouraging and constraining collaboration. While certainly interesting, the remainder of the book focuses exclusively on conversation. This leaves the reader wondering why or how to include objects, technologies and settings in theorizing observable practice. Conversation itself is a particular form of embodied activity, and a connection to more recent video-based ethnomethodological studies could have pushed the conversation even further (see Heath, Hindmarsh, & Luff, 2010).
In Part II of the book, Campbell empirically considers the verbal means by which innovative entrepreneurial work is accomplished. Although only suggestive in her conclusions, Campbell puts conversation analysis to work to ‘provide a window’ into the ‘machinery’ of playfulness, reflection and empathy. This is particularly enlightening, as these phenomena are all too often black-boxed as products of individual introspection. Part III of the book critically questions conventional knowledge that successful teams ‘move fast and break things’ and ask ‘disruptive questions’. In these two chapters respectively, Campbell analyses excerpts of actual conversations among (later successful) founders of two innovative ventures. She argues for a more nuanced understanding, namely: entrepreneurial teams are willing and able to make swift decisions when the stakes are low – but just as willing and able to slow the pace of decision making when the decisions are expected to matter. Entrepreneurial teams also invite opinions and welcome suggestions more frequently, and seek confirmation less frequently, than in general conversation. All in all, Campbell undoubtedly establishes the value in analysing real conversations by demonstrating that innovative entrepreneurs do not practice what they preach.
Part IV begins with a chapter examining how successful and unsuccessful product innovation teams verbally create and access resilience and bricolage differently. Using a rather speculative coding scheme, and a ‘thin slice’ of team conversations, resultant quantitative frequencies suggest that the low-performance team tended to use fixed, absolute language. This contrasts with the high-performance team’s use of more flexible, conditional language. Campbell argues that this enabled the high-performance team to avoid premature cognitive commitments and allowed them to embrace fresh, multiple perspectives. While this admittedly explorative chapter is methodologically questionable, it does pique interest into possible means of investigating real-time conversations. In the subsequent chapter, Campbell examines conversations from unedited film footage of an innovation team from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to speak to bricolage literature. And yet, a more natural reference would be to Weick’s (1993, 2005) studies of sensemaking of failure because: the team struggles to describe a failure that they’ve just witnessed, their naming of the potential reasons for the unexpected failure, and their attempts to define ways to test their assumptions of the most likely cause. This captivating chapter is limited in its framing, yet still provides fresh evidence that fostering interpretation, flexibility and reflection in action may help teams successfully navigate transformational moments.
One of the most intriguing portions of the book is Part V. In the first chapter, Campbell levels a critique on the vast and dominant entrepreneurial cognition literature (McMullen & Shepherd, 2006) in that it stops short of analysing uncertainty as a socially enacted feature of entrepreneurial work. Campbell convincingly argues that a practice-theory informed study can demonstrate the situated means by which co-founders grapple with the lack of knowledge in the moment-to-moment organization of their interactions. Once again using short excerpts, the author provides rare examples of this ‘epistemic interplay’ from actual conversations between entrepreneurial teammates. The second chapter switches tack to rethink entrepreneurship education in light of the ‘turn’ toward practice theory. Campbell rightly argues that the value of contemporary entrepreneurship education is limited as educators rarely give overt attention to the verbal means by which people talk their ventures into being. Alternatively, the author introduces the ‘conversation analytic role-play method’ (CARM) in which learners engage with the actual language of practice and evidence-based training materials relevant to the entrepreneurial workplace. The potential of this method is exciting and analogous to evidence-based methods in aviation training – researchers observe and surface the conversational moves between the cockpit crew and the tower personnel that enable greater safety, then educators incorporate these findings into rigorous aviation training.
Overall, Campbell’s book opens more doors than it closes, but in doing so, she etches out a convincing assertion that a more comprehensive and systematic understanding of the conversational competencies of innovative entrepreneurs is needed. Conversation analysis can certainly be a rich source insight for entrepreneurship studies, although scholars should recognize its limitations. As a whole the book underpins how the emergent ‘entrepreneurship-as-practice’ research community 1 is poised to undertake important arcs of inquiry that can reveal not only what western innovative entrepreneurs say, but what entrepreneurs really do in understudied cultures and communities around the world.