Book review: Disclosing entrepreneurship as practice. The enactive research

Disclosing Entrepreneurship as Practice. The Enactive Research provides a comprehensive insight into the methodology of enactive research. By strongly supporting the concept of entrepreneuring (Steyaert, 2007), Johannisson conceptualises ‘enactment’ and ‘enactive research’, and he introduces the concept of the entresearcher ‘to depict the composite role or identity of a researcher who also acts as an entrepreneur’ (p.5).

I began reading the book from ‘realist tales’ in chapter 4 to examine different examples of researching entrepreneurship through enactive research. My initial reading led to imagining enactive research as a spiral, which determined the sequence of my remaining reading. The entresearcher’s (author’s) storyline was moving away from the core (the ‘realist tales’), yet it kept revolving around them. In this imagined story line, which did not strictly follow the book’s flow, the entresearcher first describes his fieldwork and then reflected on the process from an entrepreneur’s perspective (chapter 4). He then presents his results and reflects on them from a researcher’s perspective (chapter 5), after which he describs methods of enactive research, reflects on them from a methodological level (chapter 3) and discusses the role of enactive methodology from a philosophy of science perspective (chapter 2). Chapter 6 suggests further ideas and options for applying the enactive research methodology. Here, I suggest following the spiral from the core to its ‘periphery’.

As mentioned above, in chapter 4, Johannisson describes his own enactments (Anamorphosis and SORIS Projects), compares them by focusing on different notable issues (circumstances, predicaments and experiments) and presents them from different angles (as realist, impressionist and confessional tales). The chapter is written in a personal and occasionally even emotional manner; it reflects Johannisson’s caring attitude towards and commitment to local community development, and it reveals the agency of an entresearcher in a highly institutionalised environment as unsettling for the author. Clearly, there is room for constraints, irregularities, mistakes and even failures in the enactment process. As suggested by Johannisson, ‘the main task of this act of reflection is to translate the tacit, i.e. embodied and intuitive, knowing produced by the practice of entrepreneuring into knowledge in a form that is compatible with explicit academic knowledge’ (p.156).

In chapter 5, Johannisson reflects on his own research experience and unfolds an idea of entrepreneuring as creative organising. He presents the main findings as ‘formative dispositions associated with entrepreneuring’ and suggests that we see institutions as competitors, indifference as an enemy, resistance as an energiser and entrepreneurship as a never-ending, never-sleeping improvisation. Finally, he presents the entrepreneurial career as a weaving practice (p.187) by highlighting the importance of both the existential and instrumental aspects of networking for entrepreneuring.

Unsurprisingly, the methodology of enactive research itself is presented in the book’s middle (chapter 3). Based on his own experience, Johannisson literally answers the question How to conduct enactive research. Through sequential enumerations, the chapter reveals basic questions, rationales, principles and phases of enactive research and criteria for quality control. He also introduces his understanding of (auto)ethnographic inquiry and its applicability in enactive research. This information makes the text practically valuable for people who are starting research entrepreneurship as a practice.

The most remote chapter (2) from the centre of my imaginary spiral is about the methodology of enactive research from the philosophy of science perspective. Observing a phenomenon from this perspective always feels like looking on the Earth from outer space. Almost 50 pages of the second chapter pave the way ‘from process philosophy to practice theory’. The chapter presents a piece of art of its own while also acting as an extension of the author’s earlier paper (Johannisson, 2011). The chapter’s roots address Greek mythology and Aristotelian philosophy by unfolding the concepts of metis, phronesis and kairos to explain the difference between scientific knowledge and practical knowledge and to relate it to entrepreneuring and enactive research.

Chapter 6 reads more like an open-ended discussion than a conclusion. Johannisson suggests that we consider being ethical, critical and/or constructive, practical and creative in enactive research. He simultaneously highlights that it is about ‘engaging hands-on in [the] construction of new realities’ (p. 197). The main site for enactment/enactive research is considered an entrepreneurial university due to its teaching, research and outreach. At the chapter’s end, Johannisson refers to a pyramid of enactive research (Johannisson, 2018), through which he briefly introduces the idea of art being embedded in enactive research as originality criterion.

For a novice researcher, this book was neither easy to read nor possible to finish. It contains many ideas and theoretical concepts, ranging from philosophical issues to practical advice on the application of particular methods of enactive research. It even raises existential questions regarding entresearchers. This is the type of book that one returns to again and again with a new level of awareness. While most methodology books are typically 500 pages long, this book contains only 240 pages. It feels as if Johannisson’s inner researcher liked to develop some ideas further, but his inner entrepreneur was calling for future enactments. However, Johannisson creates a holistic picture of enactive research and covers the main topics to let us reconsider whether to experiment and how to apply the methods in our own enactments and research.