This paper identifies several ways in which entrepreneurship as practice research has left aside questions of venture creation and argues that venture creation is a matter of organizational constitution and organizational ontology. Drawing on recent debates in EAP, as well as contributions to organizational ontology, I argue that the theoretical perspective known as the communicative constitution of organization (CCO) is particularly useful to explore questions of venture creation. I highlight the importance of exploring how organizations, including ventures, exist, especially against the background of the new mobilities and modalities that challenges separations between work and life, and suggest that that Entrepreneurship as Practice research has thus far largely neglected social practices of everyday life as constitutive of organizational emergence.

Purpose For more than 20 years, research on the communicative constitution of organizations (CCO) has drawn on interactional data to offer novel explanations of how organizational phenomena emerge, change, and stabilize in and through communication. Accordingly, the idea of “never leaving the t erra firma of interaction” has become a tenet of CCO research, guiding scholars’ theorizing, data collection, and analysis. The aim of this paper is to reflect on and enrich this tenet. Design/methodology/approach First, this paper traces the history of the concept of the terra firma of interaction and its usage until now. Second, drawing on ethnographic writings on complicit reflexivity and on the two first authors’ doctoral research experiences, this paper identifies current limitations of the terra firma notion. Findings Reflecting on these experiences, the idea of composing with the terra fluida (fluid ground) of interaction is proposed as an enrichment of the terra firma of interaction concept because it advances present discussions about CCO researchers’ positionality and reflexivity while opening up new paths for understanding how organizational phenomena unfold as relational fields in processes of communication. Originality/value This paper questions and reevaluates the role of the researcher in CCO scholarship and, in doing so, offers new insights into the value of acknowledging researchers’ entanglement and complicity with the fluid fields of interaction they aim to understand.

Coworking is a rapidly growing worldwide phenomenon. While the coworking movement emphasises equality and emancipation, there is little known about the extent to which coworking spaces as new forms of organising live up to this ideal. This study examines inequality in coworking spaces in the Netherlands, employing Acker's framework of inequality regimes. The findings highlight coworking-specific components of inequality regimes, in particular stereotyped assumptions regarding 'ideal members' that establish the bases of inequality, practices that produce inequality (e.g. through the commodification of community) and practices that perpetuate inequality (e.g. the denial of inequality). The study provides an update of Acker's framework in the context of coworking and speaks, more broadly, to the growing body of literature on (in)equality in emerging organisational contexts.

Abstract This chapter introduces a specific phenomenological approach in a suggestion to sense organizing as a productive encounter between a place and its potential futures. In particular, it draws on the work of the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart to propose a ‘sensing’ approach to tune in to the role of place in the emergence of an alternative urban community of entrepreneurs and activists. While the field of management and organization studies (MOS) has been experiencing a very vibrant spatial turn, so far scholarship in this area has been focusing mostly on the ‘here and now’ of spaces and places. This has a lot to do with the specific epistemological commitments of MOS, including a realist focus in the field of organizational ethnography. This chapter suggests that a focus on what can be seen only goes so far, and that research on new or emergent organizations needs tools in order to sense the not-yet-there, and that this requires an affective attention that moves beyond the visual. The case presented, based on a field visit to an alternative urban community in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, offers insights into how such early-stage organizing can be seen sensed through an attention to things in a certain place, and how they are named and cared for.

This paper highlights the role of materiality in legitimising art organising as occurs at festivals and performances. Through ethnographic fieldwork pertaining to art events and projects, we documented how legitimacy is accomplished through the very performance of art. We observed that artistic practices materialise the very norms by which they are assessed and demarcate a normative space of their own. Our paper contributes to the research on legitimacy by showing that it takes place through connection with societal norms and also through a disconnection that fosters such a distinct space. Legitimation thus corresponds to configuring the specific situation where the actions under scrutiny are legitimate; it is a continuous process that is accomplished not for but with an audience.

Organization and management are the perpetual, and perpetually fraught and resisted, ordering of sense experience. However, banning the senses into the outside of thought, and of organizational analysis, was – and to a large degree still is – the default and mostly implicit and unquestioned mode of thinking and studying organization and management. Introducing the special issue on ‘The Senses in Management Research and Education’, this essay historicizes and contextualizes the neglect of the senses, dwells upon possible reasons for keeping the sensory at bay and discusses recent attempts to remedy this situation. The contributions to the special issue are introduced into this context. In conclusion, we speculate on what might happen next.

Based on thirty interviews conducted in ten coworking spaces in Amsterdam and Paris, we ask whether and how members of coworking spaces engage in identity play, and what mechanisms related to space seem to enable such identity play. We identify four types of spatial mechanisms members and hosts of coworking spaces claim to create or engage in, and show how these relate to experimentation with professional identity. In so doing, we highlight possible material and spatial aspects of identity play. This paper contributes to the literature on identity play by drawing attention to the physicality and constitutive nature of the holding spaces necessary for identity play, and to research on coworking spaces by drawing attention to their possible identity effects.

This article argues that while creative spaces are believed to instigate creative production, their strongest value is in producing new possibilities for self-organizing. By zooming in on short snapshots of resistance against gentrification in creative spaces in Amsterdam, I investigate whether small-scale and grass-roots forms of resistance and self-organizing between independent workers in the creative industries can be understood as examples of the autonomist notions of 'the common' and 'the multitude'. By placing observations of creative workers' self-organizing practices alongside autonomist theory, I suggest that autonomist thought is a promising philosophy for a politicized view of creative production, because it celebrates multiplicity and uniqueness. This is a timely topic in a society with growing numbers of freelancers and increasing flexibilization of labour. This article contributes to research on self-organizing among creative workers and to the literature on work conditions in the creative industries.

Work and organization increasingly happen in transit. People meet in coffee shops and write emails from their phones while waiting for buses or sitting outdoors on benches. Business meetings are held in airports and projects are run from laptops during travel. We take the street as a place where organizing in transit accumulates. While the organization studies field has been catching up with various related phenomena, including co-working, digital nomadism, and mobile and online communities, we argue that it has overlooked what has historically been the most important site for organizational activity outside of organizations. The street has been both location and inspiration for organizing, whether political, social or governmental. It is a space of both planning and spontaneity, of silent co-existence and explicit conflict, and therefore offers abundant empirical and methodological opportunities. It is surprising that the street and the experiences it brings with it have remained largely outside the scope of organization studies. We suggest that organization scholars take to the street, and offer recommendations as to how to do so. Specifically, we explore the tensions that become apparent when organizing happens in and through the street.

This symposium embraces the premise that organizing and spaces are intrinsically interconnected and that to adequately study management and organization phenomena, researchers must take organizational spaces into consideration. Organizational spaces are the various physical and virtual locales that operate as sites for organizational actions and interactions and supply an infrastructure for organizing while simultaneously being influenced by it. In recent years, this premise has gained traction because relatively new organizational arrangements (e.g. telework, globally disperse teams, and multi-location work) make the tethering of space salient to organizing. As a result, organizational practices (e.g. coordinating collaboration, leading followers, managing employees, and making strategic decisions) are more complex when intertwined with shifting spaces. To address these challenges, we set forth a constitutive approach to the study of organizational space and organizing as a process. The purpose of this symposium is to explicate this approach as well as to demonstrate how researchers can use it empirically across a range of management themes. Spacing and Gendering The Mutual Constitution of Organizational Space and Gender in an Accelerator Presenter: Saija Katila; Dr.Sc. (Econ. & Bus. Adm.) Senior Lecturer Presenter: Ari Kuismin; Aalto U. School of Business “Making and Using History” in a (Twice) Entrepreneurial Space Presenter: Thomas Davis; U. of Liverpool Management School Presenter: Yihan Liu; U. of Liverpool Management School Presenter: Kathleen Ann Stephenson; U. of Liverpool Management School When Space Speaks for Itself: A Constitutive Approach to Justifying Real Estate Expenditures Presenter: Elizabeth Wilhoit-Larson; Auburn U. Spaces as Machines of Capture: Organizing (in) Art Spaces Presenter: Boukje Cnossen; Leuphana U. Lüneburg Presenter: Nicolas Bencherki; U. du Québec, TÉLUQ

We aim to shed light on the deep mechanisms that keep individual entrepreneurs in the creative and cultural industries motivated in this insecure and fast-paced environment. We collect data through a survey of entrepreneurs working in the Dutch creative and cultural industries (CCI) and examine what motivates these professionals to work in an environment characterized by tough competition. Specifically, we analyse our respondents' self-perceived (creative and entrepreneurial) competences and needs (for autonomy and relatedness) in relation to their motivation to execute creative work. We suggest a reading of our results through the lens of self-determination theory. Our results show that the need for competence is a consistent predictor of an individual's motivation to work in the CCI. Furthermore, we find that although intrinsic motivation is very high among entrepreneurs working in the creative and cultural industries, those who have a relatively high esteem of their creative capabilities do expect external rewards as well. Our study suggests the existence of a trade-off between autonomy and commercial viability rather than one between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations.

The goal of this study is to investigate discourses of diversity and inclusion in the setting of coworking spaces. Coworking is rapidly becoming a well-established solution for freelancers, small companies, and remote workers to share office space. Managers of coworking spaces often encourage their members to socialize and exchange knowledge through events and routines, and promote the coworking space through marketing and branding, meaning these spaces acquire elements of organizations. Many things about these quickly spreading new organizational environments remain unknown, among which how they strive for inclusion. In order to address this issue, we conducted research in four Dutch coworking spaces, resulting in a four-dimensional framework. Based on these dimensions, we show that although coworking managers and coworkers use discourses of openness and professional diversity, and seem aware of the business benefits of diverse members, stereotypes and practices of exclusion prevail to the extent that existing societal inequalities are reproduced and reinforced.