Practicing ‘intellectus’ in rural entrepreneurship

In this seminar I will present research in progress from a research project conducted in the research collective EMBLA where we have studied women’s rural entrepreneurship funded by Kampradstiftelsen, use recent philosophical investigations as a vehicle to analyse stories from entrepreneurial women in rural areas. What we found striking was how the women describe a variety of social activities they are engaged in to develop their companies, products and services, but also the local community, and society. These engagements are often described in passing, and not directly connected to the company according to conventional goal-oriented logic. Rather, they are seen as taken for granted– they are just done, and someone needs to do them. They concern care for others – for the children in the community, the elderly, the infrastructure, the sustainability of the industry etc.

They are neither described as a sacrifice, nor as benevolence, as is so often emphasized in social entrepreneurship stories. Rather, these engagements signal something else. What we argue is that they illustrate a reflective practice of entrepreneurship, normally suppressed by an economic logic and described as play, passion and creativity in the sociologically inspired entrepreneurship literature. These practices we analyse through the lens of philosopher Jonna Bornemark’s concepts of ratio and intellectus.

Karin Berglund is a professor of Business, specializing in entrepreneurship, at Stockholm Business School, Stockholm University. She takes a particular interest in the expansion of conventional entrepreneurship into new contexts and in the emergence of alternative forms of entrepreneurship and innovation. Her overarching research interest lies in studying entrepreneurship and innovation from a sociological perspective, as part of an enterprise culture, and in contributing to critical management, organization, gender and entrepreneurship studies. In her view, scholarly efforts are needed to help us understand how to give innovation and entrepreneurship new meanings and facilitate all that it has been associated with.