"Let them not make me a stone”- Repositioning Entrepreneurship
Sarah Dodd's thought-provoking seminar on repositioning entrepreneurship away from the 1%
[Guest post by my Middlesex colleague Dr Andrea Werner. In this post Andrea reports on a seminar she organized in the MLO seminar series.]
On 27 January 2021, the Management, Leadership and Organisations Department at Middlesex University Business School hosted a thought-provoking seminar by Sarah Drakopoulou Dodd, Professor of Entrepreneurship, from the University of Strathclyde.
Sarah argued that the academic study and teaching of entrepreneurship has taken a wrong turn, as it only focuses on a very narrow range of elite high-growth, high-tech and high-finance entrepreneurs. Sarah set out the case for a repositioning of entrepreneurship, focused on purposes beyond growth and on principles that honour the biosphere and each other. She called for the championing of ‘everyday entrepreneurs’ and for an active embracing of the richness and diversity of entrepreneurship at the ‘places of the edges’.
In some fun interactive tasks, Sarah asked her audience what they thought entrepreneurship was for and how they would depict ‘entrepreneurs of the edges’. This led to vivid discussions and exchanges of views as to which people we should be studying and create role models out of, and how we should research and teach entrepreneurship. The seminar drew about 15 participants, from within Middlesex University and a range of other universities including the University of Strathclyde, Kingston University and the University of Porto, many of which said how much they enjoyed the event and that it will have an impact on their own work.
You can download Sarah's slides here. Sarah’s article on the subject has recently been published in the Journal of Small Business Management.
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Copyright © 2023 Andrea Werner. All rights reserved. Page last modified on Fri 5 May 2023 07:55
Dr Andrea Werner is Associate Professor at Middlesex University Business School specialising in Business Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility. Her research focuses primarily on ethics in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), on which she has published widely in leading business ethics journals. A specific research interest of hers is the Living Wage and its implementation in SMEs and other contexts. In 2016, she won a grant from the Barrow Cadbury Trust to lead pioneering research on the strategies and practices of Living Wage accredited SMEs in the UK, and her research has been used as an invaluable campaign tool by a range of NGOs both in the UK and abroad. Dr Werner also has an interest in sustainable fashion, which she has explored in an AHRC funded project investigating sustainable practices in small fashion design enterprises.
