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Introduction
Europe has long been a fertile ground for critical perspectives on entrepreneurship, fostering scholarship that goes beyond the narrow confines of economic growth and individual success (Tedmanson et al., 2012; Verduijn et al., 2026). Rather than treating entrepreneurship as ideologically neutral, philosophically ungrounded, or universally beneficial, critical studies have examined its socio-economic, cultural, aesthetic and political dimensions (Ogbor, 2000; Hjorth & Steyaert, 2009; Farias et al., 2019; Lubinski & Tucker, 2025). Critical entrepreneurship research does not follow a single, unified approach; rather, it encompasses diverse perspectives and methodologies (Steyaert & Hjorth, 2003; Spicer, 2012; Verduijn et al., 2014; Fletcher & Seldon, 2016; Dey et al., 2023). This tradition values contextual understanding (Welter, 2011), embraces interdisciplinarity (Steyaert & Hjorth, 2003), and challenges dominant narratives that shape entrepreneurial discourse.
While entrepreneurship is often portrayed as equally accessible to all, research demonstrates how initiatives can even exacerbate marginalization in a broader, intersectional sense - through gender, culture, ethnicity, and class - such as reinforcing the marginalization of women and femininities (Ahl, 2006; Ozkazanc-Pan and Clark Muntean, 2021), and how gendered and culturally stereotypical conceptions restrict opportunities for migrant women, ethnic minorities, and non-hegemonic men to gain legitimacy and access resources (Essers et al., 2017; Alkhaled & Sasaki, 2021; Ozkazanc-Pan, 2022; Essers et al., 2023).Beyond identifying problems, scholars have also explored constructive pathways to transform entrepreneurship to be more inclusive, for example, through rethinking and revitalizing entrepreneurship education (Berglund & Verduijn, 2018; Hytti, 2018) and highlighting actions for entrepreneur support organizations to support gender equity (Ozkazanc-Pan and Clark Muntean, 2018).
It should also be acknowledged that entrepreneurship has been approached as deeply entangled with neoliberal processes and practices through which the entrepreneurial self is framed as a mode of self-work (Berglund, 2013; Pongratz & Voß, 2003). While entrepreneurship is often seen as empowering and joyful, this orientation shifts responsibility onto individuals, calling for critical reflection on its political dimensions, human limits, and the collective and relational conditions of entrepreneurial endeavours (e.g. Alkhaled and Berglund, 2018; Lewis, Rumens & Simpson, 2022). Against this backdrop, empirical research has increasingly turned to the lived consequences of entrepreneurial subjectivation, examining how these ideals materialise in entrepreneurs’ everyday experiences and well-being. No wonder, then, that studies have revealed how entrepreneurial activity may contribute to stress, burnout, stigmatisation and other health-related challenges (Delladio & Caputo, 2025), which further exacerbate exclusion. At the same time, however, critical research suggests that entrepreneurial discourses do not govern subjects in a totalising manner, but may also open up spaces for creativity, ambivalence, mutual relations and alternative forms of agency (Dey & Teasdale, 2016; Christiaens, 2020; Wettermark & Berglund, 2022).
Entrepreneurship research has not simply multiplied subfields but has progressively problematised the very coherence of entrepreneurship as a singular concept. The emergence of social (e.g. Mair & Martí, 2006), institutional (e.g. Thornton, Ocasio & Lounsbury, 2012), community (Johannisson & Nilsson, 1989; Buratti, Sillig & Albanese, 2022), team (Stewart, 1989), entrepreneurial leadership (Hensellek et al., 2023), and corporate entrepreneurship (Burgelman, 1983) reflects sustained attempts to situate entrepreneurial phenomena within specific social, political, and organisational contexts. Each of these perspectives carries its own assumptions, norms, and exclusions, shaping what becomes visible, valued, or marginalised as entrepreneurial. Taken together, these examples illustrate how the meaning of entrepreneurship is continuously redefined rather than stabilised. The exhaustion of such a list is, of course, neither possible nor needed; the point being to remind us of the ongoing work of knowledge to both describe phenomena that have been silenced and to invent new ways of understanding and practicing entrepreneurship. We need a continued, research-based, critical knowledge-creation process for entrepreneurship to be understood, taught, and practiced across diverse organizational and societal contexts.
The above-mentioned genealogy of entrepreneurship has also brought us new and important insights due to the development of approaches, methods (Higgins et al, 2015), and interdisciplinary framings of the phenomena we as entrepreneurship scholars have come to study (Ripsas, 1998; Acs & Audretsch, 2010; Gartner, 2017). We have seen constructionist, poststructuralist, feminist, processual, posthumanist, and new materialist perspectives being used in the study, analysis, and knowledge-creation process as part of entrepreneurship research. In the European research tradition, these are all critical approaches, reflecting on how the concepts, methods, and interdisciplinary influences are part of what ends up in focus, directs the analysis and gets offered as new knowledge (Verduijn et al., 2026). Such reflexive uses of knowledge are fundamental to research and need to be continuously challenged, questioned, and critiqued in order to remain renewed and imaginatively practiced.
Acknowledging the longstanding presence of critique in the field, we position this special issue as an invitation to dialogue across academic generations. Such an exchange can help us continue to question today’s entrepreneurial cultures, not as unprecedented, but as reappearances of older debates in new guises. This is the reflexive, cross-generational engagement we invite contributions to this special issue to pursue. Within this context, European scholarship, in particular, has played an important role in cultivating spaces of openness, creativity, and methodological experimentation that have been vital to the development of critical approaches in entrepreneurship research. Building on this tradition, we see a responsibility not to delimit the conversation, but to invite scholars across geographies and generations to partake in, extend, and challenge these critical conversations.
This special issue, which will be introduced at RENT in Antwerp in 2026 to mark the conference’s 40th anniversary, aims to celebrate and build upon this legacy by inviting contributions that critically examine and reimagine entrepreneurship from diverse theoretical, methodological, and empirical perspectives, advancing both theory and practice.
List of Topic Areas
We welcome conceptual, empirical, and methodological papers that engage with critical perspectives on entrepreneurship, including but not limited to:
- Alternative, inclusive, forms of organizing and entrepreneurial value creation, such as cooperatives, social enterprises, and grassroots initiatives;
- Critical analyses of entrepreneurial narratives and discourses, deconstructing cultural myths around success and failure;
- Critical entrepreneurship education, critical perspectives of entrepreneurial pedagogy and transformation of entrepreneurship education;
- Critical inquiry on entrepreneurial well-being, burnout, stress, and health;
- Critical perspectives on migrant entrepreneurship and transnational networks;
- Entrepreneurship and ethics, moral dilemmas, and the commodification of social good, social entrepreneurship;
- Entrepreneurship and neoliberalism, neoliberal ideologies, power, inequality, and exclusion in entrepreneurship;
- Entrepreneurship and policy critique, the role of policies in constructing entrepreneurial subjects and shaping inequalities;
- Entrepreneurship and societal challenges: climate change, poverty, social justice;
- Gendered and racialized entrepreneurship, such as intersectional analyses of identities;
- Historical and institutional analyses of entrepreneurship in Europe and beyond;
- Precarity, gig work, platform economies, and entrepreneurialism;
- Critical interrogation of new technologies, such as Gen AI and AI, and their role in entrepreneurialism and (in)equalities;
- The rise of technofascism at the intersection of new technologies, populism, and start-ups;
- Spatial inequalities and the politics of place in entrepreneurial ecosystems.
Submission Information
Submissions of full manuscripts are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Registration and access are available here:
Author guidelines must be strictly followed. Please see:
Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to “Please select the issue you are submitting to”.
Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.
Abstract Submissions
Abstract submissions must be emailed to Guest Editor Karin Berglund at [email protected] by 15th January 2027.
Key Dates
Closing date for abstract submissions: 15th January 2027
(Virtual) Paper development workshop: Spring/Summer 2027
Opening date for manuscript submissions: 1 November 2027
Closing date for manuscript submissions: 30 November 2027
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