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Entrepreneurial activities are fundamentally future-oriented: actors face future deadlines, make predictions about prospective business opportunities, and may need to accelerate their activities to align expectations for projected outcomes. Yet surprisingly, the future is still often treated as a mere context variable in entrepreneurship research, rather than as actively produced through situated daily activities. This limits our understanding of how entrepreneurial actors engage with tensions that arise when multiple futures coexist, and why coordinating them in their daily work is often experienced as difficult yet consequential. This paper advances a future-making lens on entrepreneurial practices by conceptualizing entrepreneuring as the ongoing enactment of multiple futures in tension through daily practices. I argue that such tensions arise from the simultaneous enactment of incompatible categories of future-making practices. Building on a practice perspective, I develop a conceptual framework that distinguishes three temporal categories of future-making in entrepreneurship and theorizes the temporal coordination practices through which entrepreneurial actors manage emerging tensions. By reconceptualizing entrepreneurship as an effortful accomplishment of the future through practices, the paper opens new avenues for entrepreneurship-as-practice research to study how entrepreneurship is enacted through a nexus of daily practices that make the future.

This article develops an evolutionary model that synthesizes emergent and deliberate innovation processes to explain how organizational adaptability is constituted. Existing research on “emergent” innovation processes tends to view these as diametrically opposed to “deliberate” action, applying each attribute with little nuance and relying on an under-complex understanding of the interplay between evolutionary mechanisms. We translate insights from Niklas Luhmann’s concept of adaptation processes and sociocultural theory of evolution into the organizational innovation management context to address these limitations. The resulting model systematically integrates distinct means–ends and end–means logics and identifies an intermediate “third” space where emergent dynamics prevail. Our model demonstrates how and why deliberate and emergent innovation processes are interdependent rather than mutually exclusive, jointly contributing to an organization’s ability to both adapt to and shape its environment. After unfolding the subtle interplay between deliberate and emergent innovation processes from three coherent perspectives, we derive three related propositions. These insights, we argue, advance the theoretical discussion and practical understanding of innovation management in increasingly complex and uncertain environments, thereby providing a foundation for future research on emergent innovation processes and adaptability.

Abstract

While the future is unknowable, this intriguing temporal category has become a predominant issue in modern discourse. However, less is known about how actors navigate tensions and contradictions that arise when engaging with the future in strategy-making. This gap is problematic, as unresolved tensions may limit social actors’ ability to generate novel insights and fully embrace the future’s uncertainty. This paper presents a dialectical framework that explains inherent future-related tensions and contradictions in the strategy-making process, showcases four perspectives of the future—incremental, expanding, punctuated, and speculative—and explores how social actors synthesize these tensions through the practice of imagining. In doing so, this paper contributes to scholarship on future-making and strategy-making, highlighting theoretical implications and outlining promising avenues for future research.

Abstract

Conducting ethnographies in the business and society (BAS) domain is often a lonely odyssey for early-career researchers (ECRs), whose emotional struggles are frequently concealed behind celebrated research outcomes. I highlight the emotional stress during their research and call for solutions beyond their personal responsibility. I offer five suggestions to combat negative emotions and help ECRs navigate these challenges through collaborative efforts and systemic changes.

Abstract

Corporate entrepreneurship is infused with power. Prior research has begun to shed light on the role of power in innovation contexts. Yet, we know much less about the day-to- day enactment of mundane power in corporate entrepreneurship, which, despite its partial subtlety, is no less consequential regarding decisions on pursuing or abandoning innovative ideas. This article extends the literature on corporate entrepreneurship and power by exploring the discursive practices through which managers and employees of a corporate accelerator disciplined venture founders in the pursuit of innovative ideas. Based on a Foucauldian discourse analysis of ethnographic data, we show how a clash of entrepreneurship discourses invokes the day-to-day performance of three discursive practices—observing, exercising, and punishing—through which the accelerator’s staff ensured that venture founders would adopt a dominant entrepreneurship discourse, with important implications for decisions on pursuing innovative ideas or not. These findings deepen our understanding of enacting mundane power in corporate entrepreneurship as well as the enablers and outcomes of such power enactment. We also outline the practical implications for emerging corporate innovation settings such as accelerators.

Abstract

This curated debate provides a discussion on impact and its relation to practice-based scholarship, i.e., scholarship grounded in the social theories of practice. Five experienced senior scholars reflect on conceptualizations of impact, how it can be created and disseminated, and on the role of practice-based scholarship in this process. The authors discuss the role of researchers as members of the academic system, their activities related to generating, developing, and challenging new theory, and their reflexive relation to the research context when explaining their research to stakeholders to create knowledge and thus, for impacting practice. To suggest ways of practicing impact, their contributions also conceptualize impactful theory and reflect on the relationship between the production and usage of knowledge. These insights are an important contribution to the debate on scholarly impact and provide critical guidance for impactful scholarly work beyond conventional concepts.

Abstract

“Acceleration”, i.e., the performance of activities in ever-shorter periods of time, is a distinctive feature of contemporary organizations and societies that is reflected in, and driven by startups’ attempts to scale up their businesses in ever-faster ways. Although prior research has highlighted that temporary organizing is a key way to accelerate the startup process, we know little about how actors do so. Based on a one-year ethnographic study at a startup accelerator, we explore how actors enact temporary organizing to attempt to accelerate the startup process. Our analysis shows that this process involves a plurality of partly conflicting temporal structures. As our study shows, such conflicts invoke tensions that actors live out in their daily activities. We identify three temporal practices—sequencing, freezing, and merging—through which actors engaged in temporary organizing enact acceleration in the startup process by reconciling these temporal structures. Our study has implications for understanding time in the expanding literature on temporary organizing and acceleration.