Entrepreneurship Lost and Found

In light of the many attempts within the social/societal turn of entrepreneurship to disconnect entrepreneurship from economic rationality and embrace it as an act of social becoming, the purpose is to reconnect entrepreneurship to its primary function within the capitalist regime: to make money and accumulate capital. This function, it is argued, is lost in present day research on entrepreneurship, and the aim therefore is to present a framework in which both economic and social aspects are found crucial for understanding entrepreneurship.Design/methodology/approach: Following post-positivist research traditions the research is based on an auto-ethnographic case study of entrepreneurship in the field of music. In focus is the phenomenon of collecting records, and the cultural web of social and economic significances that unfolds by means of the authors confessional tales about engaging in record collecting is used as an interpretative lever to question the dichotomy between social and economic rationality and value within contemporary research on entrepreneurship.Findings: In contrast to becoming or being perspectives on entrepreneurship, our interpretations lead us to frame entrepreneurship in terms of a having-mode. This mode in turn suggests a primary epistemic orientation based upon three interrelated socio-economic aspects: 1) a systemic know-what in order to distinguish field-specific values from non-value, 2) a systemic know-how to convert social value into economic value, and vice versa; and 3) a systemic know-how to create, capitalise upon and accrue field specific surplus value.Research/practical implications: The proposed framework breaks with both modern and postmodern notions of entrepreneurship, and thereby opens up new vistas for research on entrepreneurship as intrinsically a social and economic phenomenon.Originality/value: By opening up new vistas for research on entrepreneurship, alternative ways of describing, prescribing and understanding entrepreneurship are offered.