14422: Diversifying Social Theories of Entrepreneurship After the Posthuman Turn

Friday, July 25, 2025

10:30 - 12:00 CEST (GMT+2)

Location: Bella Center: Hall B- B0-m3

Session Type: PDW (workshop)
Orientation: International,Research,Diversity
Shareable link: https://cdmcd.co/zEAkpZ

Organizer(s)

CS

Chris Steyaert

University of St. Gallen, Switzerland
DF

Denise Fletcher

University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg

Presenter(s)

MC

Marta B. Calas

U. of Massachusetts, Amherst, United States
BR

Bernhard Resch

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands
JF

Jonas Friedrich

Research Institute for Organizational Psychology, Switzerland

Facilitator(s)

OB

Orla Byrne

University College Dublin, Ireland
OG

Olivier Germain

-, Canada

Participant(s)

CL

Christina Andrea Lüthy

Lund U., Sweden

This professional development workshop aims to expand social theories of entrepreneurship through exploring neo-materialist thinking that conceptually and practically considers the current and interwoven challenges of climate crisis, political polarization, and social inequality. Neo-materialist thinking is a rich set of meta-theoretical and conceptual ideas that are concerned with de-privileging human agency and breaking through mind-matter, culture-nature, structure-agency, and animate/inanimate dualisms. It emphasizes the transversal, emergent, contingent flux and flow of relations and assemblages of the human and non-human and the affective flows that have the capacity to affect, move, de-stabilize, and dis-assemble. Exploring these neo-material concepts, the workshop proposes to illustrate and discuss with the participants how recent social theories such as practice-based, feminist, and queer perspectives adopt material, embodied, and performative aspects of entrepreneurial endeavors that respond to a broader ethical and political agenda of inequality reduction. Drawing upon three opening stories that recount personal experiences of adapting neo-materialist thinking, the workshop focuses on how practice-based, feminist, and queer theories have incorporated neo-materialist thinking and enable entrepreneurial research to consider the consequences of the posthuman turn. The roundtables provide lively platforms for sharing experiences, ideas, questions, and pitfalls – thereby enabling experiential exchange among peers. The workshop concludes with short statements from the participants that gather learnings, insights, and proposals for entrepreneurship’s research agenda.