Grand fantasy of an entrepreneurial future - Producing a heterotopia and startup entrepreneurship at ‘Slush’ conference

There are only a few studies that have critically studied entrepreneuring within the increasingly dominant area of entrepreneurship, i.e. high-technology entrepreneurship. The studies have demonstrated both reconstruction of the dominant practices of this kind of entrepreneurship and a subtle subversion of these practices. Furthermore, a concept of heterotopia has been used in some entrepreneurship studies to focus on creating a space of alterity within entrepreneuring. Heterotopia refers to a practiced place that creates spaces of difference within the dominant power-knowledge order (Foucault, 1986). We build on this extant research to examine how social and material are co-constitutively entangled to produce both the practices of heterotopia and startup entrepreneurship within a startup and technology conference. Our empirical focus is on a major startup and technology conference Slush 2014. We contribute to critical research on entrepreneurship by providing a sociomaterial analysis of startup entrepreneurship. We demonstrate how human and non-human actions co-constructed practices of using the place of Slush, and the implications of those practices for entrepreneuring. Our results show three intertwined practices constructing a heterotopia and startup entrepreneurship: festival-making, pitching and bonding. Within these, startup entrepreneurship is produced as rock stardom, vitality, risk-averse. A position within the “startup ecosystem” becomes available to everyone, but new hierarchies also emerge. These understandings reproduce the dominant understandings of the ideal entrepreneur as the white, heroic male. Especially the position of a vital rock star entrepreneur is a position that is mostly available to vital able-bodied men. However, some fractions in regard the dominant understandings of entrepreneurship emerge.