Orchestrating affect at the entrepreneurial university

This chapter sets out to explore affective, bodily experiences through which entrepreneurship promotion activities of the entrepreneurial university operate. We conceptualize these activities as ‘orchestration of affect’, which refers to a range of practices, strategies, and design efforts through which actors seek to generate particular kinds of affective responses in other people to achieve certain organizational ends. Drawing on an ethnographic study at a university-based startup incubator located in Helsinki, Finland (ThinkCo), we identify and analyze the key practices in and through which affects are orchestrated to create support for an entrepreneurial university: inviting inspirational speakers and facilitating business idea development. Our analysis offers new understanding of how higher education organizations regulate their participants’ experiences on the level of precognitive forces. To close, we propose an agenda for future research on entrepreneurial university from the perspective on affect.