“We’re the biggest student movement in Finland since the 1970’s!” A practice-based study of student Entrepreneurship Societies

The social theoretical ‘practice turn’ is now making its way to the field of entrepreneurship research. The extant practice-based studies of entrepreneurship are changing and rearticulating understandings of entrepreneurship and ways of theorizing it. Current studies mainly start their analysis with looking at people labelled as ‘entrepreneurs’ engaging in something entrepreneurial. We vouch for another way of approaching entrepreneurship: we start by looking at what is done around the idea of entrepreneurship. Through an ethnographic study, we study how the meanings of student entrepreneurship organizations, Entrepreneurship Societies, were constructed within a get-together and what the social effects of this coming together are. We drew on practice-based studies, in particular on Silvia Gherardi’s work, in order to do this. We argue that practice enacted around the idea of entrepreneurship have implications for how entrepreneurship is understood, practiced, supported, promoted and so on, but also implications for the (re)production of society.