Entrepreneurship and expropriation

Entrepreneurship plays out today in an ideologically mediated contest between production in common and expropriation of the common. On the one hand, it is possible to locate a ‘positive’ moment of the increasing socialization of work through which production has become social and cooperative, involving production from the common, in common, of the common. On the other hand, there is a ‘negative’ moment that seeks to separate, enclose and capture this common. Entrepreneurship is a key ideological operator in the expropriation of the common, through localizing production and claims to value in one particular element of socialized production. Although entrepreneurship research today recognizes that entrepreneurship rests on production in common, it hesitates to come to the radical conclusions required by this recognition. Caught between production in common and expropriation of the common, entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship research today confront the prospect that those whose production in common is daily expropriated might turn the tables on the expropriators.