The tacit dimension of entrepreneurial expertise: Practical competence in withholding action

Entrepreneurship-as-Practice (EaP) scholarship has shifted attention from individual entrepreneurs toward the relational, materially mediated, and normatively organized practices through which ventures emerge. Existing work has illuminated what practitioners do but has left undertheorized what practitioners skillfully refrain from doing. Drawing on Johannisson's (2011) call for phronesis as the relevant intellectual virtue of entrepreneuring, we argue that phronetic competence is irreducibly two-sided: it includes both knowing what to do and knowing what to refrain from doing in particular situations. We theorize the second dimension, practiced absence , as a tacit, relationally accomplished, materially mediated, and normatively organized competence in withholding action. Using Schatzki's typology, we specify what is withheld: teleoaffective structures of growth, practical understandings such as the pivot, and explicit rules such as speed-to-market injunctions. Two illustrations, Patagonia and Basecamp's withholding from growth and Mailchimp's twenty-year withholding from the pivot, show how the competence is sustained through coordinated interaction, embodied in artifacts, and held to tacit normative expectations within practice communities. Ventures, we conclude, are constituted as much by what is skillfully refused as by what is pursued.