Concepts of Entrepreneurialism: An Exploration of Hype

Entrepreneurship has its own language and concepts, typically taken for granted. While scholars have shown great interest in entrepreneurial storytelling as a strategy for establishing legitimacy for new ventures, they rarely engage with the core concepts of entrepreneurship and the semantic baggage they come with. We propose a history of the concept of “entrepreneurial hype” and ask what the valorization of hype reveals about the norms of entrepreneurialism and how they were constructed and justified. Through a “conceptual history” (Koselleck) of hype and its evolving meanings over the last century, we theorize three norms that the concept of hype valorizes: rule-breaking, fetishizing imagined futures, and constructing the agentic entrepreneurial self. Our analysis contributes to the literature on entrepreneurialism by exploring how entrepreneurial culture and ideology operate and critically reflecting on the vernacular that supports them.