Rethinking the Histories and Ideologies of Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship is often celebrated as the pursuit of opportunity and venture creation, yet such perspectives obscure its broader historical and socio-cultural dimensions. This article advances the concept of entrepreneurialism as the ideology of entrepreneurship that defines who counts as a legitimate agent of change and which actions are valued. We engage ‘rethinking’ as a historically informed and critical practice that enacts a double movement: unsettling dominant narratives while affirming emergent possibilities. Drawing on insights from the interdisciplinary research project ‘Rethinking Entrepreneurship in Society,’ we mobilize craft and Indigenous entrepreneurship as historically rich provocations that expose assumptions in dominant concepts and open vantage points for reconfiguring entrepreneurship. This approach makes visible the ideological work of entrepreneurialism and opens space to imagine more plural futures for entrepreneurship theory and history.