Entrepreneurship and Truth-Game:Entrepreneurial Parrhesiastes

Abstract

Whereas recent entrepreneurship studies have tended to theorize an entrepreneur as an opportunistic actor who makes use of symbols and rhetoric to mobilize resources, this study aims to explore his or her political/moral practices which have been largely ignored in existing literatures. Relying on Foucault's thought of power, knowledge, and self and his view of ‘Parrhesia’ (Foucault, 2001), this study conceptualizes an entrepreneur as the parrhesiastes who takes risk and speaks the truth with courage under the challenge of launching new business. In order to enrich such understandings, this study introduces Ogura Masao as an exemplar of parrhesiastes in entrepreneurship. It shows two cases of his practice, the creation of the first private door-to-door parcel delivery service in Japan and the social enterprise for disable workers. These cases illustrate the characters of an entrepreneur as parrhesiastes and ‘the entrepreneurial truth-game’ between an entrepreneur and stakeholders which had contributed to driving innovations. The view of Parrhesia leads us to paying further attention to the role of the researchers' own reflection on themselves in order to see the research object as subjective entity.