De-linking entrepreneurship from profit-motivated capitalism: some lessons from an English locality

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the entrepreneurship literature that has sought to deconstruct the normative view of the entrepreneur as a heroic icon of profit-motivated capitalism by developing a typology of the multifarious lived practices of entrepreneurship ranging from wholly social to wholly profit-motivated forms of entrepreneurship cross-cut by wholly informal to wholly formal forms of entrepreneurial endeavour. This is then applied by reporting evidence from a small-scale survey of the multiple forms of entrepreneurship in the English locality of Bassetlaw. The finding is that just 12% of the entrepreneurs surveyed in this locality are engaged purely in profit-driven entrepreneurship in the legitimate economy. The outcome is a call to more widely apply this typology that depicts the multiple forms of entrepreneurship in order to open up entrepreneurship to re-signification as demonstrative of the possibility of futures beyond legitimate profit-driven capitalism.