To study the nature of becoming entrepreneurial through musical commerce 5 contrasting mixed- sites (Marcus 1998) are studied. These mixed-sites coordinate a singular case study of becoming entrepreneurial through musical commerce in the Mersey basin of North West England in a relational and processual way. Between the interplay of tactical sites and the wider more strategic case of musical entrepreneurship in the Mersey basin images are elicited. Hence, the mixed-site empirical approach interacts with case study to create an analytical way to create and illuminate images, in which organizational creativity is presented against a background painted with common brushstrokes (Certeau 1984). Within the study the idea of entrepreneurial images therefore plays multiple roles. One use of images is empirical, and interacts with the idea of a site, as loose boundaries of opportunity and learning are distinguished and fall away. Each site is also followed over time. Two images are therefore coordinated to show the processual nature of experiences of opportunity through time, how human resources and constraints develop and give way to each other in the creation of new images. Five contrasting sites is deemed to allow for thickness to be built up within each experience, and to develop a thicker case study without presenting pale and superficial lives. To be sensitive to how Shackle and Penrose suggest images might be studied, images are not treated as if they can be simply gathered, and instead are
created and allowed to multiply within the study. Images therefore also guide the analytical strategy, and they are shown to be created between the strategic setting of the musical
entrepreneurship in North West England and the imaginative lives of musical bricoleurs. This use of images is able to present actors’ becoming entrepreneurial through blending commercial setting and make do creativity. The images illuminate unique experiences, yet are also relational and gain their presence amongst the different sites. The images are coordinated can neither be located at the individual level; isolated to the sites themselves, nor at the societal level; created through the rigid interpretation of case study method. They hover in the interplay of tactical sites and strategic case settings, and are related within the process of study itself.
94 Interpretivist epistemology (Weber 1978/2008; Geertz 1973) has surfaced through emphasis on narrative interpretation and imaginative re-relation to entrepreneurial settings being openings into opportunity experience (Gartner 2007; Sarason et al 2006; Anderson 2010; Pitt 1998; Sarasvathy 2008; Hjorth 2007; Penrose 1959/1995). Through attempting to find or create access to the prosaics (Steyaert 2004) of opportunity experience, a loosely ethnographic tendency is expressed in varying intensities across the sites.The study is broadly interested in narrative and storytelling as an engagement with lived experience (Ricouer 1990; Certeau 1984; Cope 2001; Gartner 2007, 2011), one that is able to animate the making and remaking of entrepreneurial images. The study develops previous narrative coordinating points drawn from Certeau (1984) in a way that is sensitive to the way Shackle and Penrose suggest opportunity may be approached. It transcends restricted definitions of induction and deduction (Weick 1989, 1996), and grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss 1967; Charmaz & Mitchell 2001; Strauss & Corbin 1998), through to'ing and fro'ing (Certeau 1984) between deduced strategy and induced tactical occupation. The study extends Penrose's (1959/1995; 1960) own use of mixed method case study, storytelling, and her preoccupation with the processual, everyday nature of entrepreneurial images.
Case study method has a long history in management studies, indeed, with Penrose (1959/1995, 1960) herself utilising the approach. Yet while the literature is peppered with management scholars (e.g. Graebner & Eisenhardt 2004; Eisenhardt & Graebner 2007; Eisenhardt 1989; Van Maanen 1988; Watson 2009; Guercini 2004; Chandler 1962), case study remains an obscure and often overlooked method (Flyvbjerg 2011). Traditional restricted definitions (e.g. Eisenhardt 1989; Yin 1984) has case study as secondary to more powerful (quantitative) analyses because their everyday nature is assumed not rigorous or authoritative enough. A resonant
counterproposal however suggests particularly a mixed-site case study allows for the richly textured description and deep understanding not permitted through quantitative nor qualitative efforts for breadth (Flyvbjerg 2011; Gummesson 2007).
Real-life case examples are also central to everyday human learning (Flyvbjerg 2007; Van Manen 1990); people do learning through inserting abstract knowledge into context-dependent occasions of use in creative ways. This chimes with Shackle's and Penrose's suggestion that knowledge and identifiable resources and relations only have significance in moments of
95 practice, and Certeau's suggestion that images tactically occupy and re-relate to formalised spaces. It suggests our only access to human knowledge is as Socrates found it: through real-life sites (Flyvbjerg 2007). Metaphysical, somehow objective knowledge is strategic, being
formalised spaces without relation to lived experience; whereas in contrast, knowledge in use is tactical and emphasises unique images of being-in-business. Between in the most part
identifiable commonplace resources and relations and their tactical re-relation organizational creativity and site specific practices are therefore revealed. The idea of a mixed-site case study, then, brings abstract scholarly interests in strategic and identifiable phenomena down to the level of prosaic experience (Van Maanen 1989; Flyvbjerg 2011). A mixed-site case study
distinguishes unique spaces, and relates them to wider and more general settings, and the many different interacting sites elicit images. A case study method imitates narratives (Flyvbjerg 2011), and is an opening into the making and remaking of images.
A mixed-site case study approach made up of multiple images does not imitate the rational quest to set up impermeable and immutable boundaries, by instead allowing images to interrelate, forces and influences to move in and out, and understanding to emerge between, as well as within, sites. Yet though well cited case study theorists emphasise the tactical nature of case study research, their prescriptions emerge from the strategic literature (e.g. Eisenhardt 1989, 1991; Graebner & Eisenhardt 2004). Because of this, case studies or sites of case study, though generally put in comparison by analysts, are often treated as distinct spaces occupied by
homogeneous populations. Recalling Certeau's note of the danger of strategically submerging actors in enlarged demographic categorisations for the sake of academic parsimony, and
Penrose's and Shackle's own struggles with the semantic boundaries to firms and opportunities as they write about influence and influencing dissolving boundaries they had imposed to sites, this suggests that making a strategic distinction of sites as definitive populations reduces the level of insight to be gained into the experience. A mixed-site (Marcus 1998), or trans-local (Hannerz 2003) approach is therefore taken in this study because no isolate research “object” can be identified at separation from others and the boundaries of influence and influencing to
opportunity are still unknown to the analysis. Through contrasting and comparing different sites (Eisenhardt 1989, 1991; Flyvbjerg 2011) study narrates relational spaces (Hjorth 2007; Certeau 1984; Gustavson & Cytrynbaum 2003; Marcus 1998), and site boundaries fall into obscurity and
96 re-emerge as influences and influencing pass in and out. Mixed-site case study method sets actors in discrete bounded contexts animating different ways of configuring entrepreneurial settings and formalised space, but, through not treating them as entitative realities that can be understood in separation, allows them to blur and interrelate with one another. Their contrast and comparison reveal insights into one another, and their voices and different configurations refract as they pass through each other.
A mixed-site case study approach 'thickens' description of life (Geertz 1973) and allows prolonged reflexive collaborative theory building (Flyvbjerg 2011; Simons 2007; Alvesson & Skoldberg 2009), through allowing proximal interaction and ongoing, in-depth study, and multiple methods. A mixed-site case study approach animates things occurring at certain times, over time, in certain spaces (Van Manen 1990; Simons 2007; Stake 1995; Flyvbjerg 2011). A mixed-site case study sets boundaries on longitudinal and relational practice so that the approach becomes simultaneous with storytelling (Simons 2007; Flyvbjerg 2007). Sites define the
boundaries to action scenes, plot, and orient characters who deal with strategic commonplaces, events occuring, and other figures (Flyvbjerg 2011:311). Sites present imaginative and unique lives of commonplace things, as openings into the processual and relational presence of images, but also treat study in a relational and processual way as well. The idea of sites therefore
intertwines with the idea of how an image might be approached empirically. The idea of site and case is an analytical approach too, as timeless miracles (Gartner 2007) are practised in transient moments, history is re-described through multiple new beginnings, and general appearances are animated in ways that matter to actors. Within the idea of a site and the unique experiences one is characterised by the kinds of human resources and the way in which they coordinate more strategic case settings might be approached to animate the creation of images. By studying how human resources like imagination and personal experience build up over time within sites, how actors are able to relate to strategic case settings anew is shown and images of organizational creativity are coordinated. Sites therefore provide boundaries around entrepreneurial practice, and focus attention on use and processes of change (Graebner & Eisenhardt 2004; Gummesson 2007; Merriam 1998; Flyvbjerg 2011). The formalised settings of Liverpool as a context for musical entrepreneurship are occupied by contrasting images at varying times and at the same time, dominant orders of musical business commonly experienced through a panoply of
97 practices, procedures and other strategic things are put to use in the mixed-sites making up the case study, and images are shown being created through the determinations set up by scholars (Certeau 1984). A mixed-site approach thickens the case study by allowing figures, voices, texts and contexts to interweave and come in and out of focus so that “the story [can] unfold from the many-sided, complex, and sometimes-conflicting stories” involved in experience (Flyvbjerg 2011: 311). It is in this sense of allowing multiple voices, relations, data types, interpretations and methods to overflow into instances of data creation, and relating together, that mixed-site case study provides thickness (Geertz 1973) description (Atkinson & Delamont 2008). By each being a unique site of a more general case they flesh out the thick relationality of experiences of opportunity and cannot be located individually but must be understood together. The idea of images as a way to situate opportunity in the creative lives of those is therefore approached through using images as an empirical approach, and also an analytical strategy, both of which are sensitive to Shackle’s and Penrose’s thoughts. In turn, a mixed-site case study approach becomes a particular social science (Flyvbjerg 2011); a 'science of the particular” (Certeau et al
1998:138), that is able to engage with the messy quotidian, by revealing agents falsifying in their ordinary practice strategic things inherited from dominant orders and deduced by researchers (Certeau 1984; Flyvbjerg 2011). This makes a mixed-site case study approach useful for capturing the messy (Gartner 2007; Law 2004), longitudinal and relational nature of study encounters and entrepreneurial images in ways that study still matters (Law 2004; Flyvbjerg 2011).
Significantly, a mixed-site case study approach therefore also disabuses scholars of the institutional desire to abstract away from the experience and make generalizations that are
independent of space, time and actors (Flyvbjerg 2011). Interest is kept where it matters; with the thickness of ordinary experience, inviting scholars to resist withdrawing to strategic positions of panoptic vision, and generalizing and predicting across other sites. Abstract explanations
explaining practices of the many is exchanged for in-depth understanding of a singular case comprised of multiple sites, and theory is created rather than affirmed across sites at the expense of only developing superficial insights. This makes a mixed-site case study approach
entrepreneurial (Eisenhardt 1989; Gummesson 2007), precisely because strategic case settings are revealed being practised in tactical ways. A mixed-site case study approach opens up spaces
98 to understand images in the play between the strategic and tactical as human resources and the generally identifiable entrepreneurial settings Penrose describes interact. Put into some sequence, a mixed-site case study approach elicits different ways to imagine theoretical narratives of
opportunity recognition.
The empirical and analytical use of images, then, blends with the relational idea of mixed-site case study. Singular cases cannot be understood in isolation from others, different tactical occupations of the same strategy come into relief, and multiple images, data sources and sites of analysis coalesce in the one (Hannerz 2003), rather than coordinating a nexus designed outwards from a researcher who appears to be neutral (à la grounded theory; Glaser & Strauss 1967), and to stand still (à la Eisenhardt 1989). In contrast with attempts to compare distinct cases as if their relational existence only exists when analysts pull them together, then, through combining multiple sites within one singular case, comparison reveals the irreducibility of images to any one individual site, and coordinates relational spaces of practice and study (Certeau 1984; Gustavson & Cytrybaum 2003) in which sides of researcher and researched (Becker 1967), and territories and boundaries of practice blur and melt together. Rather than the indistinctness of site boundaries being a problem as strategic readings of research methods literature might suggest, this makes the movement and blurring of boundaries and sites a study topic (Silverman 2005) to develop understanding of opportunity as imaginative experience.
The intention here, then, is not an attempt toward very rationally constructing clean cut explanations of opportunities being distinguished as clear-cut spaces that can be applied
generally without resort to circumstance, but to hermeneutically understand (Dilthy 1984/1977; Van Maanen 1998; Van Manen 1990) their becoming at the prosaic level through sites of entrepreneurial speech and action that interact and contrast to highlight images emerging. The focus is on eliciting experiences of opportunity through the play between the strategic and the tactical, between different sites of human resources and material resource configurations
developed over time, and how these sites relate to wider strategic settings. These experiences can then be re-related back to current strategic manifestations of opportunity recognition and the distinction made between actors and their settings. The interpretation is active and creative, and
99 an ongoing process which implicates scholars not because they are at a strategic distance of analysis, but because they are also character in the relational narratives of images.