Relational constructionism – the thought style of the dissertation

Relational constructionism is a theory about how the world is being created from relational practices, with specific focus on language and processes (Hosking 2007). It is a thought style with implications for research practice and the organising practices of organisations because it insists on the narrative reality of actors as local in both a social and a historical sense (Hosking and Hjorth 2004, 262). As an example, this thought style implies that the construction of science becomes a local relational reality, and constructions are no more, no

less, than processes that make and re-make the local reality. In the study of entrepreneuring actors, relational constructionism sees entrepreneurial actors as relational beings – and the entrepreneurial creation is a continuously created construct from relations and interactions (Fletcher and Watson 2005, Fletcher 2006).

The radical implication of such a view is that ‘relational constructionism includes its own activities within the scope of its discourse of construction. Thus it treats the activities of theorizing and empirical work as processes of construction’ (Hosking 2007, 4).

The thought style means that traditional distinctions between individuals and context, description and explanation, objectivity and subjectivity, theoretical and empirical, the real world and the social world are sought to be overcome in the study of inter-actions – it so to speak collapses all these dualist oppositions.

However, in practice this is not as easy as it sounds, but the theory opens up the researchers mind for questioning and taking into account traditional distinctions of good and bad or what may influence a study of entrepreneurial learning! It is a thought style that focuses on the inter-actions between human and non-human actors (technology, incubator programmes, organisations, laws, infrastructure etc.), in order to get closer to the social practices that validate or discredit how the local community of practice is constructed (Hosking and Hjorth, 2004, 263); hence the purpose has been to increase the knowledge of how and why something was created or not. The traditional management and organisation literature is dominated by entitative and realist ontology and it is important to stress that the relational epistemology results in rather different perceptions and creations of leadership, networking and negotiation (Dachler and Hosking 1995), as already touched upon.

As a point of entry to a field/ phenomenon of study, Hosking’s definition of interaction does not allow the researcher to exclude or isolate any actors beforehand. Hosking uses ‘the term inter-acting (a) to speak of performance (b) that involves coming together (c) of ‘whoever and whatever’ thereby (re)constructing person-world relations as (d) relational realities’ (Hosking 2011, 53). Studying interactions – the relational processes between or among actors – gives us a chance to understand things and their functionality, since it is within the relational conditions of exchange – meaning the use of things (such as incubating services) – that we understand what they do (Popp and Holt 2013, 55). The implications of a relational thought style is that it is not enough to investigate what kind of service entrepreneuring actors receive from incubating activities; we also need to focus on the narrative reality of how knowledge is created and transferred, the didactic methods, the context and how participants of a programme may have applied the services in order to understand what works to create productive collaboration for entrepreneurial learning.

In adopting relational constructionism as a thought style, this dissertation seeks to capture, describe and inform relational practices in the incubator context, not formulate new exact principles for design and action,

even though some suggestions for alternative thinking and practice for stimulating entrepreneurial practices will be made. Relational constructionism supplements a study of barriers to entrepreneurial learning in an incubating context by;

• Dismissing the traditional understanding of an active provider and a passive receiver and focussing on relationships as the basis for interaction, and thus constructions, between different, but equal parties.

• Regarding relations as the creating force in the world, this makes relations the object of investigation in the study of incubating activities – implying that new ventures (relational realities) are ongoing constructions between actors, and not the historical outcome of individual creation.

• Accepting that there are no universal truths or best practice models and thus acknowledging and providing a language for complexity and uncertainty in a local-cultural-historical context as the natural state of acting, entrepreneuring, learning and incubating.

In this perspective, the study of barriers to entrepreneurial learning is a study of relations. The ontology of the dissertation means that relations are understood as ongoing relational creations, and that relations are created through verbal language as well as non-verbal language among human and non-humans actors (Latour 1987, Hosking 2011), and that people organise language with the purpose of obtaining and achieving things (Møller 2012, 39). Language comes in the form of discourses, narratives, conversations, body language, gestures, tone-of-voice, aesthetics, locality, indoor decoration, listening and dialogue, and through these forms of expression, language transforms and (re) creates patterns of social relations and actions (Hosking 2007, 9;

Hosking 2011, 50). As a consequence, relations and the creation of the world are made up of more than individual cognition; it also involves emotions, sensing and collective experiences. When research takes its point of departure in relations it also considers the important social and psychological issues of social construction, which are often silenced or forgotten by retrospective sense-making processes (Møller 2012, 41).

One of the problems that sometimes occurs when we analytically focus only on the individual is that we get the impression of a bounded, self-motivated human agent who acts on the environment, can create the

environment and can be separated from the environment. With a relational perspective on incubating activities, such a simplistic focus does not adequately capture the complexity of how different worlds (narrative constructions) are co-constructed by the actors interacting within them. However, if we perceive fields and local construction as creations of relations, the ‘interspace between the individual and the environment begins to emerge as a prime mover of human agency in the continuous work of cultivating its world’ (Cooper 2005, 1690). As I return to in Part III, this interspace between actors of the field can be understood as the available narratives, which becomes informing in terms of capturing, describing and explaining the logic of practice.

Bouwen (2010) describes how a relational approach to studying the creation of organisations and grasping the social world of collaborating actors involves focussing on the ongoing practices among the participating actors.

In a way, my interest in relational constructionism (Hosking 2007) as valuable to this study came from the lack of organisational constructions (moving things, developing methods and changing ways of acting) in the empirical material, since much of it was about the troubled character of relationships as barriers to the interaction that they actually wanted to pursue. If we accept that ‘it is in the doing together that the organisation is constituted’ (Bouwen 2010, 38), it becomes relevant to investigate the doing of the relationship and what is done in/ through relations – because if there is no productive doing-together – in the sense of changing, challenging or surprising interactions between advisors and entrepreneurs – it is likely that there is no entrepreneurial creation within the Accelerator Programme.

There is growing consensus in the academic field of incubation that so far it has been difficult for researchers to get close to the mechanisms of business incubating activities and study what they do because of the complexity of the phenomenon (Maritz and Brown 2013, Blackburn and Schaper 2012, Mason and Brown 2013). Most inquiries into incubating activities are designed as variance studies, in which the complexity is silent, and only one or two units of investigation have been studied (Van de Ven 2007). To allow the complexity to be heard, it is relevant to turn to theories that are capable of capturing the interdependent nature of organisational life, the in-betweens of relationships, inter-action learning, organising and entrepreneurial creation (Bradbury and Lichtenstein 2000, 551). Relational constructionism offers a way of thinking about and performing empirical conduct and a vocabulary for entrepreneurial interactions and performance that allows the complexity of venturing actors and their making to be heard (Fletcher 2003, 127), which I have found to be both useful and important in terms of understanding why incubating activities are performed as they are – and also what acts as barriers to entrepreneurial learning.

Steyaert (2004, 11) suggests a study of entrepreneurial processes that look to the mundane; the small stories collected of the everydayness of entrepreneuring, studying the complexity of entrepreneurial making from interviews, meetings, e-mails, events, pieces of texts and language, as this study intended to do. This is also why it made sense to perform the fieldwork as an ethnographic inspired study focussing on narrative practices of an organisational field (Czarniawska 2004, 33). The study of relations and relationship constructions is by the nature of the phenomenon difficult, but I have chosen to investigate relations through texts, stories and conversation – in short – in the language of the field. Through narrative reading of language I seek meaning and explanations of the actions in the field to answer the research question. I follow Czarniawska’s 2004 argument that “a student of social life, no matter of which domain, needs to become interested in narrative as

a form of social life, a form of knowledge, and a form of communication” (Czarniawska 2004, 14). Narrative analysis and construction is introduced in this thesis as a writing method for structuring the empirical material – which allows me to make sense of the events and conversations that I have participated in during the fieldwork.