The purpose of this Special Issue of Organization is to explore the ‘taken for granted’ norms of entrepreneurship scholarship as a whole including its ideologies, dominant assumptions, grand narratives, samples and methods. Even though entrepreneurship is a very diverse phenomenon that calls for divergence and multiplicity in understanding it, the majority of entrepreneurship research is still functionalist in nature (Jennings et al, 2005). There seems to be a normative assumption that entrepreneurship is a good thing and that ‘the more entrepreneurs the merrier’ (cf. Weiskopf and Steyaert, 2009). Entrepreneurship has been increasingly eulogised in dominant neo-liberal policy discourses, infiltrating seemingly unrelated aspects of social life in potent, but seemingly innocuous ways (Armstrong, 2005) and few studies have aimed at ‘peeling away’ these ‘layers of ideological obscuration’ (Martin, 1990).
