Team entrepreneurship

Description:

I wrote this book years ago, so hopefully I can be fairly objective. It's a short ethnography based on (unintended) full participant observation. The site is a highly autonomous division of the large auto parts maker Magna International. The division was very much old school, driven by hands-on technology and crafts people. The employees overwhelmingly lacked apparent qualifications but nonetheless, as a "team" (their word) developed ad hoc procedures that worked well. In a sense, viewed as a whole system, shop floor people who were employees and not entrepreneurs behaved entrepreneurially, creating new resources. This was my meaning of the title, which at the time was unusual but has since been taken up with a different meaning, that of new venture teams. The book was treated in one review as a practitioner work. It does have a "prologue for practitioners." However, it is at least somewhat frank about the autocratic qualities of the place. It also has an early version of an article published the next year in Organization Science on the anthropology of entrepreneurship (The Bigman metaphor...) and to a lesser extent another (more distinct) article the year later (1991) in ET&P.

subjects: Case studies,  Entrepreneurship,  Organizational effectiveness,  automobile industry,  collective entrepreneurship,  ethnography,  Management,  Mitarbeiter,  Arbeitnehmergesellschaft,  Efficacite organisationnelle,  Kollektive Fu˜hrung,  Entrepreneurs (Economie politique),  Etudes de Cas

Places: Toronto

Times: early 1980s