Chapter from: "Everything Old is New Again: How Entrepreneurs Use Discourse Themes to Reclaim Abandoned Urban Spaces"
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Business Expert Press
Length: 29 pages
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Abstract
This chapter is excerpted from 'Everything Old is New Again: How Entrepreneurs Use Discourse Themes to Reclaim Abandoned Urban Spaces'. Canonical entrepreneurship scholars (Schumpeter, Hayek, and others) have argued that entrepreneurial innovation and initiative is a critical part of 'creative destruction' - the sometimes difficult process of building social arrangements that challenge and topple existing, less capable predecessors. Although the revitalizing potential of entrepreneurship has often been studied in the context of commercial start-up businesses, recent scholarship on institutional entrepreneurship highlights the kinship between for-profit entrepreneurship and the equally transformative innovation and initiative of entrepreneurs in the nonprofit, community, and policy-activist fields. This expanded exploration of entrepreneurial potential has become important in the creative destruction - or, more accurately, 'creative reclamation' - of abandoned or under-used industrial relics and urban space. My project uses case studies in New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, where community groups have deployed or are attempting to deploy symbolism and narrative to re-purpose abandoned urban infrastructure into urban public spaces. I have derived several research questions: 1) How do Friends of the Park organizations successfully navigate institutional settings to create public spaces? 2) How do Friends of the Park organizations involved in creating public spaces gain community, private, and governmental support? 3) How do Friends of the Park organizations involved in creating public spaces manage the discourse around these proposed spaces? To analytically test these questions I used a mixed qualitative approach, combining in-depth interviews, document analysis, site visits, and census tract data. I focus on a selected contemporary phenomenon where in-depth descriptions would be an essential component of the process. In such situations, small qualitative studies can gain a more personal understanding of the phenomenon and the results can contribute valuable knowledge to the community. If a certain kind of unsuccessful discourse theme (or successful one) exhibits itself in a large portion of the potential population, you're very likely to see it in this sample; if the discourse exhibits itself in a very small portion, you're very unlikely to see it. Small samples, in other words, are a wide-mesh net, convenient for catching the big themes.
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Abstract
This chapter is excerpted from 'Everything Old is New Again: How Entrepreneurs Use Discourse Themes to Reclaim Abandoned Urban Spaces'. Canonical entrepreneurship scholars (Schumpeter, Hayek, and others) have argued that entrepreneurial innovation and initiative is a critical part of 'creative destruction' - the sometimes difficult process of building social arrangements that challenge and topple existing, less capable predecessors. Although the revitalizing potential of entrepreneurship has often been studied in the context of commercial start-up businesses, recent scholarship on institutional entrepreneurship highlights the kinship between for-profit entrepreneurship and the equally transformative innovation and initiative of entrepreneurs in the nonprofit, community, and policy-activist fields. This expanded exploration of entrepreneurial potential has become important in the creative destruction - or, more accurately, 'creative reclamation' - of abandoned or under-used industrial relics and urban space. My project uses case studies in New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, where community groups have deployed or are attempting to deploy symbolism and narrative to re-purpose abandoned urban infrastructure into urban public spaces. I have derived several research questions: 1) How do Friends of the Park organizations successfully navigate institutional settings to create public spaces? 2) How do Friends of the Park organizations involved in creating public spaces gain community, private, and governmental support? 3) How do Friends of the Park organizations involved in creating public spaces manage the discourse around these proposed spaces? To analytically test these questions I used a mixed qualitative approach, combining in-depth interviews, document analysis, site visits, and census tract data. I focus on a selected contemporary phenomenon where in-depth descriptions would be an essential component of the process. In such situations, small qualitative studies can gain a more personal understanding of the phenomenon and the results can contribute valuable knowledge to the community. If a certain kind of unsuccessful discourse theme (or successful one) exhibits itself in a large portion of the potential population, you're very likely to see it in this sample; if the discourse exhibits itself in a very small portion, you're very unlikely to see it. Small samples, in other words, are a wide-mesh net, convenient for catching the big themes.