The other reading: Reflections of postcolonial deconstruction for critical entrepreneurship studies

This chapter outlines that deconstruction is not only a dismantling method or mode of reading and analyzing a text, but it can be seen as reconstructive and productive in the way it expands the limits of an established field of conversation, such as entrepreneurship. The contributions of postcolonial deconstruction to the epistemological, ontological, and even metaphysical questions of the critical theory of entrepreneurship focus on language as performative, as constitutive of meaning. As postcolonial deconstruction can happen only in relation to the specific context, understanding it also needs to happen through it. Postcolonial deconstructive theoretizations of entrepreneurship would therefore act outside and to subvert the logic of Western logocentrism and thus would claim the undecidability and impossibility of the dichotomous and hierarchical system of traditional Western thought, to find ways of knowing without explanatory models and stable conceptual definitiveness. The chapter explains the intertwining of theorizing, empirical research, and relations of power.