'Becoming other': entrepreneuring as subversive organising

This paper discusses entrepreneurship as a process of subversive organising, a journey towards becoming Other. Examining the field of stand-up comedy in Finland, we argue that the desire to become an entrepreneur is not only an individual quest, but also a social, subversive desire to resist fixed, institutionally bounded professional identities. Subversive desire, performed through de/professionalisation and de/institutionalisation, constitutes entrepreneuring as a social practice of creation: a nonlinear quest towards difference, discontinuity and intuitive futures yet to come. Subversive practice, in this respect, promotes and sustains, rather than resolves, the inherent tensions of entrepreneuring.