Data di Pubblicazione:
2018
Citazione:
Imagination, asset and risk: the performance of value in the Italian start-up food economy / V. Luise. ((Intervento presentato al 5. convegno Interdisciplinary Market Studies Workshop, ‘Market Situations-Situated Markets’ tenutosi a Copenhagen nel 2018.
Abstract:
In the '70s the spread of new technologies produced a fundamental transition in advanced industrial from a manufacturing-based to services-driven economy. In the Post-Fordist society (Arrighi, 1994) the socio-economic systems is based on the production, re-production and consumption of information and knowledge. New entrepreneurial organizational forms (Salamzadeh & Kawamorita, 2017) and various flexible labor practices and identities (Gandini, 2016) have emerged in the ‘Knowledge Economy’ (Powell & Snellman, 2004) thanks to the diffusion of the digital technologies. The importance of knowledge and flexible ways of cooperation make the intangible assets the core elements for the company's valuation (Arvidsson & Peitersen, 2013). In this context, start-ups emerge as new enterprise organizations which aims to develop a repeatable and scalable business model based on disruptive innovative products or services (Blank & Dorf, 2012). According to Ries (2011), a start- up is an institution designed to create a new product or service which operates within an extreme uncertainty environment where customers, markets, and other economic elements of businesses can be completely unknown. The whole system of venture capitalists, incubators and angel investors (Drover, 2017) guide new start-ups, monitoring the progress of projects and providing the new entrepreneurs of the necessary skills to communicate the idea in order to attract investments (Kanniainen & Keuschnigg, 2004). Indeed, the financial evaluation of the start-ups is not based entirely on marketed products or services, but in relation to future earnings (Birch, 2016).
The first aim of this paper is to understand and assess to what extent start-uppers in Italian new food economy produce and articulate discourses about future economies in online and offline domain. Beckert (2013) argues that the economic actors are motivated in their actions by the imagined future or fictional expectations. The fictional expectations in the knowledge economy take narrative form such as stories, theories and discourses. I intend to explore how start-uppers produce fictional expectation in order to create casual links that bridge the gap between the present and possible future economic developments and which type of economic behaviour they adopt according to these future economic projections.
Since, the economic action takes place in the present but is directed towards the future (Mische, 2009) these representations are not confined to empirical reality, but also fictional expectations are also a source of creativity in the economy (Bronk, 2009). Thus, the uncertainty about future states can be a source of innovation as a form of deviant behaviour, which is stimulated in the normative architecture of start-up economies encouraging deviant imaginaries, risk-taking economic behaviour (Neff, 2012), and the creation of innovative goods. Indeed, according to MacKenzie (2009), the economic accounting practices involve a process of interpretation which is not unambiguously or directly performative. Start-uppers scrutinize all possible alternative combinations and calculate the costs of all options. But as Langlois and Cosgel (1993) argue the distinction between risk and uncertainty (Knight, 1912) do not arise from assign a probability to an event, but from the initial classification of random outcomes. In this sense, risk requires judgment and intuition, rather than calculation. The second aim of the paper is to explore how start-uppers redefine ‘risk and uncertainty’ through the qualitative classification of all possible economic alternative combinations of the future events.

Furthermore, my objective is to understand how the communicative public actions become a central element in entrepreneur
Tipologia IRIS:
14 - Intervento a convegno non pubblicato
Keywords:
start-up; imagined futures; uncertainty and risk; Italian food economy
Elenco autori:
V. Luise
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