Sylvain Bureau and Rym Ibrahim. From International Journal of Entrepreneurial Venturing.
"Abstract
The Schumpeterian 'creative destruction' is a well-known concept, yet there is a tendency to emphasise either its bright side - entrepreneurs as great contributors to economic development - or its dark side - entrepreneurs' activities contributing to various damages. In this paper, we aim to move beyond this dichotomy to fully grasp the dialectic. To do so, we pose the following question: How does the 'creative destruction' dialectic support the fabric of heroic entrepreneurs? To answer this question, we analyse a 19th-century narrative of an entrepreneurial journey as depicted in the famous novel The Ladies' Paradise by the naturalist writer Émile Zola. Based on our analysis, we detail how four themes of narrative dialectic - economic, socio-political, cognitive, and artifactual - support the fabric of an entrepreneurial hero in the novel. This new framework helps to reconceptualise 'creative destruction' and offers new perspectives for discussing the heroisation of entrepreneurs, bringing new possibilities for teaching entrepreneurship through fiction."
