The Other Organization: Heterotopia, Management, and Entrepreneurship

Organizations are viewed as ordered places that legitimate the hand that holds back and that formalize structured, institutionalized ways of saying and doing. Against this backdrop, we want to see the more recent attention to the entrepreneurial as a reason to conceptualize the new organization that emerges from within the existing organization as the “other organization,” accomplished through heterotopia. We propose that such creation of organization, the process of entrepreneurial emergence, can be thought of as part of organizations: organization entails both the already organized and the emergent; and organization-creation efforts are tactically exploring the cracks, the interstices, of the already organized. The “other organization” is actualized within the heterotopic and ephemeral space opened by such efforts. Bringing heterotopic/heterochronic space-time back into the study of organizations requires that we immerse ourselves in the spaces of resistance, emergence and play. This essay—hopefully, also playfully—does that.