This section, present in every volume, aims to suggest an entry into critical approaches to entrepreneurship, which evolve within the community between ignorance and skepticism, through questioning or refounding vocabulary. It is inspired by Gilles Deleuze’s ABC Primer. It is therefore not a question of proposing, strictly speaking, a dictionary objectifying the terms used, but rather of proposing a critical look at entrepreneurial discourse. Guest authors are thus invited to write 2 pages on a word which resonates with his-her subjective and critical perspective on entrepreneurship. One may choose:
A traditional concept of entrepreneurship to be redefined with a critical lens;
A critical concept in the field of entrepreneurship and its dictionary;
An ordinary word from the everydayness of entrepreneurs.
Why is it that we are always told to climb mountains and to aim for summits? For entrepreneurs, this ascent often takes the form of the continuous growth of their ventures. Accordingly, the word “scaling”—referring to the way in which new ventures can rapidly grow their internal operations—has achieved some momentum in practitioners’ jargon. Scaling, from the Latin scala (staircase, ladder) and its equivalent in old French escaler (l’escalier), is all about climbing, moving higher up. By climbing the ladder, entrepreneurs are able to spread excellence within their organization (Shepherd and Patzelt, 2020). Because the average cost per unit of output is thought to decrease with an increase in scale or magnitude of the output produced by a firm (Khemani, 1993), growth is presumed to bring efficiency and profit maximization through economies of scale…