Roots radical – place, power and practice in punk entrepreneurship

2014

Sarah Louise Drakopoulou Dodd

The significance continues to grow of scholarship that embraces critical and contextualized entrepreneurship, seeking rich explorations of diverse entrepreneurship contexts. Following these influences, this study explores the potentialized context of punk entrepreneurship. The Punk Rock band Rancid has a 20-year history of successfully creating independent musical and related creative enterprises from the margins of the music industry. The study draws on artefacts, interviews and videos created by and around Rancid to identify and analyse this example of marginal, alternative entrepreneurship. A three-part analytic frame was applied to analysing these artefacts. Place is critical to Rancid’s enterprise, grounding the band socially, culturally, geographically and politically. Practice also plays an important role with Rancid’s activities encompassing labour, making music, movement and human interactions. The third, and most prevalent, dimension of alterity is that of power which includes data related to dominance, subordination, exclusion, control and liberation. Rancid’s entrepreneurial story is depicted as cycles, not just a linear journey, but following more complicated paths ? from periphery to centre, and back again; returning to roots, whilst trying to move forwards too; grounded in tradition but also radically focused on dramatic change. Paradox, hybridized practices, and the significance of marginal place as a rich resource also emerged from the study.

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