Christina Lubinski
Christina Lubinski is professor at the Department of Business Humanities and Law at Copenhagen Business School. Her research and teaching focuses on entrepreneurship in society. She is the principal investigator of the Carlsberg Foundation Semper Ardens Advance grant "[**Rethinking Entrepreneurship in Society**](https://www.carlsbergfondet.dk/da/Forskningsaktiviteter/Bevillingsstatistik/Bevillingsoversigt/CF22_1148_Christina-Lubinski)". The project group studies entrepreneurship as a discourse and model for social action, drawing on the business humanities and law for novel approaches. What is the influence of entrepreneurship beyond the marketplace? And how does our understanding of entrepreneurship influence approaches to social inequality, the future of work, and other big societal challenges? For details and updates about the project, see [**Rethinking Entrepreneurship**](https://www.rethinkingentrepreneurship.com/) and our profile on [**LinkedIn**](https://www.linkedin.com/company/98622379/admin/feed/posts/).
Christina has published in leading journals in both management (Strategic Management Journal, Organization Studies, Family Business Review) and business history (Business History Review, Business History, Enterprise & Society). Her monograph [**Navigating Nationalism in Global Enterprise**](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/navigating-nationalism-in-global-enterprise/616101CDB4C02F0AC39357AB1103FBCF) appeared with Cambridge University Press. She has won the John F. Mee Award for best paper in history at the Academy of Management (2023), Henrietta Larson Award (2015) and Oxford Journals Article Prize (2013) as well as several teaching awards. She is editor-in-chief of Business History (AJG 4) and serves on the advisory boards of the Ahlers Center for International Business, Knauss School of Business, University of San Diego and of the Erasmus-funded master program "GLOCAL: Global Markets, Local Creativities", at the universities of Glasgow, Rotterdam and Barcelona.
Trapped in the Model: Ideological Intermediaries and the Persistence of Failed Entrepreneurship in the Peruvian Amazon
Why do entrepreneurship-for-development programs persist, even when they consistently fail to deliver lasting benefits and when practitioners recognize these failures?
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Peruvian Amazon, we investigate how development intermediaries sustain belief in failing entrepreneurial models. We identify a recurring deflection cycle composed of three ideological traps—framing failure as progress, overstating isolated successes, and attributing failure to community deficiencies.
These traps do more than justify poor outcomes: they constitute ideological work that enables practitioners to reconcile failure with their development ideals, allowing the ideology of entrepreneurialism to persist not in spite of failure, but through it.
This paper foregrounds the role of intermediaries as ideological infrastructure. Positioned between funders and communities, practitioners translate, absorb, and stabilize externally imposed models at the point of practical friction. We show that their belief in entrepreneurship is not merely cognitive, but affective and moral, expressed through mundane everyday routines. This helps explain why recognition of failure does not lead to reform. Instead of prompting structural change, failure is reinterpreted through ideological frames that foreclose learning and legitimize persistence.
Our findings bridge scholarship on entrepreneurship as a tool for poverty alleviation and research on entrepreneurialism as ideology by theorizing how entrepreneurial ideals are operationalized, defended, and naturalized in everyday practice. We argue that the three ideological traps form a durable infrastructure that displaces accountability and masks systemic misalignment, sustaining models that fail those they intend to serve. Rather than viewing development failure as a technical problem of “scaling what works,” our study highlights the need for ideological reflexivity. Only by interrogating the meaning systems practitioners use to make sense of failure can we begin to imagine alternative, community-defined approaches to entrepreneurship that move beyond the cycle of imposition, disappointment, and deflection.