Jim Lei
Wanjun Lei (Jim) is a PhD Fellow at the Department of Business Humanities and Law, Copenhagen Business School. Jim’s research aims to develop philosophy as a critical approach that conceptually engages with empirical or theoretical business problems, while traversing multiple discursive spheres to generate creative insights.
Empirically, his interests encompass post-bureaucratic thinking around entrepreneurship and leadership, theological motifs in organizational practices, and grand socio-economic challenges such as digitalization and sustainability.
Philosophically, his focus has predominantly been on French and German thinkers along the genealogy of poststructuralism and/or postmodernism, including Bataille, Barthes, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Luhmann, and Nietzsche.
Rethinking alternative entrepreneurship: An inquiry into the interstitial positions of Agnès Varda’s cinematic entrepreneuring
While alternative perspectives on entrepreneurship have increasingly challenged its traditional economic
logic, less is known about how such alternatives are practiced, negotiated, and potentially reorganized by the very systems they aim to unsettle. This paper explores the emergence of interstitial artistic entrepreneuring as one such alternative, focusing on the cinematic practices of Agnès Varda. Building on existing organizational research at the intersections of entrepreneuring, art, and space, the study investigates how Varda’s documentaries mobilize ephemeral artistic gestures to create heterotopias in contested public landscapes. Through an analysis of four interstitial positions in Varda’s filmmaking—between (1) art and politics, (2) culture and nature, (3) fiction and fact, and (4) living and dying— the paper traces how Varda’s cinematic entrepreneuring unfolds as a precarious negotiation between organization and disorganization of art. Rather than asserting artistic autonomy or offering resistance to neoliberal capitalism, Varda’s films highlight the fragility of spatiotemporal constructs in her journey of cinematic entrepreneuring. The study contributes to ongoing debates on the limits of alternative entrepreneurship by showing how such alternatives emerge, dissolve, and reconfigure within the interstices of dis/organizational life.