Entrepreneurialism and entrepreneurial leadership have come to be viewed as essential to improving the capability of organisations to innovate and improve performance in the face of 21st-century demands and turbulent times. Innovation is typically seen as ‘the core capability for organizational success’ (Gratton, 2007, p 5). As one educational analyst puts it, entrepreneurialism is advocated as ‘a bet on human ingenuity’, its ‘secret’ of success being ‘to summon the best within us’ (Hess, 2010, p 151). Governments, pulled by the promise of entrepreneurialism as an invigorator of organisational success and by perceived pressures of global economic competition, put a high priority on enhancing enterprise. Creating a more enterprising society has become an integral part of the dominant policy discourse in the UK to plug what is seen as an ‘enterprise gap’ (HM Treasury, 2004, 2008), with a clarion call being issued most recently to ‘light the fires of entrepreneurialism in every corner of our country’ (Cameron, 2010).

In the post-bureaucratic organisation (Maravelias, 2009), organisational members are expected to behave as if they are entrepreneurs and ‘owners’ of the organisation they work for. As a consequence, a new organisational and policy actor is being fashioned: the entrepreneurial subject, acting ‘upon one's self and others in a specific, calculative and maximizing way’; and the employee is being ‘re-imagined … as a strange hybrid, a mixture between “employee” and “entrepreneur” – an “entreployee”’ (Weiskopf and Steyaert, 2009, pp 185, 186).