A bureaucrat’s journey from technocrat to entrepreneur through the creation of adhocracies

How we understand entrepreneurship is a function of the stories we tell. This article uses insights from process theory to explore the ways in which an entrepreneur can employ a story to mobilize others to shed conflicting viewpoints to converge with the abstract. In this story, regulation as a reification of past procedures did not fully account for organizational realities of mailroom inspections conducted by the military post office, so an appeal to foundational values was adopted to alter the shared vision of future potentiality and overcome bureaucratic barriers through the creation of adhocracies. As a result of overcoming interorganizational boundaries, a technocrat became an entrepreneur by changing the view of stakeholders from a fixed audience to active co-authors during the spawning of adhocracies. The creation of adhocracies in this story is explored through an autoethnographic layered account, which is a storytelling approach that mirrors the co-construction of the narratives found within this paper’s vignettes. The understanding of entrepreneurship provided in this paper challenges commonly held assumptions of entrepreneurship, in addition to corporate, organizational and public service entrepreneurship, as well as the methods and writing styles to explore these concepts.