Entrepreneurship is broadening its horizons. Defi ned as risk-taking, business venturing, value creation, emergence and development of organisations and projects, and recognition and exploitation of opportunity, the entrepreneurial process is widening its scope and blurring boundaries between the profi t and nonprofi t sectors. A new, largely entrepreneurial spirit of capitalism has developed in the English-speaking world and many other spheres as a proactive response to globalisation and social fragmentation. Consonant with the transformations of the economic and political environment, this dynamic of innovation is not exclusively based on the Schumpeterian principle of creative destruction.
It has led economics scholar David Audretsch to put forth the concept of the entrepreneurial society' to account for this new, widely encompassing, network-based trend. Entrepreneurial activity may shape and structure the way people live together in society and share common values and representations. It may also be instrumental in the construction of specific forms of social ties, which could be strongly embedded in cultural areas, political economies and diverse contexts.

Paradoxically, the crisis that managerial organisations and economies across the world are currently facing has given new lustre to the heroic' fi gure of the individual entrepreneur. It has ascribed a more central role to the entrepreneur's works and deeds, while strongly emphasising the societal dynamics driven by families, diasporas, cluster regions, and social entrepreneurs'. The rise of entrepreneurship as an economic, social, and societal phenomenon thus refl ects deep changes in behaviour, practices and discourses that are at play within business and social systems. Entrepreneurship appears to be a process of governance and an original form of agency that provides consistency, strength, and the driving force to the entrepreneurial societies of the second post-modern and post-communist era.

The conference, whose working language will be English, will set out to question the socioeconomic role and function of entrepreneurship from a transdisciplinary and transnational perspective. Are we heading towards entrepreneurial societies rooted in specifi c cultural areas and structured around common forms of social ties? Is a more global entrepreneurial paradigm emerging and giving birth to various, interconnected entrepreneurial societies? How sustainable is this socioeconomic development model?