Deciphering the Enterprise Culture (Routledge Revivals)

Entrepreneurship, Petty Capitalism and the Restructuring of Britain

Roger Burrows

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138858893
• eBook ISBN: 9781317510635
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The idea of the 'enterprise culture' has been much vaunted over the last few decades: the growth of self-employment and small business ownership has been an important feature of the restructuring of the British economy. Because it is a concept that is difficult to evaluate, controversial and politically sensitive, social scientists were slow to analyse it. Consequently, it had been caricatured and many questions about its impact on society and the economy had been left unanswered.

This collection, which was first published in 1991, presents a critical analysis of the various manifestations of the enterprise culture. Drawing upon a range of research, it deals with a number of related topics. The result is a powerful analysis of the material and ideological role of the petty bourgeoisie in contemporary capitalism.

Its multidisciplinary approach, which contributions from leading scholars in the field, makes this book of interest to anyone wanting to make sense of the socio-economic restructuring of Britain.

Chapter one
Introduction:

entrepreneurship, petty capitalism and the restructuring of Britain

Roger Burrows

Introduction

This book attempts to explore the nature of the enterprise culture and to ponder its possible future. This is no easy task because although the notion is a popular and politically potent one, it remains analytically vague and does not succumb easily to social scientific interrogation (Pratt, 1990; Ritchie, Chapter 2).

However, whatever its exact character its emergence has been a recent one. As Dick Hobbs (Chapter 6) notes, before 1979 the term entrepreneur was one of abuse. Entrepreneurship was not mainstream activity but the province of exceptional, often obsessive individuals. Clearly, since 1979 things have changed. The discourse of the enterprise culture has become one of the major articulating principles of the age. As Ritchie (Chapter 2) argues, the political project of Thatcherism has involved an attempt to reformulate national history in relation to the fall and rise of a 'spirit of enterprise'.¹ Thus, the post-war years up until 1979 are characterized in terms of the creation of a socialistically inspired anti-enterprise culture leading to indulgence, degeneration and national demise. Thatchcritc policies are then presented as a painful but unavoidable 'cure' leading to a quasi-spiritual rebirth of enterprise leading to widespread industriousness, regeneration and hence national recovery.

Certainly it has been the case that Britain has been experiencing a profound social (Hamnett et al., 1989; McDowell et al., 1989), economic (Allen and Massey, 1988; Massey and Allen, 1988) and political (Anderson and Cochrane, 1989; Cochrane and Anderson, 1989) restructuring. However, how best to interpret these changes has been a source of much controversy.

A plethora of often flatly contradictory attempts to make some sort of sense out of the last decade or so have emerged within the social sciences: liberal (Piore and Sabel, 1984) and Marxian (Aglietta, 1979; Lipietz, 1987) analyses of changes in the dominant mode of production; liberal (Saunders, 1986: 289-351) and Marxian (Gamble, 1988) analyses of the supposed incompatibility between market capitalism and more socialized systems of collective consumption giving rise to the hegemony of the New Right; liberal (Hall, 1985) and Marxian (Mandel, 1980) analyses of economic long waves (Marshall, 1987); eclectic models claiming to be able to identify shifts from 'organized' towards more 'disorganized' forms of capitalism (Lash and Urry, 1987); more narrowly 'culturalist' representations of recent events, conceptualized in terms of shifts from 'modernism' towards 'postmodernism' (Foster, 1984); and so on.²

To be fair, it has been the case that this babble of theoretical voices has analytically foregrounded small enterprises and self-employment to an extent hitherto unheard of (Burrows and Curran, 1989; Curran, 1990; Rainnie, Chapter 9). On the one hand some accounts (Atkinson, 1984) have viewed small businesses and the self-employed as dependent, often in subcontracting roles, and largely providing work for a 'peripheral' workforce. On the other, a highly influential institutional economics literature claims to have located the beginnings of a 'second industrial divide' in capitalist societies involving the decline of Fordism and the rise of a post-Fordist system of 'flexible specialization' (Piore and Sabel, 1984). Both of these models have been largely discredited as being cither ideologically driven (Pollert, 1988a; 1988b) or hopelessly Utopian (Rainnie, Chapter 9; Rustin, 1989).

_{Agency, structure and the enterprise culture}

However, although it might be the case that small scale capital accumulation is now getting a fairer share of the social scientific limelight than it has received in the past, the more general category of 'enterprise' has hardly featured at all in any of the accounts of restructuring, much to the annoyance of the sociological New Right (Marsland, 1988: 219).

The reason for this is clear. Whenever one attempts to give the notion of the 'enterprise culture' any solidity, it melts (Ritchie, Chapter 2). As Ritchie (1987: 1-2) asks is it just

some handy little slogan? A simple shorthand way for describing developing small business activity? Some proverbial wisdom about such? Small businesses' new guiding spirit? Or just some well-promoted party political trademark? Maybe the latest populist catchphrase? A carefully sanitized euphemism which glosses over something else?

However, this sense of analytic frustration should not tempt us to ignore the notion out of hand. One can hardly not have noticed the emergence of the rhetoric of 'business-like' discourse emerging as a (if not the) central motif of the last decade. Not just in private sector organizations has the rhetoric of enterprise taken grip. In spheres as far removed as education (Ritchie, 1989), policing (Hobbs, 1988; Chapter 6), health and social services (Kelly, Chapter 7) and other previously non-market based organizations, the discourse of business is becoming the legitimating (if not always the operational) basis for organizational calculation.³ The social world is suddenly full of entrepreneurs, 'intrapreneurs', the 'new managerialism' and so on.

Thus far there have been few attempts to understand the affiliation between the materiality of the restructuring process and the discourse of the enterprise culture. Just what is the relationship between the profound structural changes that have been occurring within Britain and the discourse of the enterprise culture? Clearly, in order to approach this question we have to concern ourselves with one of the central problems of social theory – how best to conceptualize the relative causal efficacy of structures and discourses?

Not surprisingly, the few attempts that have been made to come to terms with this question have been political, rather than analytic, in nature. On the one hand, as we have already noted, the right have viewed the emergence of the discourse of enterprise as an exhilarating ideological force causing the massive socio-economic changes we have been witnessing over the last decade or so.⁴ On the other, many on the left have viewed its emergence as little more than the latest in a long line of mystifications designed to bamboozle the masses into a state of acquiescence whilst new forms of capitalist exploitation can take shape.⁵

Needless to say, the construction of such political and conceptual (idealist versus materialist) polarities has not been very productive analytically (Burrows and Butler, 1989: 355-61). The rightist (idealist) interpretation of restructuring offers a crudely 'agent-centred' model, whilst the leftist (materialist) interpretation offers an overly 'structure-centred' model. The objections to this dualism are now well documented (Bhaskar, 1979; Giddens, 1984); agent-centred models attempt to negate the reality of structural formations and power to problems of individual and psychological motivations (i.e. individual 'enterprise') whilst structure-centred models tend to negate the reality of human agency (in this case 'entrepreneurship') to problems of societal exigency. So if human agency is neither totally determining nor totally determined in relation to the enterprise culture, how should we proceed to conceptualize the relationship more adequately?

The old Marxian truism that people make their own history (agency), but not under circumstances of their own choosing (structure), is worth remembering here. Clearly, an analysis of both agency and structure is required if one is to make any real sense out of the situation. We must reject both structural determinist and voluntaristic theories, and replace them with a model of social processes in which social structures are recognized as being both the medium and the outcome of human agency, and as being both enabling and constraining at the same time. As Bhaskar (1986: 123) puts it,

If society is the condition of human agency, human agency is equally a condition for society, which, in its continuity, it continually reproduces and transforms . . . society is at once the ever present condition and continually reproduced outcome of human agency: this is the duality of structure.

The analytic utility of this perspective for analyses of the enterprise culture is illustrated if one considers spatial divisions of enterprise as represented by, for example, the spatial distribution of the petty bourgeoisie, (Burrows, Chapter 4) or, obviously related to this, the geography of new firm formation (Mason, Chapter 5).

Clearly, explanations which attempt to account for such a gross structural patterning in terms of the 'enterprise mindedness' of local populations are unlikely to be of much use. However, at the same time it is unlikely that we will be able to explain all of the variation in new firm formation rates by appeal to purely 'structural' factors: industrial structure; plant-size structure; occupational structure; and so on (Mason, Chapter 5). As the results from a series of recent 'locality' studies have demonstrated (Cooke, 1989), although Britain may have been experiencing a process of socio-economic restructuring which has its origins in global economic shifts (Harvey, 1989; Lash and Urry, 1987) some forms of local (if not purely individual) responses are possible which are able to mediate such processes.

Entrepreneurship – a concept almost as difficult to define as the enterprise culture itself⁶ – is thus clearly a function of individual, situational and social variables. For example, after an extensive review of the geographic literature, Mason (Chapter 5) suggests that the most important factors influencing variations in new firm formation rates across localities are: an industrial structure that already has an inclination towards small independent economic units; employees working in problem-solving occupations who have close contact with customers, and are thus likely to already possess some technical and market knowledge; a concentration of technically-progressive small firms; a high awareness of past small business activities; banks and other financial institutions sympathetic to the needs of small businesses; the availability of help and advice; an affluent population; and a social climate which favours individualism. The possibility of entrepreneurial praxis is thus clearly historically conditioned and will thus always be inherently spatially uneven.

Therefore, although the enterprise culture is important as a meaning system from which actors can draw different rationalizing 'vocabularies of motive' (Mills, 1940), to make sense of their situations (Ritchie, Chapter 2; Hobbs, Chapter 6) it possesses only a small residual explanatory status in accounts of the materiality of restructuring. This confusion over its nature and status is related to its articulation with the wider discourse of Thatcherism (Gamble, 1988; Hall, 1988; Jessop et al, 1988). This is not the place to get into an extended discussion of Thatcherism; however, a brief note is required.

Thatcherism, restructuring and the enterprise culture

It is often implicitly assumed that Thatcherism (within which we include the construction of the discourse of the enterprise culture) has been, in some sense, an independent variable which has had a causal impact upon a range of other dependent variables: small businesses; self-employment; trade unions; manufacturing industry; the public sector; education; welfare; belief systems; and so on. Indeed, the concept, based as it is upon such a gross personification, encourages a fetishism for an analytic individualism of the 'if only we could get rid of her things might get back to normal' kind.

Such analyses must be recognized as little more than wishful thinking. Things are much more complex, and this complexity can best be understood by keeping the concepts of restructuring and Thatcherism distinct (Urry, 1989: 94). There is no need to collapse into a crude economism in order to argue that it is more useful to consider Thatcherism as the political expression of deeper and much more fundamental shifts in the national and the international socio-economic system, than it is to view it as a political force with its own specificity, possessing the sorts of causal ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: entrepreneurship, petty capitalism and the restructuring of Britain
• 2 Enterprise cultures: a frame analysis
• 3 Self-employment and entrepreneurship: notes on two problematic concepts
• 4 A socio-economic anatomy of the British petty bourgeoisie: a multivariate analysis
• 5 Spatial variations in enterprise: the geography of new firm formation
• 6 Business as a master metaphor: working class entrepreneurship and business-like policing
• 7 The enterprise culture and the welfare state: restructuring the management of the health and personal social services
• 8 In search of small firm industrial relations
• 9 Small firms: between the enterprise culture and 'New Times'
• Index