The Culture of Enterprise in Neoliberalism

Specters of Entrepreneurship

Tomas Marttila

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138920743
• eBook ISBN: 9781136208799
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Political Economy
• Index: Economics

This book provides an empirical study of the increasing importance of the concept of the entrepreneur in the context of the neoliberal cultural paradigm. Using the theoretical framework of the post-structural discourse theory and methods of qualitative discourse analysis, the book describes the changes in political discourse that resulted in the increasing dominance of the figure of the entrepreneur after the late 1980s.

1   Specters of Entrepreneurship

Marx and Engels’ “The Manifesto of the Communist Party” begins in the following famous manner: “A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have united in the holy alliance to exorcise this spectre. The Pope and the Czar, Metternich, and Quizot, the radicals of France, and the police-spies of Germany” (2003: 125). It is no accident that communism should be called a specter. After all, what the opponents of communism exorcise are the presumed expressions and manifestations of communism in the form of opposition parties and the adversaries of power. Recently, another, this time celebrated, “spectre of entrepreneur” has appeared in Europe. Governments informed by the neoliberal principles of rolling back of the state, marketization of the public sector, transfer of responsibilities from political authorities to communities, and individual subjects have considered the entrepreneur a partner that sustains the re-orientation of the government.

Characteristic of the entrepreneurial government is how earlier collective objectives of economic growth, social security, and employment are outsourced from political institutions to enterprises and individual subjects, trusted to possess endemic entrepreneurial capacities (cf. Rose 1996: 165). Also, markets have gained an unforeseen importance following certain convictions that they enhance competition—and thus productivity—between different enterprising entities and increase the efficiency in resource utilization and allocation (Du Gay 1996: 183; Osborne and Gaebler 1993). The entrepreneurial government is also accompanied by the so-called “capability approach,” which replaces, at least partly, the collective responsibility for individual social security and employment by the individualization of that responsibility (cf. Lessenich 2003a; Salais 2003; Schmid 2004; Trubek and Mosher 2003). The emphasis on the individuals’ capability to be active in the government of their own social security draws on the neoliberal notion of the endemic capacity and interest of individual subjects to realize their personal life projects. However, it remains a collective responsibility to teach and advise individual subjects how they should conduct themselves so as to make the most use of their personal freedom. It is in this context that we encounter the unprecedented importance of the entrepreneur. In the framework of the entrepreneurial government, entrepreneur has become one of the projected role models and scripts of subjectivity in the form of which individuals are asked to make both a contribution to political government and to engage in active self-management of their own social welfare and employment (Bröckling 2007; Burchell 1993; Rose 1996b).

A curious aspect of the unprecedented importance of entrepreneur is how the earlier, very distinctive characteristics defined by economic theories begin to dissolve. Contrary to Schumpeter’s (1961, 1928), von Mises’ (1980a, 1980b), and Kirzner’s (1973) notions of the entrepreneur as founder or innovator of an enterprise, the entrepreneur has turned into a metaphor that now refers to a vast number of entrepreneur-like social practices. Within the context of the entrepreneurial government, for instance, entrepreneur has become a general role model for the way social subjects should conduct themselves in order to maximize their own social security and employability. Entrepreneur has become a concept with considerable contentual variations because it could relate equally well to business founders as to “school superintendents,” “principals,” “airport managers,” “welfare commissioners,” or “labour secretaries” (Osborne and Gaebler 1993). The entrepreneur has become a specter¹ because instead of referring to a particular and distinctive social practice (founding enterprises, initiating economic innovations), it has turned into a general dictum or ethos for the way in which a number of different social practices should be carried out. As Bröckling (2007) notices, the transformation of the entrepreneur into a general role model of social subjectivity basically transforms all subjects into “entrepreneurs of themselves.” A general construction of the entrepreneur involves rather complex processes of metaphoric construction, or sprectralization, which opens for projecting it on a number of unprecedented activities, projects, institutions, and social roles.

The contemporary spectral being of the entrepreneur can be illustrated by describing a passage/scene in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: Prince of Denmark (2008), in which the “ghost” of Hamlet’s father, the dead king, re-appears to first the guards and then his son (and thus the audience as well) in current time. Not recognizing the ghost at first, one of the guards wonders:

What art thou that usurp’st this time of night,

Together with the fair and warlike form

In which the majesty of buried Denmark did sometimes march?

By heaven I charge thee speak. (Shakespeare 2008: 89)

Explaining itself, the ghost advises Hamlet, “I am thy father’s spirit,” defining its purpose in manifesting itself to Hamlet as:

Doomed for a certain term to walk the night,

And for the day confined to fast in fires,

Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature

Are burnt and purged away (Shakespeare 2008: 117f)

The condition of the ghost is one of conceptual indeterminacy. Agamben (2007: 91) describes that it is essential for the being of a ghost to “appear threateningly … as an unstable signifier par excellence, which can assume to the diachronic signified of a perpetual wandering.” In the case of Hamlet, the appearance of the ghost leads to the distortion of the existing, pre-supposedly natural, and normal order of the state as it becomes haunted by the suppressed past. Specters generate disorder in the social edifice since their sudden appearance puts the continuity of the present social order in question (Agamben 2007: 91, 95). What the ghost of Hamlet’s father symbolizes are the past socio-historic conditions on which the present state of Denmark is founded. The ghost of Hamlet’s father casts the social order into turmoil by refusing its own historical death and confinement to the past as separated from the present exercise of rule by Hamlet’s uncle. Haunting now the subjects of the new social order, the dead king manifests the unsound historical origins of the present reign. In general terms, the present-day entrepreneur and the ghost of Hamlet’s father have a number of similarities. First of all, both the ghost of the dead king and the entrepreneur manifest the conceptual openness of both terms. How could it otherwise be possible to comprehend that the meaning of the dead king and of the entrepreneur can change from one moment to the next? For Derrida, the spectral being of the objects of cognition, that is their conceptual indeterminacy, is possible only against the backdrop of the ontological indeterminacy of significations (Derrida 1981: 292). In terms of Althusser (1971), both the emergence of the ghost of the dead king and the projection of the entrepreneur to a number of unprecedented social activities and functions manifests a process of overdetermination through which new meanings are transferred to an existing object.²

Overdetermination is not a unilinear but rather a bidirectional process of transference of meaning involving both the concept, which is being transferred, and the objects affected by the transference. In the context of the entrepreneurial government, an entrepreneur is no longer the founder or innovator of a business but a general idea of how enterprises and individual subjects should get things done. In Hamlet, the dead king of Denmark is no longer the retired “king” but the victim of a terrible crime. The objects affected by the transference of the meaning appear in a different light when associated with the entrepreneur and the dead king, respectively. In the context of the entrepreneurial government, for instance, the unemployed are no longer involuntary victims of the market economy entitled to social welfare, but subjects who should discover their intrinsic entrepreneurial spirits in order to make themselves employable. Observed against the backdrop of the ghost of the dead king, the existing rule of the state of Denmark appears as something rotten. However, Just like the ghost of the dead king became readable and understood after it had declared—“I am thy father’s spirit”—so does it become possible to associate entrepreneurship to a new set of social practices only when we have learned that “[t]he true meaning of the word [of the entrepreneur] is broader … than was known before” (Osborne and Gaebler 1993: xix). These kinds of re-significations are by no means innocent and without normative and ethical implications. After all, the new meanings of the entrepreneur and the dead king open up for new kinds of social agency. Just as the ghost of Hamlet’s father follows a dictum—“[r]evenge his foul and most unnatural murder” (Shakespeare 2008: 118)—the social subjects associated with entrepreneurial capacities are expected to have an almost “magical effect on economics” (Greene et al. 2008: 3) or to carry out public sector reforms (Osborne and Gaebler 1993: 115).

Against the backdrop of the initial discussion, the specter of entrepreneur can be described to consist of the following elements. First, even though the entrepreneur already had a particular meaning—as defined above all in the economic theories—the neoliberal entrepreneurial government changed the meaning of entrepreneur through its promotion to a general role model for the social subjects’ conduct of themselves. Second, there was a change in the meaning of things described as entrepreneurial characteristics, properties, and objectives. In both regards, we encounter a bidirectional process of opening of meaning and anew closure, or fixation, of meaning. My argument that entrepreneur is a specter denotes this process of continuous and subsequent stages of re-definition of what an entrepreneur might be exactly and what kinds of things might be possible to attribute entrepreneurial characteristics. However, the spectral being of the entrepreneur not only refers to this considerable process of re-conceptualization but also to the ontological possibility of re-conceptualization as such. Against the backdrop of the deconstructivist and post-foundational ontology of meaning, as presented further in Chapter 3, the fascinating thing about the recent construction of the entrepreneur is not the fact that its meaning and range of social applications has changed, but rather that the more extended and general meaning of the entrepreneur as a role model of social subjectivity has become a normal way of thinking about the entrepreneur. The specter of entrepreneur refers therefore to three different processes of opening, closure, and retention of meaning. However, yet another aspect must be taken into account. Contrary to Jones and Spicer’s (2009: 37) argument that the entrepreneur does not have any clearly definable meaning nowadays, recent research on entrepreneurship observes a considerable enrichment of the ideas related to entrepreneurship (see Chapter 2). It appears therefore reasonable to argue that an extension of the meaning constitutes the fourth aspect in the spectral being of the entrepreneur. Furthermore, it is this extension of the meaning of entrepreneur that has made it possible to relate to a number of unprecedented social practices, institutions, and social roles of a remarkably recent date (Hodenius 1997; Marquand 1992; Reckwitz 2006). In particular, the so-called Foucauldian “governmentality studies” (Bröckling 2007; du Gay 1996; Opitz 2007) have retraced the historical origins of the recent idealization of the entrepreneur to the increasing predominance of the neoliberal rationality of political government. In other words, the historical development of the entrepreneur toward a general role model of social subjectivity reflects another, more pervasive and fundamental process of neoliberalization of the political rationality.

There is nothing new about the cultural hegemony of neoliberalism and how its ideological edifice has come to guide the thoughts and strategies of political agents worldwide. However, the mechanisms, logics, and historical stages underlying the increasing hegemony of neoliberalism have been analyzed to a lesser extent. The primary objective of this study is to detect in empirical terms how the entrepreneur as the neoliberal role model of social subjectivity has not only been established as an objective fact, but also how it has been disseminated across different social sectors, in which it has become the dominant way of thinking of how things should get done. Of course, this aspiration is ambitious. Its realization needs either a rather high degree of abstraction, to account for the dissemination of neo-liberalism over space and time, or an empirical case study in a particular spatiotemporal context, in which these particular case-transgressing logics and processes of cultural dissemination become observable. The focus of the following study is constrained to Swedish political discourse since the latter is a case in point of the spectral logic of being of the entrepreneur. Moreover, considering the rapid increase in the influence of neoliberalism on political rationalities and strategies (e.g., Anderson 2005; Blomqvist & Rothstein 2000; Svensson 2001) and against the backdrop of its history as a social democratic welfare state, Sweden represents a rather counterintuitive and even surprising context for the dissemination of the ideas of entrepreneurship. Moreover, not only has the entrepreneur been the object of rather rapidly increasing appreciation, but the meaning of entre-preneurship has changed and become disseminated beyond the private business and economic system. A typical statement of entrepreneur in the mid-1990s argued that “a good climate for enterprises and entrepreneurs will strengthen Sweden’s long-term competitive ability” (Government Bill 1995/1996: 207, p.11). Less than a decade later, entrepreneur had become a rather general role model for how to get things done. Indeed, more or less every person across different social spheres was considered a possible site of materialization of the entrepreneurial specter. A policy paper published in 2003 by NUTEK, the agency for regional and economic growth, voiced suspicions that:

Entrepreneurs can be found everywhere in society. To deal with problems actively and find solutions, to turn ideas into actions or to be entrepreneurial in general–these are some characteristic traits of an entrepreneur. One who just does! It can be at school, on construction sites, in health care, at university or anywhere else. Some start businesses. Others mobilize their entrepreneurial potential at work as employees. Others develop ideas on improvements and innovations. They all contribute to welfare and growth. (NUTEK 2003: 6; italics added)³

According to this statement, everybody who “just does” and avoids satisfaction with existing conditions fulfills the characteristics required to make oneself an entrepreneur. However, a closer look at the text reveals that becoming an entrepreneur is not without ethical implications. After all, one should not become an entrepreneur for the sake of individual satisfaction, but because entrepreneurs “contribute to welfare and growth.” In other words, what seems to be a statement free from any subjection and moralization actually performs a considerable disciplinary function because it not only appreciates active subjects, but it also postulates that activation of oneself on behalf of the collective objectives of welfare and growth is best achieved when subjects conduct themselves in the manner of entrepreneurs. In other words, the above statement defines the societal importance of the entrepreneur by means of opposing entrepreneurs to non-entrepreneurs and activity to passivity. This asymmetrical order of distinctions is founded and justified by the reference to welfare and growth. Derrida’s deconstructive approach suggests that these kinds of distinctions are constitutive of all meanings. Regarded in this way, the transformation of the entrepreneur from an economic agent with a rather limited economical function to a general, more or less society-wide role model of social subjectivity must be understood as a result of numerous moments of revision and re-signification of the actual meanings, utilities, and functions of entrepreneurs.

The following study departs from the deconstructive difference-theoretical perspective on the social construction of the entrepreneur and as a genealogical analysis discovers both different historical stages in the social construction of the entrepreneur and different moments of change that paved the way for the subsequent new meaning. Each of these historical sequences contained its particular specter (i.e., a vision) of the true meaning of the entrepreneur as based on a set of beliefs about necessities, rationalities, consequences, and promises associated with entrepreneurial behavior. The indeterminacy of the concept of entrepreneur described by the difference-theoretical perspective opens an indissoluble gap between the actual and potential meanings of entrepreneur along with the possibility to wonder whether the entrepreneur might actually be something else than has been assumed so far. Opitz (2007: 104) has argued that entrepreneur might actually function—in terms of Deleuze and Guattari (2003)—as a “chiffré,” that is, a point of projection and condensation of various meanings. In this regard, it would be the immanent conceptual openness of the chiffré of entrepreneur, which explains both the considerable diachronic variation of the meaning of the entrepreneur and the possibility of its establishment as a widely appreciated role model of social subjectivity. Now this deconstructive point of view is certainly helpful for understanding the conceptual openness of the entrepreneur, and yet it explains nothing about the equally numerous attempts at not only anew pinpointing, but actually also at stabilizing and reproducing a particular definition of entrepreneur. The following study will therefore have to analyze both the openings and closures in the genealogy of the entrepreneur and interpret the development of the entrepreneur toward a general role model of subjectivity while looking back on the overall process of historical transformation.

The focus of the study is confined to one case (Sweden), one particular social domain (political government), and a historical period of time covering 1991–2004. Despite these restrictions of the analysis, the achieved empirical results are believed to be of such general and generalizable nature that the present case study can be well compared to similar developments in, for instance, the Thatcherite culture of enterprise in the 1980s (e.g., du Gay 1991; Heelas & Morris 1992; Rose 1996) and the consequences of the recent German labor market reforms (e.g., Bröckling 2003; Pühl 2003). In general, the Swedish case is believed to reflect a more universal, nonlinear, and hybrid pervasion of neoliberalism. However, an answer to the question of whether this is the case must be left to further case studies. Chapter 2 starts with an overview of the recent research of entrepreneurship and postulates the necessity to adapt a social constructionist point of view on the social functions, utilities, and practices associated with the entrepreneur. Thereafter, the focus moves along a short culturalist conception that interprets different meanings of the entrepreneur resulting from various mutually distinctive cultural systems and locates the recent idealization of the entrepreneur in the particular ethos of the neoliberal culture of enterprise. The concluding part of the chapter supplies a number of different social forms of interaction involved in the social construction of the entrepreneur and thereafter revisits the research questions and the overall structure of the book.

2 The Culture of Enterprise

Over the last few decades, different scientific disciplines have established a remarkable number of accounts to elucidate the terms of entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurialism (e.g., Blum and Leibbrand 2001; Heelas and Morris 1992: 16; Henrekson and Roine 2007; Smyth 2004: 440). Despite this prolific record, Jones and Spicer (2009) have noticed, among others, that entrepreneurship literature has tried somewhat in vain to determine what entrep...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• 1. Specters of Entrepreneurship
• 2. The Culture of Enterprise
• 3. Discourse, Difference, Meaning
• 4. Political Discourse
• 5. Discourse Analysis
• 6. Liberal-Conservative Politics for Functioning Market Economy: 1991–1994
• 7. Social-Democratic Politics for Full Employment: 1994–1997
• 8. Securing the Welfare in the KBE: 1997–2004
• 9. The Specters of Entrepreneurship
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index