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THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF
ENTREPRENEURSHIP

The Anthropology of Entrepreneurship provides a comprehensive overview of the unique

contribution from anthropology to the field of entrepreneurship studies.
Insights from anthropology illuminate the wider socio-cultural implications of
entrepreneurialism, a moral order and social practice that is profoundly shaping con-
temporary society. Revisiting classic works in anthropology from a new angle, this
book provides an exciting introduction to diverse conceptual framings of economic
agency. The author also examines a wide range of 21st century ethnographies from the
Global South, alongside his own research from across Europe. Readers meet ordinary
people struggling with new social landscapes, including neoliberal urbanism, informal
credit, heritage marketing, social enterprising, gift competition, and silicon utopias.
With sensitivity to different theoretical, temporal, and ethnographic perspectives, the
author presents a thorough cultural history of the entrepreneur—this ubiquitous, yet
ambivalent contemporary character.
This important volume will be of interest to scholars and students of anthro-
pology, business studies and other related social sciences.

Richard Pfeilstetter is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of

Seville.
THE ANTHROPOLOGY
OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Cultural History, Global
Ethnographies, Theorizing Agency

Richard Pfeilstetter
First published 2022
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 Richard Pfeilstetter
The right of Richard Pfeilstetter to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
Cover photo: La Pescadilla que se muerde la cola (2013, detail) by Veredas
López.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Pfeilstetter, Richard, author.
Title: The anthropology of entrepreneurship : cultural history, global
ethnographies, theorizing agency / Richard Pfeilstetter.
Description: First Edition. | New York : Routledge, 2022. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021024116 | ISBN 9780367424398 (Hardback) |
ISBN 9780367407483 (Paperback) | ISBN 9780367824136 (eBook)
Subjects: LCSH: Economic anthropology. | Entrepreneurship. | Ethnology.
Classification: LCC GN448 .P44 2022 | DDC 306.3--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021024116

ISBN: 978-0-367-42439-8 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-367-40748-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-82413-6 (ebk)

DOI: 10.4324/9780367824136

Typeset in Bembo
by Taylor & Francis Books
Für Veredas, Ana und Pedro
CONTENTS

Preface and acknowledgements ix

Introduction 1

PART I
The social life of entrepreneurship 11
1 Entrepreneurialism: The first 50 years 19
2 Talking entrepreneurship 35
3 Entrepreneurship studies and entrepreneurial academia 43

PART II
The history of entrepreneurship in anthropology 55
4 Agency-driven social change 59
5 Culture theories of entrepreneurship 73
viii Contents

PART III
Global contemporary entrepreneurialism 91
6 The social in entrepreneurship 95
7 Oppressive entrepreneurship 107
8 Entrepreneurialization 118
Conclusions 127

References 133
Index 145
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It is the fate of many authors that they can only mention the latest catastrophe in
the preface. Like the Chernobyl disaster in Ulrich Beck’s book Risk Society for
example, or the 2008 financial crisis in Hann and Hart’s Economic Anthropology.
Besides thousands of daily deaths, the corona virus pandemic produces new global
scenarios of inclusion and exclusion. But it does not put the rationale of this book
into question. Before and after, entrepreneurs in business, politics, culture, and
science are expected to find solutions to the latest pressing societal challenges. This
book is about the sociocultural conditions of possibility of such a collective
expectation. How does faith in—or disillusion with—creative, individual, and
rational agency play out in ordinary life?
I have been concerned with those kinds of questions since starting my PhD in
2007. To some extent, this book is about what I have learned so far. Along the
way, I have benefitted from many people and institutions, and I can only mention
a few of them here. Discussions, fieldwork, and writing on this project were
enhanced by inspiring encounters at the Departments of Anthropology in Munich,
Berkeley, Manchester, Oxford, and the LSE, all kindly hosting me as a guest
researcher. Thanks to the European Commission’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Actions, I could make long-term visits to organizations in Berlin, Glasgow, and
Vienna, some of which are presented in this book. The Cajasol Foundation sup-
ported my PhD research in Spain and Germany, where I gathered the first mate-
rials for this project. Four anonymous reviewers for this book—and many others of
my previously published papers—helped me to develop a balanced argument over
time. I have included condensed or modified versions of some of these articles
here. Subsections in chapters two and four draw on data from my paper “Mann
der Tat, Enterprise Culture and Ethno-preneurs” published in Sociologus. “Doing
Good and Selling Goods” published in Voluntas is the source of a section in chapter
six. The data on Manchester in chapter seven is taken from “Silicon Utopias”
x Preface and acknowledgements

(Suomen Antropologi) and “Startup Communities” (Compaso). A very compressed

version of my paper “Heritage Entrepreneurship” published in the International Journal
of Heritage Studies is included in a subsection in chapter eight. Taylor & Francis, Springer,
and Duncker & Humblot have kindly allowed me to reproduce some of my thoughts
here.
My special thanks goes to all informants, colleagues, and students who have
influenced this book in any way or appear in its pages. Against tradition, I do not
want to single some people out. I might risk forgetting somebody or reveal iden-
tities without consent. Those of you who personally know me and read this: thank
you for your support or collaboration. Without you, this project would not have
been possible. To my family—thank you for your encouragement. Finally, my
gratitude goes to the anthropology editor of the Press. She and her team believed
in this project early on and helped me to move successfully through the many
stages up to publication.
INTRODUCTION

Forbes magazine recently put it this way: “Entrepreneurship is one of the hottest
topics in economic development today, and cities, States, regions, and countries all
over the world are trying to build entrepreneurship ecosystems” (2014). The
World Economic Forum encourages the idea of social entrepreneurship to
“improve the state of the world”. The UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization is promoting education in entrepreneurship. The European Union
urges member States to foment “entrepreneurial culture”. Corporations finance
university chairs in entrepreneurship, multinationals give prizes to young entre-
preneurs, and banking groups are relaxing the loan criteria for entrepreneurs on
behalf of governments. Popular literature on self-marketing and self-employment is
on the rise. Here are some recent headlines from the magazine Entrepreneur: “How
to become a millionaire by age 30”; “Ready for greatness?”, or “How to stay sane
during a crowd-funding campaign”. What can anthropology tell us about such
developments? Isn’t this discipline known for asking other, much larger questions,
like: What makes us human?
In his number one world bestseller on the history of humankind, Harari (2014) starts
by explaining the evolutionary difference between sapiens and his fellow animals. He
explains this difference with the “legend of the Peugeot”. It is the unique language of
sapiens that allowed him/her to imagine things that do not exist, like Peugeot and other
corporations without physical substance. Besides gossip—Harari argues—collective
imaginations of this kind were crucial. It allowed large scale cooperation required for
war, trade, or “entrepreneurship” in the case of the invention of the limited liability
company (2014: 33). I am interested in pointing to some patterns of the occasional
appearance of this notion in Harari’s popular book. Entrepreneurship and Peugeot are
obviously secondary examples that Harari puts forward to illustrate that collective ima-
ginations were the crucial evolutionary advantage of sapiens. He is not interested in
studying entrepreneurship or corporations. Nevertheless, entrepreneurship is framed
DOI: 10.4324/9780367824136-1
2 Introduction

here as an example of an important evolutionary social pattern of humankind.

Entrepreneurship makes us different to other species because it requires believing
in things such as corporations, credit, or the market. Thus, Harari’s surprising
entrepreneurship-Peugeot-example, explaining human mythical thinking to the
popular science audience, comes with an inbuilt ethnocentric bias. This bias con-
sists of framing Western entrepreneurship as a shared evolutionary behaviour of all
humans. To some extent, Harari naturalizes entrepreneurship by presenting it as an
ahistorical and innate human trait. In this book, I explore the universal, but also the
particular about entrepreneurship across the globe, both historically (Part II) and
contemporarily (Part III). I will bring the concept out of the shadows of unre-
flected and naturalized assumptions, like those of Harari. I will show that there is a
specific anthropological tradition within the concert of socio-scientific approaches
to this topic (Part I). This scholarship avoids simplistic and unreflected assumptions
about humans as per se entrepreneurial.
A more sinister, yet non-ethnocentric image of the entrepreneur appears in
Ruben Andersson’s outstanding book No Go World (2019), that I reviewed
recently for the American Anthropologist (2020b). In his account of the spread of
“danger zones” across Mali, Somalia or Afghanistan, the award-winning, Oxford-
based anthropologist argues that Western “remote interveners” create the risk they
are supposedly fighting. The crucial problem is “fear” and its spread is “systemic”.
Yet within this “system framework” that characterizes Andersson’s book, he con-
ceives of certain agents that can take advantage of the system. They play its game
well. For example, they know that “in order to be rich you have to threaten” as
one of Andersson’s informants in Mali put it (2019: 176). Those “fear entrepre-
neurs” practice a “reflexive dangerization” and may both be large and small (2019:
204). For instance, there are “power brokers and entrepreneurs in putative danger
zones, who know how to satisfy every dangerous desire as they court external
donors and interveners” (2019: 18). In addition, there are governmental “fear
peddlers”—like Donald Trump—marketing “snake merchants” and ordinary Mal-
ians that are “pitching donors” (2019: 16, 176–7). Andersson’s book is a good
example to illustrate the widespread anthropological employment of the concept. It
also shows the notions’ great interest for making sense of the world we live in. Yet
it also is representative of its often utterly undertheorized employment. Thus, both
popular anthropology bestsellers and cutting-edge expert monographs often tend
to frame entrepreneurship as a “native term”. There is little interest in the theore-
tical breadth and ethnographical depth with which it is addressed conceptually
elsewhere.
Thus, this book speaks to the anthropological community, demonstrating how
entrepreneurship permeates both past and present of the discipline and that it has
the potential of moving again—like in the 1970s (see Chapter 4)—from a niche
topic to a central disciplinary vocabulary. On the other hand, most academic
experts and students of entrepreneurship who might be reading these lines have no or
little background in anthropology. They are often eager to complement main-stream
research on start-ups with contextualizing frameworks provided by critical studies,
 Preface and acknowledgements 3

such as anthropology (see introduction to Part II). This book is also a handbook for
that purpose, diving deep into the intellectual history and present of anthropological
theory and ethnography of entrepreneurship. While ethnographic methods and
entrepreneurship studies will be at the core, this book has many connecting points
for audiences interested in (economic) agency theory, work sociology, neoliberal-
ism’s history, advertising language, cultural, gender, development, organizational,
postcolonial, and even technology studies. Ultimately, those relatively few
anthropologists and ethnographers working specifically on entrepreneurship,
innovation, or creativity, many of whom will probably find themselves cited here,
can expect an unprecedented attempt at pulling together many different debates,
sources, and thought traditions. Aware of the longstanding history of the anthro-
pology of entrepreneurship, they might agree that this history has not yet been told
consistently. Here is a first argument to start a conversation about how the field of
the anthropology of entrepreneurship might be best conceived of and how the
many puzzle-pieces could be brought fruitfully together. In short, I try to trace a
productive balance between a general introduction and a specialized expert
monograph, being very specific and very general at the same time, as one of the
reviewers observed.
What is entrepreneurship? In contrast to the all-out enthusiasm of corporations
and administrations cited at the beginning of this introduction, among academics,
the term has become “almost trite gloss for the ills of today’s precarious global
economy” (Freeman 2014: 18). Others, like Anna Tsing for example, understand
entrepreneurship as a basic pattern of interconnectivity or “friction”.

Rather than assume we know exactly what global capitalism is, even before it
arrives, we need to find out how it operates in friction. […] In tracing the
connections through which entrepreneurship operates, the cultural work of
encounter emerges as formative (Tsing 2005: 12).

This polarizing success of the notion can be explained—paradoxically—by its

very ambivalence. Entrepreneurship allows for positive and negative framings, lofty
generalizations as well as box-ticking accountability. Ordinary meanings range from
risk-taking mentality to business creation. There are locally specific connotations as
well (where is entrepreneurship?). In Costa Rica, emprendedores are thought to be
positively concerned with the community, besides being innovative and creative
(Schwittay 2011: S78), while in Spain we can find young business owners feeling
uncomfortable with the antisocial impression that might resonate with that notion,
preferring to think of themselves as autónomos instead (Escribano et al. 2019; see also
Chapter 2). The Indian State shifted from condemning to mandating entrepre-
neurship over the course of a few decades (Irani 2019). In German—my mother
tongue—there is no clear-cut translation at all. Nevertheless, the Unternehmer in
the writings of Joseph Schumpeter, Max Weber, Karl Polanyi or Karl Marx is
often cited as the first socio-scientific concept of entrepreneurship (see Chapter 4).
While the term is normally translated into English as businessman or entrepreneur,
4 Introduction

it literally means something similar to “someone who is undertaking”. Of course, I

could now turn to even more ways of defining entrepreneurship. Some have found
this problem worthy of quantitative empirical analysis in its own right, like
Gartner (1990). For this book’s purposes, it is enough to provide a first, rela-
tively simple working definition with some anthropological undertone. The
entrepreneur is supposed to be an agentive individual or economic agent,
giving inventive responses to structural constraints. Entrepreneurial sociality is
an interaction between humans who conceive of themselves as individuals granted free
will and choice. The ideology that places individualism above other forms of sociality
might be called entrepreneurialism. Harari’s way of introducing the term—mentioned
earlier in this introduction—comes very close to such an ideological bias. In
Chapter 8, I introduce the notion of entrepreneurialization. I think about it as the
counterintuitive assignment of agency to ideas, things or people that are usually
conceived as unchanging or stable. For the sake of readability, throughout the
book I avoid such nominalistic exercises of definition (or endless footnotes).
Instead, in the following chronological outline of the book’s content, you will
hopefully come across diverse and comprehensible ways to grasp the many socio-
cultural meanings of the concept.
This book introduces the field of entrepreneurship from an unconventional
viewpoint, by looking at the ways in which ideas of micro-economic agency shape
ordinary life. Far beyond the business schools, entrepreneurship programs, research,
and support agencies have become an omnipresent feature around the world. In
that context, starting up a risky business is a very common understanding of
entrepreneurship. In contrast, this book explores a different perspective on micro-
economic agency (Chapter 4), enterprise culture and entrepreneurial personhood
(Chapter 5) developed by anthropologists. The book investigates the wider socio-
historical background of the “Age of Entrepreneurialism” (Part I) and discusses
anthropology’s contribution to understand entrepreneurship as a distinctively
human phenomenon (Part II). In-depth case studies—conducted by fellow
anthropologists, but also taken from various of my own projects in Spain, Austria,
and the UK—provide contemporary examples for qualitative-participatory research
into entrepreneurialism across time, regions, and social milieus (Part III).
Part I of the book is called “The social life of entrepreneurship”. The title aims
to capture different social dimensions and effects attributed to this notion—ethical,
political, or semantical, for example. But the life metaphor can also be understood
in terms of contradictory conditions of living. Is enterprising a universal human
capability or is it a personality, space, time, or culture-contingent behaviour? Is
entrepreneurship out there to be discovered or is it an invention of the human
mind? How can academia study entrepreneurialism in an unbiased way, when
competition, inventiveness, and rationality are at the very heart of its own work-
ings? In order to bring these philosophical questions down to earth, I introduce the
famous case of the native north American potlatch ceremonies of the northwest
coast. This ethnographic case triggered a larger debate about the nature of eco-
nomic agency among anthropologists throughout the 20th century. Namely, why
 Preface and acknowledgements 5

do humans compete by destroying valuables? The different ways in which this

economic puzzle was addressed by different scholars—Franz Boas, Marcel Mauss,
Jacques Derrida, David Harvey—gives an introductory hint towards the semantic,
historic, and sociological backdrop of entrepreneurialism. Economic agency is
attributed to things, to work, to social relationships or to words, according to dif-
ferent anthropological readings of the potlatch.
In Chapter 1, I start reviewing some important works of the second half of the
20th century, concerning the individual and its relation to labour in late capitalism.
I will be discussing some big names of poststructuralist economic sociology, such as
Michel Foucault, Ulrich Beck, and Richard Sennett. In the second part, I shift
attention to the most recent trends of the early 21st century. I concentrate on
postcolonial and feminist scholarship from a new generation of women whose
persuasive, reflexive and ethnographic accounts focus on neoliberal subjects beyond
the white male worker or boss. Thus, I tell the success story of neoliberlism in the
West between the 1970s and 1990s through the eyes of male sociological classics.
Their guiding categories are the culture of individualism, liberal governance, and
flexible labour markets. In contrast, entrepreneurial others and their dilemmas
experienced and reported by female ethnographers are at the heart of the more
contemporary entrepreneurialism that I describe. Here, gendered work disparities,
ethno-entrepreneurial labelling and the rising global middle classes are more pro-
minent analytical tools. Thus, the chapter traces critical social scholarship over the
last 50 years, focusing on different labels and scenarios to explain a new or specific
form of economic agency—the neoliberal (Gershon 2011). Different points in time
are the backdrop of neoliberal agency scholarship, from Thatcherism to the post-
cold-war era, from the dotcom-bubble to the 2008 financial crisis. A shared broad
concern, however, is neoliberalism’s interplay with ordinary people’s lives or
agency, both at home and abroad. At the end of the chapter, I will turn to a recent
provocative argument about the rise of “bullshit jobs” by David Graeber. Many
white-collar jobs are not quite as efficient, entrepreneurial, and flexible as theory
has it. This point allows me to critique some of the common places of the sociol-
ogy of work presented earlier in the chapter and to speculate about possible
entrepreneurial futures.
Chapter 2 moves away from the broader historic and sociological framings of an
era of entrepreneurialism, towards its synchronic-linguistic reading as a con-
temporary discourse. The persuasive language of the microeconomic agency—the
small and medium-sized enterprise or SME—is all over the place. Consider a bank
promoting ordinary loans in terms of “support to our entrepreneurs”. We could
perform several interesting analyses of this advertising, but for the sake of illustra-
tion, let me just give one example. Microsoft Word suggests eight synonyms to the
magic word at the heart of this book: businessperson, tycoon, magnate, impresario,
industrialist, financier, capitalist, and mogul. It is not hard to understand why the
bank preferred the word entrepreneur instead. Consider that I was reading the
aforementioned advertising in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis in southern
Spain. Taxpayers were forced to bail out banks, while people were evicted from
6 Introduction

their homes as they could not afford to pay the mortgage. The “financier” prob-
ably did not sound very tempting to many clients. Along these lines, in Chapter 2 I
look at entrepreneurship talk—how it works and what it does—in combination
with an extensive empirical example from Andalusia.
Yet analysing language alone is deemed insufficient by a discipline that increas-
ingly considers researchers’ reflexivity as one of its key assets. Chapter 3 aims to
perform such a reflexive U-turn, by looking at knowledge producers like me and
the sites of knowledge production, such as academic books on entrepreneurship
like mine. Entrepreneurship experts, the social sciences and academia writ large
have contested and adopted the language of entrepreneurship, as well as its prac-
tices. We are all part of the era of entrepreneurialism. On the one hand, taking
together the different ways of researching entrepreneurship that I will present in
Chapter 3—from psychology and management to philosophy—brings us closer to
an anthropological holistic explanation. On the other hand, the fact that so many
disciplines write about the topic—and that anthropology is only reluctantly dealing
with it too—speaks of different academic identities and research practices. Thus, I
will discuss how research often reproduces the entrepreneurial behaviour this book
aims to study. For instance, the often extractive nature of empirical research “with”
communities, the competitive logic of academic promotion or the obsession with
the individual genius in science more generally, are only some of the images we
may find in the mirror. The empirical examples sustaining my argument are a
survey among early-career anthropologists in Europe, recent experiments in
Anglo-Saxon universities to practice anthropology “as design”, and some instances
from my own academic biography.
If there is such a thing as an anthropology of entrepreneurship, then it cannot be
reduced to ethnographies of exotic businessmen. We need women, theory, and the
ordinary too. In addition, research relevant to this field does not necessarily con-
ceive of entrepreneurship as explicitly a relevant concept. This is my overall argu-
ment in Part II. In the introduction, I raise this problem by presenting scholars
who have spiced their research with some input from “anthropology”—either
exotic tales from far away or mystical, at best slippery ideas about “culture”. I also
briefly show the diverse interest for peddlers, traders, businessmen, big men, mer-
chants, and so forth, in traditional ethnography. Both lines of research—scholars
borrowing selectively from anthropology or traditional peddler ethnographies—
have often something in common. They are frequently unaware of walking the
same paths as classic (economic) anthropologists before them. These include Joseph
Schumpeter, Fredrik Barth, Clifford Geertz, and Mary Douglas, among others. The
two chapters that follow are devoted to reconstructing, discussing, and classifying
these traditions—evolutionism, formalism, structuralism, and historical particular-
ism—as applied to entrepreneurship research.
I have given the first of these traditions the title “agency-driven social change”.
Chapter 4 starts by illustrating the characteristics of this formalist viewpoint,
through the story of a media entrepreneur in rural Andalusia. I put this story in the
context of my own PhD research agenda back in 2007. Similar to many of my
 Preface and acknowledgements 7

colleagues, I did not acknowledge then my adherence to some basic principles of

Joseph Schumpeter’s and Fredrik Barth’s work. Both were defying some of the
central axioms of anthropological research in the early 20th century and in the
1960s. Their transgressive ideas included looking at society in terms of dynamic
processes not traditional blocs, a focus on individual action instead of swarm intel-
ligence, and the unromantic belief that not all contribute equally to grassroots
social change. I track these notions in early German-language social sciences,
including Weber’s and Schumpeter’s ideas about the Unternehmer—the man of
action mentioned earlier. Barth later followed this change-maker idea, especially in
his fieldwork in Sudan and Norway. He was promoting the entrepreneur within
the discipline, for example in his plenary address to the American Anthropological
Association (1967a).
“Culture” has become a hot topic for many disciplines, but especially entrepre-
neurship scholars. I argue that this has contributed to often quite simplistic
assumptions. This is why I present the historical struggle in anthropology with its
subject in the introduction to Chapter 5. I offer the works of Mary Douglas and
Clifford Geertz as two points of reference for any researcher who wants to take up
the task of studying entrepreneurship culture more seriously. Both are the main
characters of my fifth chapter because they have put forward specific culture-the-
ories of entrepreneurship. Geertz emphasized historic developments and local cir-
cumstances in Indonesia. His historical particularism nevertheless recognizes two
ideal-type entrepreneurs. His princely type is a noble forced to maintain his tradi-
tional authority through the means of business creation. The peddler type is
adapting to historically available templates for doing business, such as the social
conventions of the bazaar economy in 1960s Java. Douglas for her part works with
a more structuralist framework of four ideal-type cultures. The entrepreneurial
culture is only one piece in her equation. She writes about the enterprise culture
later in her career, but I also introduce her earlier work, through the example of
her analysis of the pangolin ritual of the Lele people of the Belgian Congo in the
1950s. I argue that both elements of her work successfully tackle some of the major
problems with the employment of the culture-concept. Rediscovering the culture
concept, with its complex and complicated history in anthropology, is crucial to
analysing neoliberal agency, instead of adopting it uncritically together with its
inbuilt social relativism (Gershon 2011).
Part III of the book is a situation picture of global contemporary entrepre-
neurialism. For the case of anthropological scholarship, such a picture is unprece-
dented. I will present detailed accounts of cutting-edge research from Asia, Europe,
Latin America and Africa. All these 21st century accounts will be tied into core
anthropology concepts and writers of the gift economy, ethnic labelling, or neo-
colonial power relations. Without forcing comparisons, each chapter will discuss
ethnographies from the global south besides experiences from the north. This is
how I try to go beyond the current divide in the scholarship, aiming for a trans-
cultural viewpoint. You will come across women and men, ordinary and extra-
ordinary. In the introduction to Part III, I will use Pierre Bourdieu’s view on
8 Introduction

changes in economic habitus among the Kabyle people in late colonial Algeria, to
present each chapter’s content. The following three chapters are concerned with
issues such as social enterprising, informal credit, neoliberal urbanism, heritage
marketing, do-it-yourself development, or socialist informal economics.
Can social improvements and individual profit go together? This is the question
posed in Chapter 7. Enlightenment thinkers, such as Adam Smith in his famous
The Wealth of Nations, had no doubt about giving a positive answer. In the 21st
century though, even in the West, ordinary people are increasingly thinking that
this is nothing but a joke. This is among the reasons why “social” entrepreneurship
has strong advertisers in politics and the corporate world in recent years. The label
is used to promote the idea that private initiative can bring social innovations as
well as good life to clients, founders, employees, and shareholders. In Chapter 6, I
will approach the issue of “the social” in entrepreneurship more broadly through
the lens of Marcel Mauss’ theory of the gift. He shows that human transactions are
never completely selfish or uninterested. The point for him is different. We must
act as if our interests were beneficial to the community and do the same with the
interests of others. I will present three empirical examples to show how such a gift
economy operates in practice. We will learn how traders in Bolivia and Venezuela
capitalize on gifts in the form of informal credit and deferred payment. Trust,
reputation, and fidelity is not a side product, but the essential element of their
business operations. My analysis of an Austrian work integration enterprise shows
how commodities can acquire enhanced social status of quasi-gifts. In this case,
small scale production posited in opposition to large scale manufacturing can have
such a social refinement effect on things. A third example will be the effort of
organizations—like my local bank mentioned earlier—to produce “corporate social
responsibility” by linking their activities to positively sanctioned moral values.
Suggesting that we are donating instead of buying is one of the many fantasies
produced by social entrepreneurship.
What if nudging the youth into entrepreneurship is the most effective way to
accustom them to unemployment, with the positive side-effect that they will start
blaming themselves for it? I have called the seventh chapter “oppressive entrepre-
neurship”, because there are many ethnographic reports from around the globe
that suggest exactly that. The young city dwellers of Cairo, Manchester and Nair-
obi that we will meet in the chapter, are trained and supported by corporations,
universities, and non-profits. They produce or sell products and services, even if
this does not really allow them to make a living. Yet, hopes and aspirations are
constantly fuelled by those who do make a living in stable jobs—by selling the idea
of entrepreneurship to others. These promotors are at the heart of my own
research in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. I follow the work of local lobbyists
who get the intentions of government and investors into the hearts and minds of
mostly young male “coders”. They do so by creating a sense of community at
“networking events” celebrated in “coffices” and “coworkspaces”. But I will also
take the reader to rural Costa Rica and Bangladesh. There, Anke Schwittay and
Juli Huang have found much more subtle ways in which young women are
 Preface and acknowledgements 9

exploited. Trying to gain a little degree of economic freedom—without failing

their families and communities—they find themselves frustrated in both endea-
vours. In the meantime, they are playing the advertising agency for foreign cor-
porations and NGOs. Throughout this chapter, I will deliberately put very
different experiences from four continents in the same box. But I will also discuss
the extent to which the coercive element varies from case to case, between simple
deception of Western middle-class dreams to systematic exploitation of the poor in
the south. In addition, I will provide a critical examination of the limits and pro-
blems of research exaggerating the oppressive dimension of entrepreneurship. If we
do not consider the anthropological groundwork set out in the second part of the
book, we are condemned to (unwarily) repeat old debates from the 1960s.
In the last chapter, I assemble a diverse set of concepts and case studies. What
they have in common is an innovative attempt to push the boundaries of what we
might understand as entrepreneurship. I start with Howard Becker who described
in the 1960s how norms, values, and “outsiders” are created from scratch by
“moral entrepreneurs”. But Becker is not especially interested in exploring all the
theoretical consequences of his neologism (like Andersson was not with his neo-
logism of the “fear entrepreneur” mentioned earlier). This is why I give more
space to the presentation of the Comaroffs’ book Ethnicity Inc., where they expand
on a more self-consciously produced series of imaginative concepts, including
“ethno-preneurialism”. Commodification of ethnic identity works through the
marketing of one’s own body-as-culture. This is what the authors have found,
among many other places, on the French side of Catalonia. Therefore, presenting
their concept is the prelude to my own example of gastronomic heritage con-
struction in the Catalan capital Barcelona. There, the Mediterranean diet is labelled
and incorporated on behalf of the food and tourism industry by a specific “non-
profit” foundation, that I conceive of as a “heritage entrepreneur”. The example is
followed by Xin Liu’s ethnography of high-tech entrepreneurs in China. In cities
like Beihai or Nanning, doing business often equates to simply accumulating
money, sex and power. Liu reports how entrepreneurship is corroding the histor-
ical or moral self-understandings among the local elites. Throughout the chapter, I
bundle all these experiences and theories together under the title “entrepreneur-
ialization”. This is the term I use to describe how an increasing number of social
situations around the globe have an entrepreneurial nature. But the term also helps
me thinking about where an anthropological concept of entrepreneurship might go
from here. “Framing structures as agents” is one suggestion that I make.
In the conclusions I make the case for an anthropology of entrepreneurship and
rebut some of the major possible objections. I explain how I tried to avoid painting
a too narrow picture of the field, despite seeking some common ground, mainly by
classifying and justifying my classifications. I primarily gathered evidence of serious
and prolonged scholarly engagement with this subject, despite all the differences in
aim, scope and focus. Methodologically, I tend to stick to the authors’ texts—
instead of schools, themes or other heuristics—showing that both in past and pre-
sent entrepreneurship has served anthropologists to creatively think about agency,
10 Introduction

power, culture change, the personal and the impersonal. By tying the story of
entrepreneurship research into the larger history of anthropology, I keep a distance
from any sort of partisanship or hyperspecialization. I also avoid sterile conversa-
tions about whether the anthropological contribution to the topic is mainly cri-
tique, ethnography or studying non-Western scenarios. Differences, but also
similarities with the rest of the social sciences and humanities are given credit.
Historical, contemporary, and global everyday experiences are an integral part of all
chapters—like those of Elsa in the Andes, Juan in Andalusia, or Haihun in
Guangxi. Personal engagement with such ordinary entrepreneurs and an empirical
interest for microeconomics—both past and present—is one of the features of the
anthropology of entrepreneurship. But asking the big philosophical questions about
human emancipation and its discontents is another. Critically self-observing our
entrepreneurial academic lives vis-à-vis the entrepreneurs we study, together with a
sensibility for language and cultural history, contributes another important twist.
But the anthropology of entrepreneurship is not a postmodern science. It has
evolved historically, especially through ethnographic encounters in the (post-)
colonies, which resulted in two major thought traditions. One is concerned with
explaining agency-driven social change, and the other with describing history, cul-
ture, and morality of entrepreneurialism. In my book I give room to this overall
complexity, but I also make an effort to combine the different pieces of scholarship
into a coherent new picture. This picture—the anthropological interrogation of
entrepreneurship—offers fascinating views on the contemporary world.
PART I

The social life of

entrepreneurship

In this first part, I explore the wider cultural-historical backdrop of entrepreneurship.

Some of today’s most eminent historical anthropologists have described the con-
temporary moment as the “age of entrepreneurialism”, for example David Harvey
(1989: 7) or John and Jean Comaroff (2009: 150). For these and many other cultural
historians a new moral imperative of self-responsibility and self-capability has trans-
muted into an ever-growing range of societal fields. In the following I will look spe-
cifically at how the ideal of the self-relying person gradually filtered into work, family,
gender, and politics (Chapter 1), language (Chapter 2) and academia (Chapter 3). By
saying that entrepreneurship has a “social life”, thus I refer to these dimensions,
including entrepreneurship as an object of contestation in private and professional life
worlds, as a language for describing society writ large, and as a cross-cutting feature of
research, innovation, and science. To introduce the theme of Part I, I discuss different
ways of envisioning economic agency—collective, neoliberal, Marxist, or individual,
but mediated by objects, for example. I will do so through the writings of anthro-
pology’s most acclaimed writers—both past and present—and through one of its most
beloved historic-ethnographic examples, the potlatch. Thus, different anthropological
conceptions of economic agency (more or less congruent with the contemporary
theories of entrepreneurship) will be showcased through the potlatch example. The
challenge consists of differentiating economic agency and how it framed visions of
entrepreneurship historically (Part I), but also view the contemporary entrepreneur
(1970–2020), as an archetype of a specific form of agency—the neoliberal—and its
gendered appearance in the postcolonial world (Chapter 1).
A few lines earlier I mentioned David Harvey, professor of anthropology and
geography. Among the most cited authors in social sciences, he is also a prominent
voice on the left critical of “entrepreneurialism”. In his popular introduction to
Marx (2017) he is borrowing Jacques Derrida’s catchphrase “the madness of eco-
nomic reason” to critique capitalism’s latest excesses. Derrida and Harvey, and
DOI: 10.4324/9780367824136-2
12 The social life of entrepreneurship

before them modern anthropology’s founding fathers Franz Boas and Marcel
Mauss, are all intrigued by precapitalistic economies and especially with an indi-
genous feast called potlatch. This ritual from the Pacific Northwest coast was a
competition over gift giving—the more the better—conspicuous consumption and
destruction of valuables. The entrepreneurial character (competition and rivalry)
expressed in such apparently anti-economic behaviour (giving away or destroying
rather than producing and accumulating) sets the scene for a disciplinary history of
100 years of anthropological speculations. To what extent was the potlatch rational
economic calculus or mad spiritual superstition? Or was it both? What might be
learned from the potlatch example about how economic agency operates more gen-
erally in human societies? The history of the different anthropological speculations set
out in the following will give us a first glimpse into understanding the many social lives
of entrepreneurship. Particularly, in the following my concern lies with economic
agency as imagined through diffusionist, formalist, postmodern or Marxist thinking,
and in the context or contrast with historical, non-Western settings, such as late 19th
century west-coast native America. Later, in the second part of Chapter 1, I turn to
poststructuralist, feminist, and postcolonial framings of a specifically neoliberal agency
(Gershon 2011) or entrepreneurial self (Freeman 2014).
Franz Boas was among the early writers on the potlatch at the end of the 19th
century, before he established modern anthropology in the US. He was a main
source for Mauss, Derrida and Harvey. Worried less about logic or madness, Boas
was originally concerned with origins. Where did the myth and dances of this
“great religious [potlatch] ceremon[y]” come from? The early Boas was a geo-
grapher, as is Harvey, and trained in the German diffusionist school. He concluded
that the myth and the ritual of the winter dances that accompanied it were not
survivors from a remote past—as the evolutionists would have it—but were
imported from the Old World (1896: 242–243). It is important to remember here
that the common ground of both evolutionist and diffusionist thinking in 19th
century anthropology is conceiving of natives—such as the Kwakiutl Boas
describes—as naturally non-entrepreneurial. Simply put, for the evolutionists the
natives “lagged behind” Western-style economic differentiation, and for the diffu-
sionists they only “copy pasted” foreign cultural traits, which means that essentially
there was no native “agency” at all. Nevertheless, some economic rational action
was involved in the process according to Boas. Gift giving or exchange of blankets
that served as a form of money among the Kwakiutl, were perfectly logic in eco-
nomic terms. It “brings honor and increased influence” and was therefore to be
regarded as “based to a large extent upon credit” (1896: 235). Boas regarded the
feast as the most “complex economic system that has developed anywhere among
the native races of America” (1896: 235). Thus, the potlatch was functional (dis-
tribution of economic and political resources), but also historic (through dis-
semination not evolution) and, particular (developed only among the native
“races” of America).
Let us consider the Boasian perspective for a moment, by asking if the potlatch tells
us something about contemporary economic agency. The Western individualistic
 The social life of entrepreneurship 13

imperative of competitive money accumulation—like the blankets of the Kwakiutl—

is also largely motivated by non-rational decisions and feelings towards peer groups. A
good example is conspicuous consumption in capitalist societies that the classic econ-
omist Thorstein Veblen described so well in his Theory of the Leisure Class (1899).
Contrary to any rational calculus, with the increase of prices, also the demand for a
product rises. This is because expensive items confer prestige and distinctiveness. The
price aims to sustain the exclusiveness of the product. Another example is taxes and
charity, as a modern form of “self-interested altruism”. From this vantage point, phi-
lanthrocapitalists, like Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, but also modern welfare states,
and competitive consumerism share similar socio-economic motivations as the Kwa-
kiutl. Foundations, ethnic communities or peer groups are collective or relational
economic agents because status and reputation constitute their economic operations
from the outset. Economic personhood is relational here—a social agency not an indi-
vidual agency—because all interest is geared towards public not private outcomes of
exchange. It is in this sense that anthropologists tend to conceive of entrepreneurs as
relational or socially embedded agents.
The anthropological story of the potlatch had only just started with Boas’ visits
to the Kwakiutl. A few decades later, Marcel Mauss—another founding father of
anthropology—would pick up the masters’ writings on the potlatch. Based on the
field reports, he aimed to formulate a general law of economic action in pre-
modern, as well as modern societies. “Those who receive presents at this festival,
receive them as loans that they use in ongoing enterprises, but after a few years
they must be given back with interest to the donor or his heir”. This is a short
extract of a page-long quote of Boas by Marcel Mauss in his famous essay The Gift
(1925: 139). The French-to-English translator of The Gift seems not to have con-
sulted the source that Mauss used for his own translation of Boas, which I found is
slightly different (see Boas 1989: 55). I will explain later why this is relevant espe-
cially if we conceive the economic agency of words. But what interests me now in
this quote is Mauss’ effort to highlight the universal economic logic underlying the
potlatch. It seems that Boas has emphasized the similarity of the Western credit
system and the potlatch mainly to write against a specific colonial piece of legisla-
tion that was criminalizing the potlatch (see Boas 1989: 45–55). In turn, Mauss is
more generically interested in announcing a universal law of human exchange or
“total services”. We should not pay too much attention to mystical, linguistic, or
historic origins of the potlatch, Mauss tells us in two of the several footnotes on
Boas (1925: 112, 137). He rather wants to emphasize that the feast was a universal
type of Durkheimian institution, that forces moral imperatives upon agents (and
not the other way round, as the idea of a “economic agent” presupposes); in this
case a “total service of an agonistic [or may I say entrepreneurial] type”. Mauss
starts by clarifying that the word potlatch—originally a Chinook term—gradually
took on a more general meaning among both colonizers and the colonized and was
used to describe all such similar feasts across the region. In this sense, it is generically
“a struggle between nobles to establish a hierarchy amongst themselves from which
their clan will benefit at a later date” (Mauss 1925: 8). Mauss thought that the
14 The social life of entrepreneurship

potlatch economy preceded our own modern capitalist system. Nevertheless, for
Mauss this group morality lives partly on in our social security system as he explains
in his conclusions.
Politically a socialist, in the concluding remarks Mauss hopes that we will find
ways to reintegrate the economy in society, just like the Kwakitul, the Haïda or
the Tlingit did. Today this Maussian idea—that charity and profit are two sides of
the same coin—lives on among practitioners of so called “social” entrepreneurship.
It also inspires academics working on business ethics, corporate social responsibility,
and the sharing economy. Proximity, trust, and community are the underpinning
values of these renewed “tribal economies”. I will continue this argument in
Chapter 6, but what concerns me here is a different aspect, namely the social life of
things (Appadurai 1986). The gift is taking the form of a material agent that
induces economic exchange among market participants. Commodities can have
persons or agent-like effects upon people because they carry the socio-cultural
traces of the producers, traders and consumers. “Human transactions and motiva-
tions […] enliven things” (Appadurai 1986: 5). The value of objects is our desire to
possess them, not their “use value” alone. It is to this extent that the cultural
technique of the gift enables economic agents to distribute their agency through
objects forcing moral obligations upon a “patient”, that she or he cannot refuse.
Here economic agency is not individual nor collective, it is mediated materially. It
is the things that are agentive and force their will upon us. But economic agency
can also take the form of words as opposed to things, according to anthropological
theory.
After the 1970s anthropology experienced a profound change and institutional
expansion that effects the discipline well into our days. Gradually the old master’s
concerns with universal laws and historical reconstructions of “primitive” economic
practice were forgotten. Still, feminists, Marxists and postmodernists picked up the
good old potlatch to put forward their own readings of the economic agent. In
Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money (1992) the role model of postmodern thought,
Jacques Derrida, deconstructs Mauss’ text on the potlatch. For Derrida, the potlatch
of Mauss and Boas is constituted to a large extent by their “lexical maneuvers”. He
is interested, for instance, in showing the political motives of Mauss in renaming as
“gift” something that Boas called “credit” (1992: 43–44). Particularly he holds that
both texts were inconsistent. Exchange and gift giving are incommensurable
notions because it is a contradiction to say that presents circulate (1992: 38). That is
why for Derrida, the most intriguing question concerning the potlatch ultimately is
what we actually mean by saying “gift” or “to give” (1992: 50–56). According to
Derrida, Mauss’ essay seemingly gives the word gift a completely new meaning,
only to end by saying that we do not have words to express phenomena such as the
potlatch exchanges or gifts. The postmodernist interest in the “potlatch discourse”
gives a first idea of the central issue of entrepreneurship language (see Chapter 2). It
includes the political motives of authors reframing obligation as freedom or colla-
boration as competition, for example. It also includes the interest in the ambiguities
and contradictions inscribed in the word entrepreneur(-ial/-ship/-ialism), together
 The social life of entrepreneurship 15

with the manipulations and meanings that these utterances receive in specific context
dependent speech acts. Conceiving words as the locus of economic agency is of
course a relativistic position. Here economic action is not an empirical “reality”, like
the descriptions of first-hand observed economic facts by the ethnographer Boas.
Nor is it an epistemological “belief”, like the erudite exchange theory about the
universal human gift ethics by Mauss. It is the invention of stories together with
infinite ways of “reading” these that is constitutive of words like “economic agency”.
In our case, historic anthropological literature written by Boas and Mauss constitutes
the agentive discourse. Economic agency is what they have invented and what we
have interpreted. It is not what individuals and groups do or think, nor the things
that they put in circulation, but what we say and write.
Let us return briefly to David Harvey from the beginning of this introduction to
the Part I, to explore one more twist in economic agency theory. For him, the
potlatch example he recovers as an anecdote at the end of his book on Marx—
together with Mauss and Derrida—is a way to illustrate the parallels between the
gift economy and capitalism. The destruction of houses, oil and blankets during the
potlatch, and the capitalist crisis of the last 40 years, are similar in logic he implies
indirectly (Harvey 2017: 207–209). Yet, bailing out private banks with taxpayer
money while children live in poverty, or building luxury houses for investors
without residents while people are homeless, is even more insane to Harvey. Chi-
nese or Irish entrepreneurs appear in Harvey’s account as the buyers of real estate in
the US (2017: 189). It is as if Harvey wants us to think of today’s empty New
York skyscrapers as the magnificent version of the ritual of burning houses of the
Haïda and the Tlingit over a hundred years ago. The entrepreneur in his chapter
on “the madness of economic reason” is only the ugly bourgeois face of an insane
system: neoliberalism. In this system money turns into an end in itself—none of
these entrepreneurs actually buys houses to live in—and the fetish of self-repro-
ducing capital is taking over. Property prices are rising “magically” without the
supposed “entrepreneurs” doing anything innovative or productive at all (see
Harvey 2017: 172–174 for the theory; the examples are mine). It is to this extent
that the Marxist version of the economic agent is normally either the bourgeois
exploiter or the exploited worker disguised as self-employee. Marxist economics
conflates the idea of work with that of economic agency. Ultimately, it is labour
that produces value. The paradox between this “agentive nature” of homo laboris
and the exploited circumstances of the actual work providing worker, is explained
by Marx through alienation and estrangement (Freeman 2014: 212). Labour and
the product of labour are experienced by the worker as belonging to someone else.
It is only in the private as opposed to the professional life that the real value pro-
ducing worker experiences agency or the capacity to act, choose or create.
Estrangement may produce a false consciousness in the worker when she or he
does not conceive of work as the factual depository of economic agency or power.
The shifting anthropological readings of the potlatch and its contemporary
echoes—micro credit or conspicuous consumption for example—provide a com-
prehensive ethnographic example for different ways of seeing economic agency within
16 The social life of entrepreneurship

one and the same empirical point of reference. The history of the potlatch texts,
arguments, and authors are themselves examples of how entrepreneurship evolves as a
research topic of different guises over time (my specific concern in Chapter 3). Boas
put forward his historic-particularistic ethnographies at the end of the 19th century, in
contrast to Mauss who writes one of the grand universal anthropological theories (on
exchange) in the 1920s. The Kwakiutl are a collective or relational economic agency
in the first account. Subsistence and livelihood are intrinsically intertwined with status
and reputation, and subjects are mainly concerned about their own social position and
their relation to peers. Competitive gift giving was an adapted, yet particular cultural
expression of a universal social institution, the credit. According to the founding father
of entrepreneurship research, the classic 19th century economist Joseph Schumpeter
(see Chapter 4), it is credit that socially produces entrepreneurship—expressed for
example through competition, speculation, risk, investment, among others. Yet,
Mauss saw in the potlatch a more “social” form of entrepreneurship (see also
Chapter 7) by saying that not credit was universal, but the obligatory gift cycle.
This shifts analytical attention away from groups or subjects by focussing on their
actual webs of relations and especially how these are expressed in material forms
like gifts. Here economic agency is distributed through the power exerted by (or
by way of) things. Money, credit, and gifts are the main forces that trap people in
ongoing relationships of desire, debt, and reciprocity. Thus, the social value of
things is constitutive of “the economy”. Things act forcefully upon our hearts and
minds because we are inclined to treat certain objects in certain contexts as if they
were persons, for example when we rant at our car, or ask our dolls what they
would like to eat (Gell 1998), especially if these items were gifts of our loved ones
or gifts that we make to ourselves, as to reassure our gender for example. With
Schumpeter we can say that credit produces entrepreneurs, and not the other way
round. With Mauss we can extend this argument beyond the limitations of a
myopic modernist viewpoint, by saying that monetary credit is only one specific
manifestation of the gift as institution or agentive force working upon market
participants everywhere.
For all those who are uncomfortable with such far-reaching, eventually simpli-
fying generalizations, there is the postmodern self on offer—an agent “pastiche of
narratives and historical trajectories without a central unifying consciousness”
(Gershon 2011: 539). Derrida represents this postmodern relativism concerned with
“discourse” in the 1990s. Here the potlatch and the empirical puzzle it poses to
classic economic analysis is a problem of paradoxical words—like Mauss’ gift-as-
credit oxymoron—and the limits language poses upon our capacity to understand
anything about Kwakiutl notions of agency at all. In Chapter 2 I will concentrate
specifically on entrepreneurship as a language problem. In contrast, David
Harvey—and David Graeber (see Chapter 1)—are contemporary academic faces of
the post-financial crisis disillusion with the postmodern narrative of individual free-
dom and reflexive subjectivity. The economic agency in Marxism inspired scholar-
ship is that of the worker, citizen, legal subject, or corporate entity, who is above all
a labour producing, selling, regulating, or buying personality. This agent distinguishes
 The social life of entrepreneurship 17

sharply between the private and the professional, between reproduction and pro-
duction, leisure and shift. State endorsed property ownership, labour contracts, wel-
fare state and civil liberties sustain this subject’s loyalty with the State, the company,
and the nuclear family, in expense of ethno-religious communalism or extensive
kinship ties.
But these days are gone, as are the days of the potlatch. Neoliberal agency or the
self-as-business differs from the older Fordist worker or self-as-property (Gershon
2011), but also from all the other economic agents described earlier. The neoliberal
agent conceives her or himself as a manager of his own life—self-reflexively
monitoring opportunities for future optimizations. Reluctant of long-term com-
mitments of any sort, the citizen-as-entrepreneur is sociologically described as
individualist, flexible, and liberal. The following chapter turns to the works of
Ulrich Beck in Germany, Michel Foucault in France and David Graeber and
Richard Sennett in the US and the UK, and thus shifts attention away from his-
toric indigenous societies to the Western roots of entrepreneurialism in the late
20th century. Subsequently, we will consider its consequences across the 21st cen-
tury postcolonial world as examined by feminist scholarship.
1
ENTREPRENEURIALISM
The first 50 years

This chapter is concerned mainly with broad sociological diagnosis and cultural his-
toric portraits of entrepreneurship in modern society. It asks how the entrepreneur has
been discussed as an emergent social character over the last fifty years. First, I will look
at the 1970s with Michel Foucault and what he understood was the rise of biopolitics.
Liberal governmentability is a regime aiming at self-organization of human popula-
tions in biological terms of competition, evolution, efficiency, and survival. Then, I
turn to the “individualization of society” in the 1980s. According to Ulrich Beck and
Anthony Giddens a new “democratic” distribution of environmental and economic
risks became the defining feature of Western societies at that point in time. Finally, I
portray the rise of flexible labour in the 1990s as explored by Richard Sennett, linked
to the idea of new fragmented working biographies. These sociological classics antici-
pated the entrepreneurial self as an evolving popular culture hero (and thus cultural
studies villain). They look at the foundation of entrepreneurial personhood and sub-
jectivity in terms of globally shared conditions of high modernity (Giddens 1991).
Hence, liberalism, flexibility and individualization are three key concepts for under-
standing entrepreneurship in the late 20th century.
The second section then turns from the male sociological classics in the West to
contemporary postcolonial feminist scholarship in the South. Early 21st century
ethnographies of entrepreneurialism expose how liberalism, individualization and
flexibility are experienced differently across class, gender, and ethnic-national divi-
sion lines. Taking inspiration from Lily Irani’s notion of “Innovation and their
Others”, I use otherness as a frame to look at contemporary entrepreneurial liveli-
hoods. More than comparing the decline of the Western industrial male worker at
the end of the 20th century to the rise of global unisex service labour in the 21st
century, I focus on empirically sustained concepts helping to grasp the current
diversity of entrepreneurial work conditions beyond sociological commonplaces.
Particularly, I am interested in the male, white-Western, atheist–protestant, upper-
DOI: 10.4324/9780367824136-3
20 The social life of entrepreneurship

class business founders’ others. These others include self-branding job seekers (Ger-
shon 2017), precarious business in socialist economies (Lindtner 2017; Vertovec
2021), emotional and affective labourers (Freeman 2014), indebted-aspirational
migrants (Gutiérrez-Garza 2019), invisible-creative online workers (Lukacs 2020),
or minorities’ and majorities’ “entrepreneurial spirit” (Kelman 2018; Mauksch
2017). Thinking about the works and lives of the women who have made these
more recent contributions, I show the importance of reflexivity to put own–other
depictions of contemporary entrepreneurialism in perspective. Towards the end of
this chapter, I turn to look at where things might go from here. I use the provo-
cative statement on bullshit jobs by David Graeber (2019) to assess critically some
of the sociological mainstream work on capitalism, the self and work. According to
Graeber, boring and pointless jobs are much more common today than entrepre-
neurial ways of making a living. Experiencing freedom, playfulness, and one’s own
agentive action upon the world is still a powerful utopia, whether one associates
these principles with entrepreneurship or not. For example, similar hopes and
dreams move philanthrocapitalists and anarchists alike to fight for a universal
income. But before thinking about these and other entrepreneurial futures and
futures of entrepreneurship, let me start my short cultural history of entrepre-
neurialism in the 1970s with someone who makes his appearance at the beginning
of so many anthropology books: Michel Foucault.

1970–1990: Biopolitics, individualism and flexibility

Foucault’s history of the liberal art of government (1979) is a central work for
understanding the birth of the entrepreneur as a new ideal type of citizen from a
socio-historical perspective. Foucault focuses on the relation between liberalism and
biopolitics to understand the ways in which social relations are reorganized in late
capitalist societies. Let me start by explaining these two concepts and their intimate
relationship. Law and order—this is the State and civil society—have been reor-
ganized in new ways since the 18th century in relation to the life of nations, now
conceived as “populations” (Foucault 1979: 78). Foucault describes a historical
moment when the economy turns into the central site of “truth formation”. This
means that the “wealth of the nation” becomes the dominant way of conceiving
social life. It is from this moment on that ruling classes consider self-imposed lim-
itations to their power based on their new belief in a “natural order” of freely
competing bodies and minds. This is what we might call the ideology of liberalism.
Before this, kings and other rulers understood their subjects as receivers of orders;
they had to be forced to obey. But in the liberal era “civil society” is increasingly
perceived as a self-regulatory natural “ecosystem” where individuals interact
employing their specific personal qualities. Society ceases being imagined as anon-
ymous masses divided by rank, sex or age, but is seen as a sum of individuals occupying
a certain territory or “homeland”. Importantly, in Foucault’s thinking, liberalism does
not mean the absence of the State or sovereign power. What is gradually changing
are the ways in which power is enacted. Increasingly “disciplining” the citizen
 Entrepreneurialism 21

becomes entangled with encouraging him/her to “self-regulate”. Positive sanctions

become more important. Disciplining and self-control is practiced in new or trans-
formed “institutions”, such as the school, the workplace, the hospital, or the prison.
This means that liberalism gradually fosters a new form of politics that Foucault calls
biopower. While biopower is always entangled with older forms of power based on
the sovereign and discipline (Povinelli 2016), it is nevertheless a new type of govern-
mentality that produces entrepreneurial livelihoods—the product of self-regulation
and positive sanctioning—as we will see in the following.
Biopower is the management of a population of individuals and their aggregate
biological qualities, or—as Povinelli puts it in Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Lib-
eralism—biopolitics is “power […] organized through a statistical understanding of
the health of the population” (2016: 97). Biopolitics becomes the administration,
securement and stimulation of spontaneity, autonomy and freedom of populations
seeking self-regulation and self-preservation (Lemke 2011: 35, 47). Therefore,
biopolitics is also a doctrine of the normal, the average, that is the “healthy” indi-
vidual or body. It could be argued that in its socio-Darwinian guise, biopolitics
redefines the principle of the “survival of the fittest” as the “fortune of the entre-
preneurialest”. In this sense, the new ethos of the self as autonomous (normal) and
enterprising (talented) has two important consequences for governance. First, it
distributes the implementation of State politics—the increase of national wealth—
beyond the confines of the State. It is not the State apparatus which is responsible for
executing policies but civil society and the private sector. It is a way of outsourcing
politics to the population, so to speak. This can be seen for example by the ways in
which creating businesses and employment is increasingly seen as opposed to taxation
and welfare, not as complementary. This also means that the individual is imagined as
“being” the State in his new condition as “citizen” and “national”. Second, the ruling
class is primordially concerned with creating, improving and expanding favourable
social conditions in which the self-organization and health of the populations can
flourish. This is done through direct or indirect incentives for becoming entrepre-
neurial, for example through public tendering, tax relief, lifelong learning, awards and
prizes, to name but a few. From this perspective, two of the former US American
presidents’ famous slogans, that are often portrayed as opposites, fall together in perfect
harmony. Kennedy’s “ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can
do for your country” and Nixon’s “let each of us ask—not just what will government
do for me, but what can I do for myself?”. Both express the liberal and the con-
servative’s elite’s concern with making the population believe that they really are the
country, the State, the government. Populations need to be brought into the condi-
tions to self-govern their lives—through entrepreneurship.
Thus, I argue that Foucault’s writing allows us to examine the biological-poli-
tical nature of the contemporary entrepreneurial self. Innovativeness, talent and
creativity are some of the core ideas underpinning the view on populations as
entrepreneurial, and these are increasingly envisioned through biological notions,
such as the startup “ecosystem” (Roundy 2016) or small enterprises as “adaptive
systems” (Fuller and Moran 2001). In this direction, Pascal Dey (2014) made an
22 The social life of entrepreneurship

effort to put the Foucauldian view of the “art of governing” to the service of
scrutinizing current calls for “social” entrepreneurship. If Foucault’s art of govern-
ing is the craft of shaping individuals according to new rationalities (Dey 2014: 59),
then the new rationality of neoliberalism can be described as transforming collec-
tive problems into individual responsibilities. In the neoliberal era, entrepreneurial
practice abandons the strictly economic domain and expands into all areas of life.
This is also the case with the transformation of the traditional welfare State. It
increasingly leaves social problems to the “service and product provision” of non-
State actors such as the voluntary and the private sector. Supporting “social”
entrepreneurship is biopolitics par excellence. I will come back to this idea of
“social entrepreneurship” in Chapter 6, and many of the contemporary ethno-
graphies on “oppressive entrepreneurship” that I will present in Chapter 7 build in
one way or another on Foucault’s notion of biopolitics.
What then are the lessons to be learnt from Foucault for the assessment of con-
temporary entrepreneurialism? On the one hand, with Foucault we can explain
much of the current corporate and administrative manoeuvres nudging us into
being busy entrepreneurs, working and consuming faster, longer and harder. The
all-embracing tracking of our (digital) life, our mobile device dependence, or our
obsession with the healthy body are just some of the most striking examples. On
the other hand, Foucault’s work puts the focus on oppression disguised as freedom.
David Graeber, whom I will come back to in a few moments, cites an interview
with Foucault towards the end of his career. There, he talks about the difference
between power as strategic games within an open relationship and irreversible
closed states of domination (Graeber 2019: 282–283). Applied to our problem, this
means that Foucault distinguishes between fair competition and oppression dis-
guised as competition, for instance as exercised in the monopolistic pseudo markets
of our contemporary US and Chinese tech giants. In other words, a biopolitical
gaze allows us to avoid a simplistic criticism of entrepreneurial values. Instead it is a
disapproval of the hidden ways in which these are forced upon people. I will
conclude with Povinelli’s words resuming these two crucial contributions by the
late Foucault.

In the last decade of his life, Foucault engaged two broad lines of inquiry […]
On the one hand he began to elaborate a theory of biopolitics in which power
was organized through a statistical understanding of the health of the popula-
tion. On the other hand, he sketched a theory of critique that understood
critique as a particular stance (ethics) against this statistical reduction of life
rather than as any specific normative proposition (morality) about the content
of what the good life is or might be.
(Povinelli 2016: 97)

The heydays of Foucault were probably the 1970s, when he was starting his
crowded lectures at the Collège de France, like that on biopower just discussed. He
died in 1984, after contracting HIV. Together with the revelation of AIDS, the
 Entrepreneurialism 23

1980s were shaped by the recognition of global warming, economic recession and
Thatcherism. The sociologist Ulrich Beck would address all these issues under the
umbrella term Risk Society (1986). Among others, his Risikogesellschaft was turning
him into the most influential German sociologist (if we classify Jürgen Habermas as
a philosopher). He placed individualization and reflexivity at the centre of his
sociology and that is why his work is also especially relevant to our discussion.
Beck’s Risk Society entailed a more global and more democratically distributed
exposure of individuals to insecurities of all kinds, from ecological to sentimental,
to financial risks. Beck, maybe less pessimistic than Foucault, also saw in the new
flexible economic regime a newly opened space for individuals. These were now
freed from traditional obligations linked to gender, religion, ethnicity or kinship.
Yet, the process of individualization was a double-edged sword for Beck. It
involved the loss of old securities and the introduction of new burdens, but these
could also be understood in terms of liberation from archaic repressions and a new
horizon of opportunities.
As mentioned earlier, after finishing his book in April 1986, Beck had to write a
new preface in May because of the Chernobyl disaster. He noted that many of his
speculative new arguments on the individualization of environmental risk now
were transformed by reality into a commonplace description of the present. In a
similar vein, reading about the changes of traditional employment biographies due
to automatization, computation, deregulation and outsourcing, that he described in
his book, strangely feels like a description of the present and not like the pre-
internet era of the 1980s. Remember, this was a time with nearly no home com-
puters in Germany. Risk Society was still being typewritten by Beck’s secretary—as
she explained to me as a curiosity in 2010 at the occasion of the honoris causa award
for Beck at the University of Eichstätt, where I was a visitor then. Yet, Beck had
already noted how the computer in the office (1986: 229) and automated pro-
duction (223) would produce “flexible, plural forms of underemployment” (225;
my translation). Deregulation of labour law, together with the detachment of fixed
workplaces and working hours produced new “patchwork biographies”, where
self-organization, self-production or self-employment were the new imperative of
a new “self-oriented worldview” (1986: 217–218, 225). “These are only the first
waves of a development with an end that we cannot foresee today” he then wrote
(Beck 1986: 229; my translation).
The Cold War ended in the early 1990s and it became less plausible to describe
society in terms of risk and oppression in Beck’s Germany or Foucault’s France.
Hann and Hart (2011: 142) identify three representative sociological commentators
of the new falling walls era. First, the social consequences of the rise of internet
described by Manuel Castells. Second, the taking over of Western style liberal
democracies described by Francis Fukuyama, and third, the rise of the Asian
economies as seen by A. G. Frank. Network society, the end of history and the
Asian Age were the sociological buzzwords of that time. Regarding the ways in
which these developments influenced the conditions of the economic agent,
maybe it is appropriate to bring a fourth name to the conversation. Richard
24 The social life of entrepreneurship

Sennett is also among the most influential sociologists of the turn of the century,
focusing especially on the changes in the world of work. Flexibility—as the core
social organizing principle of the post-industrial societies emerging after the
1990s—is at the heart of his writing (Sennett 2000). The concept of flexibility for
Sennett entailed the continuous restructuring of institutions, the increase of spe-
cialization and plasticity in production processes and the rise of hidden and
decentralized surveillance. Sennett showed how the doctrine of flexibility leads to
contradictory outcomes when market demands structure professional and private
lives in a way that leads to a loss in productivity (2000: 50–53). Sennett, like most
sociologists was focusing on the changes to the Western world of work at the end
of the 20th century, especially, the loss of secure, stable wage labour in the context
of deteriorating State welfare provisions. His informants typically represented
eroding working and middle-class milieus in the US, forced by global corporations
into new entrepreneurial livelihoods. The 2008 financial crisis and the Corona
virus pandemic have only added speed to the rise of flexible labour. This can be
seen in the more recent discussions about the changing world of work, especially in
the new economy (Gershon 2017) and the cultural industries (McRobbie 2016).
They can all be traced back to the notion of the post-Fordist society at the end of
the 20th century (Eriksen 2005). Thus, the standard sociological diagnostic today is:
flexibilization leads to new entrepreneurial livelihoods that are ever more eroding
traditional wage labour relationships.

2000–2020: Innovating others, socialist pitch, and venture labour

The Zeitgeist of the late 20th century might be summarized as politically liberal, eco-
nomically flexible, and psychologically individualistic. These broad trends are the
underlying spirit of entrepreneurial life today. Yet, turning gradually into sociological
commonplaces, these assertions have been infused with new empirical observations,
political sensibilities and theoretical imaginations in the last twenty years. The socio-
logical classics discussed earlier were written by men about their own US-European-
national contexts. They operated with notions such as “society”, “state” or “work” as
wildcards for the social changes experienced by the Western white male industrial
worker. What about their others? What are the nuances of entrepreneurialism in other
world regions and within transnational settings of migrant work, online jobs, or the
postcolonial global labour divide? In this section I will look at rising middle-classes in
Japan, India, China and Middle and South America. Some of their experiences are
utterly familiar to a Western (academic) reader: work–life balancing patch-work
families that are alternating more or less self-fulfilling professional projects with
unemployment. Yet, how does the new entrepreneurial ethic mingle with long-
standing social norms and cultural values, like ethnic affiliation, gender roles, religious
beliefs or national belonging? For instance, there is the Afro-Caribbean matrifocal
family, with their often unmarried, economically self-reliant, and creative-out-of-need
women (Freeman 2014). These were already entrepreneurs of themselves before bio-
politics and neoliberalism told us so. On the contrary, for example, many Muslim men
 Entrepreneurialism 25

in Malaysia struggle to be viewed as real entrepreneurs because, according to local

ethnic stereotype, they are not innovative (for instance, investing in spouses instead of
business). The State promotes entrepreneurship among this Muslim majority with
specific benefits and quotas, which in turn only seems to confirm their inferior entre-
preneurial capabilities vis-à-vis their Chinese and Indian fellow citizens (Kelman
2018).
These and other stories from the early 21st century add breadth and depth to the
earlier positions developed on neoliberalism by famous male intellectuals working
in London, Paris or Munich between the 1970s and 1990s. Postcolonial and fem-
inist framings of entrepreneurialism, articulated by a new generation of female
scholars, often with transnational backgrounds, working in Anglo-Saxon academia,
add complexity to the earlier Western male imaginations of the neoliberal world.
They are concerned with new national and corporate strategies to harness emo-
tional labour, produce occupational identities, and the gendered ways in which the
innovation imperative is dealt with. Adding complexity to the argument sometimes
also leads to changing some of the premises altogether. What if corporations are
inefficient (Graeber 2019)? What if Silicon Valley is provincial (Irani 2019)? What
if neoliberalism and anthropology share more than they like (Gershon 2011)? I will
end my short history of entrepreneurialism of the last 50 years with some of these
thoughts.
Entrepreneurial livelihoods today are of course increasingly diverse. But in the end
they do share certain features that allow us to view them under this common rubric.
I want to frame this twofold condition of unity and diversity of the entrepreneurial
subject in the 21st century as innovating others. Lilly Irani (2019) talks about “Innova-
tors and their Others” to show that the very idea of an entrepreneur always already
implicates a hierarchy. It is putting those who are non-innovators into an inferior
position, as receivers or targets of entrepreneurial action. Slightly twisting her term, I
want to use the label “innovating others” to discuss all those who do not fit the
default imagination of the US white male tech-business founder, but still adhere or
relate to some of the stereotypes of that kind of archetype. One of these innovating
others is Irani’s example of the entrepreneurial citizen in contemporary India. What
makes this entrepreneur different is her or his compromise and duty to the devel-
opment of the postcolonial nation. While the Western archetypal entrepreneur is
cosmopolitan and liberal seeing State interference as limiting individual life-projects,
the entrepreneurial citizen described by Irani conflates older notions of duty and
communalism with those of freedom and individualism. Broadly speaking, this is
because “the state” is not a uniform template on which “neoliberalism” works.
Rather, it is a contingent relation between two social realms—politics and econ-
omy—with historically particular configurations in different places. Earlier, we saw a
Foucauldian description of liberalism’s rise in continental Europe. Slightly different
though, the Indian State’s Five Year (Development) Plans have gradually shifted
from viewing the entrepreneur as a suspicious, self-interested citizen, to think about
the entrepreneur as the default contributor to the nation’s development, as well as a
way to manage a youthful population (Irani 2019: 23–52). Many young, educated
26 The social life of entrepreneurship

Indians who follow the State’s call for innovation, for example targeted by official
projects to return from the Silicon Valley diaspora, feel at ease when being able to
explain to their grandparents how they are contributing to the national project,
instead of working on strange new computer stuff for a corporation. Thus, the
entrepreneurial citizens’ feelings towards the State is slightly different when
compared to the West. And harshly opposite emotional and political landscapes
are forging entrepreneurial lives in Cuba. Here entrepreneurship is often a poli-
tical practice of resistance to the State, when people do not want to work for
“them” (Vertovec 2021). While the national entrepreneurial project in Malaysia
is to turn the supposedly uninventive Muslim majority (bumiputera) into creators
(Kelman 2018), in China entrepreneurship is envisioned to overcome copycat
low-quality production (Lindtner 2017). I conceive of “bumipreneurs” in
Malaysia, “makers” in China, “autónomos” in Cuba, or the Indian Silicon Valley
diaspora as innovating others because they add nuances to the gross idea of the
universal neoliberal self. By setting these contemporary experiences from the
global south in relation to Foucault’s 20th century France, it becomes clear how
entrepreneurial beliefs and practices interreact within different, historically con-
tingent regimes of citizenship and political economies.
Shedding light on the contemporary global diversity of entrepreneurial liveli-
hoods through the image of the “innovating other” also allows broadening the
scope beyond the masculine values of the engineer, inventor, or adventurer, or its
contemporary versions of the brilliant geek and the messianic founder. While men
often do experiment with feminist and postcolonial ideals through entrepreneurial
life models, this does not mean they put these values into everyday political prac-
tice. In her ethnography of “maker-spaces” in Chinese Shenzhen, Silvia Lindtner
found that the apparently cosmopolitan and egalitarian hardware inventors had
absolutely no idea or plan of how to overcome the gendered exclusions in the tech
world (2017: 290). They only seemed to be at ease with conceiving of themselves
as transgressive and egalitarian. Lindtner narrates how she, like other women, were
often brought on stage to fulfil the quota, as well as how she was silenced by a
female reporter who apparently conceived of the masculine contributors to her
story as more authoritative (2017: 299). In turn, women of colour were often
viewed as especially apt “happiness workers”, as Lindtner notes in Prototype Nation
(2020: 214). In her book she generalizes about these insights through the concept
of the “socialist pitch”. The socialist pitch summarizes the wider social logic of
those “innovation spaces”; they only promise but do not realize change and justice
(2020: 12–13). Lilly Irani also spent many years experiencing those subtly gendered
division lines in similar spaces set up by corporations and governments to make
entrepreneurship happen, including hackathons, coworkings, accelerators, labs, or
hubs. In both New Delhi and in San Francisco, she found that participants were
normally young people without family or family obligations. Those who are
involved in care work are systematically excluded from those innovation places,
this is to say, mainly women (Irani 2017: 241–242). The dilemma is that not only
the double burden of most women excludes them from such elite spaces for social
 Entrepreneurialism 27

upward mobility where entrepreneurial life projects are supported. Many women
are driven into turning care work itself or sex work into their dominant ways of
making a living by way of the imperative to live entrepreneurial lives.
Ana Gutiérrez-Garza has followed closely the life histories of middle-class Latin
American women in London. She reports how gendered social pressures and the
State’s inability to protect from poverty forced many of them into risky or unsus-
tainable business ventures. As Gutiérrez-Garza narrates, “being good mothers, good
daughters, or committed family members were unspoken reasons for women … to
incur debt” (2019: 42). The moral burden of debt drove these women into
domestic and sex work in the West, with social relegation, exploitation, disloca-
tion, and illegality as consequences. Another layer to the story of the gendered
complexities of entrepreneurship is the paid female domestic labour that is part and
parcel, for example, of Afro-Caribbean businesswomen’s entrepreneurial lives in
the global south (Freeman 2014: 53–54). Revealingly, affective-emotional work is
crucial to understanding the struggles of all the women cited, as Freeman explains:

What has become increasingly complicated about the work-life rhetoric and
the neoliberal politics of flexibility is that recently women’s self-expressed
desires for flexibility, which include not just the practical combinations of paid
and unpaid work, formal sector jobs and informal economic activities, family,
leisure, self-fulfilment, recognition, and intimacy, have gotten bundled into
the same packaging. Subtly at the core of these convergences and bundles is
the prominence of affective labor. The affective turn suggests a sea change in
capitalism. Its growth is perhaps most profound among the middle classes—
whether in the United States, Europe, China, India, or the small island of
Barbados.
(2014: 214)

Or Japan. The country has the most gender-unequal labour market and the highest
rates of time spent online of all industrialized countries (Lukacs 2020). And it is
especially on our cell phones where private and professional tasks and relationships
become ever more confounded and intertwined. We not only do “our” job out-
side working hours on the phone. Online, we also perform unpaid labour for
digital platforms, that earn money from selling our data, using our content to run
their websites and increase their stock value by incorporating our networks. But
the case of young “girly” photographers, net idols, or cell-phone novelists, and
other female do-it-yourself careers on the internet in Japan is specifically striking.
Gabriella Lukacs makes an intriguing point about the continuities between these
new and much older forms of unpaid, invisible, and as such feminized affective
labours. Affects producing bloggers and social media personalities combine the
creative work of designers and the reproductive tasks of the housewife (Lukacs
2020: 17–18). They personalize professional relations, sustain communities by
sharing passions and do the necessary bonding to keep the platforms buzzing. This
“digital housewife” (Kylie Jarrett’s term) is yet another innovating other.
28 The social life of entrepreneurship

The economics of informal, unrecognized and invisible labour is underpinning

the above mentioned vignettes, as in the case of the girlish happiness workers in
places where the powerful meet, the female expert on technology who is left
unmentioned or the illegal southern sex and care workers in the north. So, what
can we take away from these contemporary studies of innovating others, in this
case of middle-class women from non-Western countries? Apparently, the mascu-
line, US–European flexibility paradigm from the late 20th century has transmuted.
The collapse of the private and the professional has not allowed women to claim
more regard or reward for domestic labour. And it seems that the commodification
of affects has only transformed male subjectivities not their everyday politics. If this
is a common trend, there are also some divergences. Beyond gender lines, per-
forming our lives “as businesses” is blurring private and professional boundaries for
ourselves, but not for the “real businesses” who only create the illusion that they
are (legal) persons.
Consider the following difference. On the one hand, we hear of young women
doing the thankless jobs behind the scenes of the shiny Chinese consumer product
workshops or the female migrants doing the dirty work for us in the West. On the
other, there are the smart and talented Japanese girls performing unpaid, yet
meaningful labour online, or the exceptionally successful women able to capitalize
on VIP tourists’ money entering the Caribbean, like Barbados, the “little England”,
and other outposts of global powers. A crucial internal social difference between
those innovating others, beyond gender or race, is age and class. Many of the above
cited scholars have addressed this issue by pointing to the politics of scale involved
in the global promotion of entrepreneurial life in recent decades. It is the undefi-
nition of entrepreneurship that allows the masquerading of differences of kind as
differences of scale. For instance, media, politics, and corporations talk about the
street hawker and the high-tech programmer as entrepreneurs (Irani 2019: 2). For
Ilana Gershon, it is especially standardization through law and money that leads to
misrecognition of scale as a central bias of the neoliberal logic (Gershon 2011: 541).
Take for instance the “agree to all” button in our online lives that legalizes the
political and economic exploitation of our personal data. It is deployed as if two
“equal” contracting parties reach a “free” agreement, just as if no difference of kind
or hierarchy was underpinning this “service at no cost”.
Another way to describe the blurred divisions between work and personal life in
terms of class and professional identities is by way of changed self-understanding or
consciousness of the worker. If the imagery of late 20th century sociology was the
“decolectivized” industrial male worker, the early 21st century has the self-branding
job seeker or temp as another crucial innovating other. Gershon’s study of hiring in
corporate America (2017) is informed by a socio-historic lens that explains this
difference brilliantly. Earlier understandings of work conceived protection and
property as key to making people loyal to the State and the corporation, thus
turning them into citizens and workers in the first place. All parties understood that
workers rented part of their lives to the company and the nation (Gershon 2017: 5–
8). Today, passion for work substitutes loyalty to the company. The loyalty and
 Entrepreneurialism 29

responsibility to oneself that incapsulates individualism is interpreted by Gershon as

a shift where everyone is the business (the Me Inc.) or is the product (self-brand-
ing). It is to this extent that our relations to other businesses are increasingly
designed as temporary “partnerships”, not renting contracts. For example, temp
agencies or platforms like Uber or Amazon Mechanical Turk are especially good at
creating this illusion of two equal contracting parties. But among the most illumi-
nating aspects of Gershon’s portrayal of precarious underemployment (disguised as
the opportunity of self-branding self-employment) is that corporations treat work-
ers only as businesses when convenient. For example, FedEx treats their deliverers
as contractors, not employees. Still, the company does not allow “contractors” to
resell the routes they receive from FedEx; thus, they do not allow them to behave
as businesses themselves in this respect (Gershon 2017: 244). The truth is that
people are not businesses. Instead of the self-as-business metaphor that Gershon
puts forward, Gina Neff proposes the concept of venture labour:

the way in which people act like entrepreneurs and bear some of the risks of
their companies. Venture labor includes the entrepreneurial aspects of work—
how people behave as if they have ownership in their companies, even when
they are not actual owners.
(2012: 16)

Gina Neff’s Venture Labor (2012) is referenced by virtually all the above mentioned
ethnographers. Her work is leading the way for new economy ethnographies for
several reasons. Venture labour as a concept is congruent with my image of the
innovating other because Neff defines it as the “expression of entrepreneurial
values by nonentrepreneurs” (2012: 16). Like the postcolonial Indian citizen, the
care-working Latin American migrants, the juvenile Japanese bloggers, or the Sili-
con Valley jobseekers, venture labourers in the New York dot-com industry of
1990s were ordinary people lured into precarious employment. From a theoretical
angle, this implies that people only apparently have choices—including para-
doxically those subjects inspired by entrepreneurial values who especially conceive
of themselves as agentive. The dilemma that this poses to reflexive researchers of
reflexive entrepreneurs is identified well by Irani. She talks about the high degree
of self-awareness of her informants, and the fact that she, just like them, is not fully
aware of the social forces that shape our consciousness (2019: 19). Putting our own
experiences and feelings in conversation with those of our collaborators is of course
a common way of making sense out of ethnographic data. But instead of leading to
a postmodern perspectivism, like in the 1980s and 1990s, the aforementioned
ethnographies of innovating others in the early 21st century ultimately conclude
with a single central finding: entrepreneurialism produces, maintains, hides, or jus-
tifies precarious labour, sexist social relations, and colonial practices. When looking
beyond famous media-savvy entrepreneurs, it is not surprising that unequal power
relations come into focus. But there is also a great deal of othering involved in
staging prominently concepts such as self-as-business, emotional or venture labour
30 The social life of entrepreneurship

or even innovating others. These render the familiar exotic. Eventually, such con-
cepts compensate the fact that the young, female, educated, English-speaking,
urban and transnational middle-classes that are at the heart of most of the above
ethnographies are all too familiar to readers and writers in the humanities. To some
extent, most of us are innovating others in the making, especially entrepreneurship
ethnographers who unravel the very trends that we also experience. Freeman has
argued that historically there was an ethnographic ambivalence, distance from or
avoidance of these middle-class entrepreneurs that she and her colleagues describe,
because they were deemed too familiar (2014: 38–39). It is no coincidence that
Neff’s influential book starts by discussing her own early career decision to go to
university in the 1990s in contrast to her friends in New York who took up
interesting and creative projects in the new internet industry. Later she narrates
how her living room was her first fieldsite. Roommates turned into entrepreneurs
and she was “living in” Silicon Alley (Neff 2012: 32). Making her shifting feelings
of jealousy, surprise, and sympathy towards her peers during the inflation and burst
of the dot-com bubble explicit, Neff engages herself in a peculiar kind of emo-
tional work. It consists of scrutinizing her own experiences and exposing parts of
her own personal live to the reader in order to shed light on the larger social trends
she investigates. Lilly Irani for example first worked for Google and later designed a
water filter for the development industry. Her experience as a woman in India, an
Iranian American in the US, and as a former Google employee at a design studio in
New Delhi all add several layers to the web of own–other attributions that are also
constitutive of innovating otherness. Meanwhile, among the entrepreneurial citizen
that she focuses on in her study, is also a Western anthropologist—tired of enga-
ging “only” in academic criticism—working at a hackathon. Irani’s, Neff’s and her
colleagues’ insights are different to those of Beck, Foucault, and Sennett, also
because of their capacity to explore the affective labour of their informants through
that of their own. Of course, Foucault’s homosexuality might have informed the
concept of biopolitics, Richard Sennett is known as a sensible ethnographer, and
Beck staged gender as a crucial category in his Risk Society. But the above ethno-
graphies offer a glimpse into how the increase of female voices, international stu-
dent mobility, precarious academia, and English written scholarship critically
informs new ways of understanding entrepreneurialism in the early 21st century.

Entrepreneurial futures: meaningful or bullshit jobs?

Maybe I am right, and the contemporary social history of entrepreneurship can
comprehensively be told as the history of the generations writing them. If so, it
might be coherent to finish this chapter with the work of a very influential
anthropologist among the age-group of the above cited ethnographers. Congruent
with, but slightly different to the feminist and postcolonial scholarship I have dis-
cussed, David Graeber was often considered “the anarchist anthropologist”, as he
ironically noted on his popular Twitter account. One of his last books—Bullshit
Jobs (2019)—builds on a sample of testimonies gathered from his Twitter-followers’
 Entrepreneurialism 31

networks, and therefore is methodologically a stimulating input into thinking about

where research into the contemporary culture of entrepreneurialism might go in
the future. Graeber defies many assumptions of the afore mentioned scholarship on
entrepreneurship, both from the late 20th and the early 21st centuries. Sadly,
Graeber (as Marshall Sahlins) passed away while I was doing the last polishing of
this book. The subtitle I chose for this chapter is of course a homage to one of the
most creative and entertaining writers of anthropology.
Bullshit Jobs are the expression of pointless work expanding in advanced capitalist
societies. Based on a widely read essay for a leftist journal, Graeber started a call on
his Twitter account (with over 90 thousand followers), asking people to email their
testimonies and experiences of unnecessary jobs, like those he described in his
earlier essay. Heavily relying on quotes from the hundreds of emails received,
Graeber argues that pointless jobs are much more common than we might expect.
According to Graeber, whether a job is pointless or not can be judged best by the
employees themselves. Nevertheless, as part of their job, during their shift they do
have to pretend that this is not the case and all their activities are perfectly rea-
sonable. Based on statistical material, the author speculates that half of all jobs in
the economy might be superfluous. Based on this polemic premise, Graeber
develops a series of specific arguments about the current state of affairs in the
modern workplace. In the following, I want to present and discuss some of these
arguments, especially regarding their relevance for the sociological foundations of
the entrepreneurial self and the extent to which—paradoxically—the anarchist
Graeber seems to be fairly positive about entrepreneurialism. Graeber sees pointless
work proliferating mainly in prestigious, well-paid and salaried white-collar jobs
(2019: 15). These jobs exist for several reasons, for instance because superiors hire
underlings as a way of increasing their own prestige (2019: 164) or because of
“weird corporate bureaucratic dynamics; bad management; poor information flow”
(2019: 151). Those below and above the bullshit strata have useful jobs. On the
one hand there are the low prestige “shit jobs” that are paid by the hour, and on
the other hand there is the managerial class, creating both the shit and the bullshit
jobs—though both are “two profoundly different forms of oppression” (2019: 15).
It is especially the “information jobs” like accounting, administration or consulting
that are utterly nonsense and have been steadily rising since the 1950s. The author
distinguishes these from true “service jobs”—a distinction uncommon in economic
figures—such as barbers or waiters. The evolution of this useful work remains
stable (2019: 145–149).
Graeber’s diagnosis of the modern world of work raises two questions of central
concern in this chapter. How could all these pointless bureaucratic box ticking jobs
proliferate in the age of individualization, efficiency and flexibility described by
Sennett, Beck or Giddens? And, does Graeber implicitly argue that entrepreneurial
livelihoods are the better alternative to the humiliating bullshit job? Regarding the
first question, Graeber describes the current version of capitalism as a new type of
feudalism. For him it is a hierarchical system where appropriation and distribution
favour the creation of endless ranks of vassals and lords (2019: 181). Different to
32 The social life of entrepreneurship

the individualization and flexibilization argument of Beck and Sennett, Graeber

argues that the efficient, individualistic, meritocratic system really is only imagined.
It is the propaganda of economists, managers, and the liberal elites. Managerial
feudalism—the term he uses—is neither flexible nor efficient, because it is pri-
marily based on rent extraction, not production. Political and economic impera-
tives have merged in this system. Therefore, it resembles classic medieval
feudalism—endless hierarchies—with industrial capitalism in the form of a man-
agerialist ethos (2019: 191). In opposition, there is the way Graeber describes the
normal way of working, before the relatively new bullshit job era. Periodic intense
labour was followed by relaxation, as in the case of farming or studying at uni-
versity. Such irregular and unsupervised work was historically the norm and is seen
by Graeber as qualitatively superior to the “sadomasochistic power dynamics” in
our current wage-labour relationships (2019: 86–88, 143).
This brings us to our second question of whether Graeber is an unrecognized fan
of self-responsible work. Curiously, Graeber’s portrayal of the historical and theo-
retical alternative to bullshit work under managerial feudalism comes very close to
how many young entrepreneurs in the West would describe their own lifestyle
today: being your own boss with flexible working hours, while combining leisure
with work. However, it cannot be Graeber’s intention to make a case for the vir-
tues of self-employment. In fact, the abstract entrepreneur appears occasionally in
his book as synonym of managers, economists, accountants, bankers, and other bad
people (2019: 65). Nevertheless, I think that Graeber unintentionally is making a
strong, anthropologically sustained case for the virtues of entrepreneurial liveli-
hoods. If I am right with my observation, it would also not be a casual coincidence
that the unconditional universal basic income, that the author supports at the end
of his book, is also advocated by many famous Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.
Throughout the monograph, Graeber dedicates much effort to answering the
philosophical-anthropological question of what makes us self-fulfilled humans. This
issue is also at the core of conversations with many people I spoke to over the last
ten years of research among small entrepreneurs. They often find “being your own
boss” a creed worth fighting for. For his part, after considering philosophers,
economists and psychologists, Graeber arrives at two responses. Freedom from
authority and playing games “of one’s own making” (2019: 99) lead to self-fulfil-
ment. Creativity and imagination—the buzzwords of the entrepreneurial era—are
positive and genuinely human virtues for the author (2019: 143). Graeber explicitly
conceives “having a sense of agency”, “being an autonomous self” or “conceiving
of [oneself] as capable of acting on the world and others” as fundamental to hap-
piness (2019: 102). In opposition, wage labour is conceived as an oppressive rela-
tionship that tends to subjugate agency. For Graeber,

[t]he need to play a game of make-believe not of one’s own making, a game that
exists only as a form of power imposed on you [like wage labour and parti-
cularly bullshit jobs], is inherently demoralizing.
(2019: 99; Graeber’s emphasis)
 Entrepreneurialism 33

Playing, creativity and freedom are not only the core values to overcome the
demoralizing state of affairs in the ordinary workplace in Graeber’s book. They are
also part of what I have called silicon utopias. These inspire the everyday practices
of entrepreneurs, politicians, aid-workers and bureaucrats that we will meet in Part
III of this book. Techies in Manchester or social entrepreneurs in Vienna, Seville
and Berlin, or in fact most other people I spoke to in my recent research projects,
including colleagues, all share a desire for an autonomous life with exciting occu-
pations in a playful atmosphere. Yet working independently on meaningful or
altruistic projects is often either unpaid or a job accessible only to a small academic
elite, as Graeber sharply analyses (2019: 218, 253). It is to that extent that it could
be argued with Graeber that more entrepreneurship and less wage labour would be
fantastic. Yet for the moment, the labour market tends to reward only self-sacrifice
and subordination, despite all the propaganda surrounding free market opportu-
nities for the many. From this point of view, entrepreneurship, subcontracting, and
outsourcing is not so much a problem or even an accurate description of work in
the 21st century, as Sennet, Beck or Giddens have argued. Entrepreneurship would
be part of a managerial ethos that does not correspond with the reality of the feudal
rentier capitalism where most people are caught up in non-liberal, even non-
capitalist power relationships that we happen to call work (see also Standing 2017).
At this point of my argument, I may conclude with the basic ideas brought
forward in Chapter 1. I will do so with a distinction between three different—yet
related—sociological readings of the cultural-economic context that historically
made the rise of entrepreneurial selfhood over the last 50 years possible. The first
sees in entrepreneurial flexibility a harmful ideology. This creed obscures the
downsides of the proliferation of outsourced, unprotected and temporary jobs at
the turn of the century, by inaccurately reframing these as opportunities, efficiency
and flexibility. The second sees entrepreneurial individualism as a two-sided sword.
Modern selfhood is configurated by the advantages and downsides of liberal market
societies. New freedoms—choice—come with new constraints—the obligation to
choose. The third reading goes like this: the current entrepreneurial ethos is an image
created by the elites. In reality, most people are caught up in traditional, boring and
oppressive wage-labour relationships. From this vantagepoint, entrepreneurship
would contribute to more happiness by giving people a sense of agency, as having
some sort of impact on the world surrounding them. Nevertheless, currently this
ideal is often only realized in unpaid “work”. This is coming very close to what
Steiner and Teasdale (2016) have called the “playground of the rich”, where only
the few have the pleasure of engaging in self-rewarding but underpaid jobs as social
entrepreneurs. We will reencounter and deepen these three readings as we move
forward. At this point, it is enough to advance that each reading might not be
equally useful when applied to different contexts, as we will see in more detail in
Part III of the book. Whether we talk of door-to-door vending supported by NGOs
in the slums of Nairobi or of Manchester middle-class boys hoping to program the
next “big thing” is utterly different. Thus, anthropology considers people’s lived
experiences in contrast to the sociological generalizations I have discussed here. I
34 The social life of entrepreneurship

have traced a broad variety of generalizations in the works of classics and new scho-
larship. Biopolitics, individualization of risk, flexibility, bullshit jobs, innovating
otherness and emotional or venture labour were among the theoretical frameworks.
But for now, I will turn from history and sociology to linguistics. The next chapter is
about the often poetic language of entrepreneurship.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 Siinä tuli tuhannemmoone juntturoomine sen akan ja poliisin
välillä.
Tiätäähä sen ny, että vähemmästäki potkia sätkyteliähän.

Ja toiset akat huuti että:

— Pirä puales, Maija!

Mutta sai kun saikin se poliisi viimmee nypätyksi pultunnuarasta

kiinni ja ku se siitä oikee kiskaasi, niin jo pärköski pultunsuu.

Oikias s’oli se poliisi! Akan toisestakin pultusta juaksi toinenki puali

tynnyriä rukihia maaha.

Mutta kyllä kans sitte jo pääsi juaksemha! Olikin niin

vikkeläkinttuune ettäh.

Meinas lipittää suaraa Präntöölle, mutta poliisi pirättiki patukasta.

Pyysikki innostuuvat kamalasti. Sanoovat että:

— Taitaa näiren toistenki akkaan pultuus olla joitakin kappoja!

Eikähä oo parasta että tuata nuan vähä kallatahan.

En tiärä sitten tuliko siitä housukallista mitää, mutta kovas n’oli

tohkehes, ku mä pois lährin.
YLISTARON AKKOJA NARRATTIHIN.

Oottako kuullu kuinka ylistarolaasia yks vekkulimiäs täs

aprillinpäivänä narras ja hyppöötti?

Se on sellaane kliipattu junkkari se rakennusmestari siälä

Ylistaros, jotta ne on aiva helisemäs sen kans.

Juksaa ja puliveivaa uskovaaset ja suruttomat aiva sekaasinsa.

Se junkkari oli naulannu kirkonkylällä taloon seinihi lappoja, jotta

osuuskauppaha on tullu sokuria ja jotta sitä saa vaihtaa rukihilla ja
ohrilla.

Oliko se ny niin, jotta viis kilua viljaa ja yks kilo sokuria, vai oliko se
enempi?

Mutta kyllä saivat Ylistaron akat kintut allensa.

Ne juaksivat aiva häntä truutulla.

Heikkoolaski jäi kaikkien talojen väet ilman ruakaa, ku akat lähtivät

klapsaasohon kirkonkylän puarihi.
 Ja Kyläänpään larvas oli yhrenki akan lapsi, kun oli yksin jääny,
syäny maitopotusta uuren tutin. Aiva rauskooksi oli pureskellu.

Ja aiva on lapsen vatta kuulemma viäläki paisuksis.

Ja körttilääsekki olivat Koskenmäeltä ajaa paasoottanehet aiva

vahrus
Korpelan sivuu kirkolle päin ja jahkaassehet jotta:

— Miksei sitä sokuria oo meirän puarihi tuatu?

Mutta huanoote käytihi kumminki yhren emännän Liipantönkällä,

kun se kans faarttas jyvälaarille ja rupes rukihia paasaamha pussihi.

Kun ei se yhtään hoksannu kun siinä härisnänsä oli hairannu

pussin, john’ oli pöhjas suuri reikä. Se paasas ja paasas ja aina kun
meinas, jotta ny piisaa ja nosti pussia ja meinas situa, nii aina vain
oli pussi pualellansa.

Silt’ oli kuulemma pillahtanu itku lopuuksi.

Oli huutanu piikaaki tulla paasaamha ja se vasta äkkäs mihnä vika

oli.

Mutta lopuuksi seki akka pääsi plynääsemhä pussi seljäs kirkolle.

Kyll oli Hyypän silimät ollehet ympyriääset, ku puarihi tryykätä

tormootti yht'äkkiää sellaane akkalauma. Niitä tuli puari aiva täytehe
puales tiimas. Ja jokahine huuti, jotta:

— Mulle kaks kilua. Ja mulle viis kilua.

Eikä kaikki päässehet puarihinkaa pussiinensa. Ovenrakho oli

nutistunu kaks akkaa niin että ne oli aiva yhres takus, kun yhtaikaa
tukkivat.

Mäkitaloon emännält' oli revenny hameskin.

Niin oli akat juassehet, jotta kaikill’ oli sukat aiva syltys ja
sukkarihmat tresajivat pitkin maata.

Ja kun Hyyppä sitte niille sanoo, jotta teitä on narrattu, ei tääll’ oo

sokuria vaihtaa! Niin kyll oli melu ja poru joukosta nousnu.

Ja jos olis se senki rumaasen-kuvaane rakennusmestari siinä

paikalla ollu, niin olis akat antanehet sille niin, ettei olsi miähellä
karvoja ollu ku vähä korvien nenis.

Mutta sekös junkkari istuu vain kotonansa ja nauraa kitkutti, ku

akat hengen erestä juäksivat.
KETTUJUTTU.

Oottako kuullu minkälaasia kettuja sitä on täs mailmas yleensä ja

erityysesti Alaurella?

Siäll'on kuulemma kovasti kettuja. Niitä vilisöö joka paikas. On

mettis, kivenkoloos, on puskikoos ja puskan juurella, on taloollisis ja
torppariis.

On takseerauslautakunnaskin!

Melkeen joka miäs on kuulemma kettu, suuree eli piänee.

Ja ketunpyyrystäjiä on kans paljo, n’otta siin’on ketuulla, suurilla ja

piänillä, kamalat paikat, kun kaikki koittaavat kettuulla ja narrata
toistansa.

Ensiksi kettuuli yks isoon taloon poika ketunmyrkyllä nii, että yks
mettäkettu nialaasi karvahan palan, tuli synnintuntohon ja
vattanporotuksehen, katuu katkerasti ja kuali.

Ja kun s’ooli mahtavaa ja kehuu ittiänsä se ketunpyytäjä n’otta:

— Täs s’oonkin ketunpyyrystäjä, tuata nuan, jok’ei hukkareisuja

tee!
Aina kellahtaa kettu, kun tämä kettu syätin tällää!

Ja toisten ihmisten pisti vihaksi. Niitä kismitti ja pisteli kun

neuloolla. Imehtelivät ja kyselivät jotta:

— Kuinka sä nuata kettuja nuan kovasti saat? Ja kuinka sä sen

syätin oikeen laitat?

Mutta sekös vanha kettu rupes täs toisia kettuja opettamhan! Pani
vaa toisen silmän kiinni ja sanoo:

— Jaa, s'onkin konsti se! Ei sitä vaa joka sorkka tairakkaa

sellaasta syättiä laittaa! Pitää ensin tappaa kukoonpoika ja kyniä se,
n’ottei se pääse lentämhän. Sitte pitää lyärä kirvhellä siltä pää poikki,
ettei se laulakkaa. Sitte sen pitää paistaa vois ja kryyrätä, mutten
sano millä — —

— Saako sitä kryyteriä atteekista vai kauppapuarista? — kysyy

yks toinen kettu viattomana.

Mutta s’ei vaa sanonu.

— Ja sitte pitää pureskella liha hampahisnansa oikeen fiiniksi ja

sitte vasta panna ketunmyrkkyä vahvaatte joukk’hon.

— Onko se sitte valmis — kysyy taas se opinhaluune kettu. — Vai

pitääkö viälä muutaki tehrä?

Jaa — sanoo se vanha kettu. — Joo, tuata nuan, sitte sen pitää
viälä reisuusti oikeen kovasti pureskella, niin kyllä kettuja saa, niinku
ootta mun nähny niitä vetävän.
 Ja kyllä se miäs niitä kettuja saiki ruakottomasti. Kun melkee joka
päivä tuli mettästä roikottaan seljäsnänsä aikamoosta ketunkoljanaa.

Ja ihmiset karehtii, n'otta n’oli aiva kurnaalinsinisiä naamastansa

kun tuata nuan:

— Joka päivä se nuata kettuja roikottaa, n’otta aivan tiät ravalla!

Ja kyllä se ny oikeen silimis rikastuu, mutta orottakohon, kun tuloo
takseerauskokous, niin kyllä kans ääniä pannahan!

Ja se kokous tuliki ja takseerimiähet käskivät sen kettumiähen

ethensä ja sanoovat jotta:

— Kuinka monta kettua s’oot oikeen saanu tänä vuanna?

Ja olivat kiäriä ja tuumasivat, jotta kun ny peijakas sanot oikeen

kunnian ja omantunnon kautta, niin kyllä me sulle ääniä paamma,
ettäs kunnian ja omantuntos tiäräkki.

Niin tuumasivat takseerauslautakunnan ketut, mutteivät mitää

puhunehet. Kattoovat vaa kun ketut ainakin sen päälle. Ja se sanoo
oikeen kunnian ja omantunnon kautta jotta:

— Yhyren ketun m’oon saanu koko talavena!

Silloon takseeriketut heiluttivat mukavasti häntäänsä. Sanoovat

aivan silimät tihirulla ja suupiälet korvis jotta:

— Vai yhyren ketun vai! — Älä yhtää kettuule miäs! Niinku ei täs
olsi pitkin talavia nähty sun kettuja kanniskelevan aiva lauree. Aina
vaan on ketunhäntä roikkunu peräsnäs, nii että toiset on jo luullehet,
jotta s’oon kasvanu kiinnikki.
 Mutta se ketunmyrkyttäjä vannoo ja vakuutti, jotta yhren ketun
s’oon vaan saannu. Sen saman ja ainuan ketun, jonka kaikki
alavutelaaset ovat nähänehet sen seljäs kiikkuvan.

Se tunnusti kunnian ja omantunnon kautta, niinkun nyt tämän

mailman aikhan pitääki tehrä, kun oikeen kranttu paikka tuloo, jotta
s’oon joka aamu salaa pussis kuljettanu saman ketunraaron
mettähän ja sitte tullu mahtavaa taas kylähä korja kettu seljäs.

— Älä valehtele! — kiljaasi puheenjohtaja.

— En valehtelekkaa, kun mä kerran totta puhun ja kunnian ja

omantunnon kautta — sanoo.

— Eikö se ketturaukka jo ruvennu haisemhan? — kysyy yks

kavala takseerikettu.

— Tiättypä se! Rupes, haisi kun raato, jotta häjyä teki. Ja nahkaki
meni pilalle, etten saanu siitä kun 50 markkaa.

Takseeriketut nauroovat, jotta partakarvat pöläji ja lupasivat

kovasti uskua kun ketunmyrkyttäjä kerran vakuutti kunnian ja
omantunnon kautta.

Mutta se ketunmyrkyttäjä nauraa pihisteli partoohinsa jotta:

— On ne kans kettuja olovanansa, nua takseeriketut, kun eivät

hoksannehet kysyä kenen kunnian ja omantunnon kautta mä
vannoon ja vakuutin!

Tiätysti sen kettu-vainaan! Eikä sill'oo kunniaa eikä omaatuntua

ollu elääskään joko sitte kuallehena!
NAHKASAVUT.

Oottako kuullu, jotta Ilimajojell’o ruvettu polttelemahan uutta laija

piipputupakkia?

S’oon kotimaanen keksintö ja tuloo halvaksiki. Ei trenkää muuta

kun hakata vesurilla hyvin pieneksi vanhat kinnasrauskat elikkä
pieksunruojuhut, sekoottaa vähä kessuja joukhon ja pistää
piippuhun.

Jaa näimäs, pitää siinä panna valakiakin ja muistaa verelläkkin

välihin.

Nämä nahkasavut ovat kuulemma erinomaasen tervehellisiä

tupakin nälkääsillen toiskan miehille. Samoon kun vasta-alkavillen
klopiillekkin, jokka kulukoovat isänsä tupakkilooras hyppyysinensä,
eiväkkä usko, vaikka rookatahan rysän päältä ja saavat sellaasia
paukkuja n’otta korvat lummehroksis hoippuuloovat hyvän aikaa.

Mutta kun tällää kaverillen nahkasavut, niin ei tartte lyärä, ei

paukahuttaa. Eivät kuulu toista pesällistä hualivan vaikka kuinka
taritahan.
 Sielä on Ilimajojen ylisespääs kuulemma yks sellaanen taloo,
johna »toiskan Jaska» koittaa pitää ittiänsä aivan krannin tupakiis.

Ei osta itte, eikä päivisin polta, mutta kun ilta tuloo, niin tuloo kans
Jaska krannihin kun knakutettu klasipenkille istuskelohon. Pitäähän
siinä isännän lopuuksi tuova tupakkiloora nöyrälle ja haastaa
piippuhun panohon.

— Jos tuota nyt panis taas vähä käryämähän — tuumii JaSka ja

Vetää nysän plakkaristansa. — Vaikka tyyristä s’oon ny tuo tupakkiki.

Sitte ottaa tupakkilooran polvillensa ja rupiaa nysää täyttämähän.

Samalla kraapii pikkusormellansa tupakit pohojaa myören, jotta jos
sattuus olohon parempaa pohojalla eli johonakin nurkas.

Tätä ainaasta »toiskan Tupakki-Jaskaa» on isäntä koittanu

petkuttaa sillä lailla, jotta s’oon tällänny propeetaria looran yhtehen
nurkkahan ja pannu huonoja kessuja päälle. Itte on isäntä kopeloonu
piippuhunsa alta parempaa tupakkia ja Jaska veteli kauan aikaa
kessuja. Mutta sitte se äkkäs yhtenä iltana, vaikkei puhunu mitää.
Toisena iltana se hoksas jo koolia. Sittemmisin on isäntä polttanu
Jaskan aikana vaan paperossia ja pitäny Jaskalle ja muillekkin
krannin miehille kessurruotoja tupakkilooras pöyrällä.

Mutta Jaska on sitkiä mies. S’oon istunu, syljeskelly ja käryyttäny

krannin isännän kessuja koko talaven n’otta kuola juosnu ja tupa
haisnu. Isännän rupes jo pistöhön vihaksi kun:

— Tuolle toiskan Jaskallenko mun pitää täs kessut viljellä ja sitä

tupakiis pitää, senkin raakkulehen kitupiikkiä, kun ei malta itte ostaa.
Mutta kyllä mä laitan sille junkkarille kryyterit kessuuhin n’otta
tietääkin.
 Isäntä meni kokille ja toi sieltä emännän vanhan navettapieksun.
Pani tolopalle ja hakkas kirveskänällä aivan kryyniiksi. Sitte kokos
kämmenen pohojahan ja kumaasi tupakkiloorahan. Vähä
kessunloppuja varisteli joukkohon.

Sai parahiksi looran pöyrällen kun Jaska jo tuli.

Eikä tarvinnu kahta kertaa käskiä kun Jask’ oli jo nysänsä larannu.

Kriipaasi valakian ja veti oikeen vattan pohjahan. Silimät pullistuu

pääs, henki salpaantuu ja Jaska rupes rykimähän, räkimähän ja
krakistelemahan kun olis rökkähän nielaasnu. Ei saanu sanaa
suusta.

— Ompa tuo Jaska aika hotales kun vetää n’otta tukehtuu! Suuri
mies eikä osaa vielä poltellakkaan! — päivitteli isäntä.

Kun oli Jaskan kurkku vähä seliinny, niin tuumas jotta:

— Olipas se väkevää. Mitä rumaasen tupakkia tämä oikeen on

kun nuon prätäjää ja haisoo häjyltä?

— Siihen on pantu vähä mahorkkaa sekahan — tuumas isäntä.

— No ilimankos oikeen kurkunpäätä kraapii — siunaali Jaska

vesissilimin.

Mutta poltti kun polttikin piipun loppuhun. Ei pannu enää toista

piippua vaikka isäntä kovasti houkutteli.

Yhtäkkiää hyppäs Jaska pysthyn ja tryykäs ovesta pihallen. Juoksi

navetan taa ja sieltä rupes kuulumahan niinkuu pikkuvasikka olis
yÖkiny. Mutfei s’ollu vasikka. S’oli se Jaska!
Eik’oo Jaska sen kerran perähän tullu krannin tupakkiloorallen.
PETLEHEMINMÄELTÄ.

Oottako kuullu jotta Kauhajoell'on sellaanenki paikka jota sanotahan

Petleheemin mäjeksi?

Ja sillä mäjellä tehtihin täs joulun välipäivinä sellaanen

hevooskauppa, n'ottei s'oo viäläkään valmis, vaikka siin'on ollu
akakkin päällänsä suupeliä soittamas.

Kun oli sen suutarivainaan huutokauppa, niin sinne tuli yhren akan
vävypoika ja yks palstatilallinen, kumpikin hepallansa poukotellen,
kun ainakin isäntämiehet. Ja rennolla päällä olivakkin.

— Viis penniä tykö! — kiljaasi se vävypoika summanmutikas kun

pihahan ajoo ja kuuli vasaramiehen huutavan jotta:

— Tulooko lisää? Ensimmäänen, toinen ja — — — tulooko lisää?

Silloon tuli se palstatilallinenkin justhin sillä viriällä salviallansa

pihalle ja huikkas n'otta:

— Ja viis penniä vielä!

Samas kans paukahti ja isännällen nakattihin aika knippu tavaraa.

Siin'oli vanha häkylä, kerinlehret, juustolauran puoliska, kaks
kakulakeppiä, tukkilukku, klihran rauta, vintilän varsi ja roukkonavari.
Ja kun isäntä tuumas jotta:

— Siinä s'tä nyt tulikin töskää!

Niin vasaramies huippas vielä vanhan kipparan karvakengänkin

tulohon samahan läjähän ja huuti jotta:

— Joko piisaa, vai nakkaanko lisää?

Mutta isäntä tuumas n'otta:

— On siinä kilua jos on kaluakin yhyren miehen osalle! Myykää jo

muillekkin.

Sitte se rupes kattohon sen vävypoijan hevoosen päälle ja sanoo

jotta:

— Ompas tuolla hevoosella häjy rusto takajalaas.

Se on selevää, jotta vävypoika suuttuu kun tupakki, sutkaasi konia

suittenperillä lautaasillen ja kiljaasi jotta:

— Katto mies mihnä sulla rustoja on!

Kun aikans'oli haukuttu toistensa hevoosija, kattottu suuhun ja

nostettu häntää, niin huipattihin huppia ja kumpikin lähti uurella
konilla kotiansa. Ja tykkäsiväkkin molemmat jotta saivat jutkahuttaa
toistansa.

Mutta vävypoijan kotona nousi totinen tomina. Siinä

puhallettihinkin oikeen kaharella harpulla falssit ja minuveetat
sekaasinsa. Ja siinä vanhas harpus oli paljo koveet ääni.
 Mutta sitte sekin loppui kun puukoon päähän. Akat sitaasivat hilkut
korvillensa, tryykööttivät pihalle, kääntöövät hevoosen ja laskettivat
häntäpitkällä vaihtamahan takaasi.

Mutta akat eivät tiennehet sitä, mitä huonoonkin hevoosmies

tietää, jottei nähkääs passaa hevooskaupas voittanehen olla
kolomehen voorokautehen kotonansa. Sitte kyllä jo pitää kauppa.
Tämä palstatilallinen oli lakia kunnioottava hevooskoijari ja pysyy
kans 3 vuorokautta katees, niinkun laki määrää, jottei
hevooskauppaa saara rikotuksi.

Mutta akat ovat kans kavalia, niinkus tierättä. Niin oli sen
vävypoijankin huonehenhallitus. Mitäs tekivät?

Lähtivät ensi pyhänä sillä vaihtokopukalla kitkkohon. Sitoovat

hupan renkahasehen kiinni ja menivät peräpenkille istumahan. Se
palstatilallinen oli kans akkoonensa tullut kiittöhön hyvästä
hevooskaupasta ja veisas hartahasti.

Silloon livahtivakkin sen vävypoijan akat pihallen ja jättivät

palstatilallisen akkoonensa veisaamahan.

Menivät vanhan salaviansa työ, päästivät aisoosta ja panivat vähä

nopiaa oman reen etehen. Sen huonon hevoosen lykkäsivät
palstatilallisen lohnasta syömähän — ja ajaa karuuttivat kotia n'otta
porkoolit soittuu.

Kun kirkonmeno oli loppunu ja viimmeenen värsy veisattu, tuli

palstatilallinen akkoonensa vakavis ajatuksis kirkosta pihalle — ja
näki! Näki, n'otta sen oma hevoonen syörä krauskutteli irrallansa
heiniä lohnasta. Kirkkomiehestä tuli yht'äkkiää tavallinen ihiminen. Ja
se lasketteli suustansa sellaasia sanoja, jokk'oli toisille kirkko-
ihmisillen kauhistus.

Meinas vierä aisoosta vetämällä lohnan kotia ja jättää sen

hevoosen siihen. Mutta hevoonen tuli peräs.

Eikä auttanu muu, kun akkakin tahtoo rekehen istua, kun panna
aseehin ja ajaa kotia, vaikka kyllä s'oli katkeraa.
JURVAN KUPPARI.

Oottako kuullu, että Jurvan Sarvijoella voirahan ny taas kovasti

hyvin?

Se oliki niin nutuusta ja rutuusta se elämä täs loppuaikoona, jotta

sarvijokiset pakkas tulhon liika krätyysiksi.

Mutta sitte tuli erinomaane siipyläänen kuppari, hiaroja ja povari ja

ny on sarvijokelaasten kruppi taas kovasti liantoone ja hyväs voinnis.
Ei vaivaa enää kihti ei romotiisi. Lonkkapistoksistaki on päästy. Eikä
sillä hyvä, että se siunattu siipyylääne kuppari hiaroo, kuppas ja imi
kuppisarvillansa pahan veren sarvijokelaasista seljän kautta uloos.
Se viälä povas kaupanpäälliseksi ja kattoo kärestä. Mutta
kaffinsumppihin s'ei kuulemma saattanu kattua ollenkaan. Ne se
litkaasi menhön poroonensa.

Ja kyllä se akka vain tiäsiki. Oli tarkasti kullekki neuvonu

varoomha yhtä ristinveristä miästä ja punaveristä naista, jokka
pakkaavat Sarvijoellaki tukkimha pariskunnan välihi. Paljo ilua ja
vähä muresta oli kullekki luvannu. Ja markan pistäny tarkasti
aluushamhen plakkarihi ja vakuuttanu, jotta hyvin menöö.
 Ja hyvinhän s'oon sarvijokelaasten mennykki. Ei voi moittia.
Kaikkien muiren, mutta sen Tuamahan käythin vähä huanosti.

Sitä ku se Siipyyn flikka hiaroo nii, että Tuamahan syrämmes

tuhahti rakkaus aiva ilmi liaskaha. Ja paloo, n'otta käry nousi. Sen
rupes silmät lirutteloho ja lakkinsakki tälläs kallellensa.

Tiätää sen ku sellaane mailmankuppari ja hiaroja ottaa

poikamiähen siltä kantilta katteltavaksensa, että miähen ittellensä
hiaroo, nii turhaa siin'on vasthan prätkytellä.

Se oli se Siipyyn flikka hiaronu sen Tuamahan niin ympärinsä,

n'otta aivan oli Tuppu-paraan pää klenahrellu.

Ja ku Tuamas oli niin fletkooksis, ettei mistää tiänny, niin oli ottanu
Tuamahan syrämmen oikee käthensä ja knäpähyttäny siihe
kuppikirvehellänsä kauhiammoosen ja syvän rakkauren haavan.

Siit'oli juassu kamalasti verta ja Tuamahan oli lyäny niin heikoksi,

jotta siinä paikas oli kosinu sitä kupparia.

— Eikä se hieroja-flikka ollukkaa pannu yhtää vastha. Oli laulaa

helähyttäny että

Hellällä palavalla syrämmellä

Raakastan minä siinua!

Ja sen päälle oli nuoripari hypelly kiverän polkan, n'otta sarvipussi

kalissu.

Ja sitte kihloolle Vaasaha. Niin kiirus oli ollu, etteivät malttanehet

junalla Seinäjoen kautta kiärrättää, ku lähtivät kävellä flinttaamha
käsikoukkua oikoostiätä Vaasaha. Kivisillan pääs olivat vähän aikaa
huilannehet ja sitte lopun matkaa hyssytellehet.

Keturista ostivat komjat kihlat ja kangaspuarista kaulahitten. Mistä

se
Tuamas sen kellon osti, sitä mä en tiärä.

Mutta hyvä s'oli käymhä, kun ei ollu ku varttia vaille, ku Tuamas oli
hellunsa kans taas viikon päästä Sarvijoella että tärähti!

Ja sen päälle juathin kaffit ja olthin onnellisia. Eikä siinä akkaan

kontittemiset auttanehet monehen päivähä.

Mutta sitte meni huanosti. Morsiaan tahtoo, että lährethän yhres

Siipyyhy, että hänki saa näyttää omanpuolohoosille sulhaasmiästä.
Ja lährethin kans. Kestinkylähän päästihin yäksi ja menthin korjasti
nukkumha.

Mutta aamulla ku Tuamas huomaatti ei morsiant' enää ollukkaa. Ei

sängyn allakaa. S'oli menny ja s'oli murheelline paikka. Kaikki oli
viäny joukosnansa, kihlat ja kuppisarvekki.

Ei muuta jättäny ku sen syvän haavan Tuamahan syrämmehen.

RUUSUJA TALVITILOOLLA.

Oottako kuullu, jotta kyllä siin’on perää ku akat sanoovat, ettei

miästen oo heirän asioohi sekaantumine?

Ne sanoo akat, jottei miähet ymmärrä akkaan meiningiistä, ja että

jos ymmärtääväkki, nii ymmärtäävät vääri. On kuulemma paree, ettei
koitakkaa ymmärtää, eikä tukkia noukkaansa niiren asioohi. Ei oo
meistä miähistä muuta ku harmia ja vaivaasta vahinkoa!

Sen sain mä ja Juppe eilee katkerasti kokia.

Ku ny on satanu nii kovasti vahvalta lunta, että pakkaa lumi menhö

housunpultuusta sisälle, nii mä sanoon sille nuarelle frouvalle, jonka
tykönä mä ja Juppe oomma kortteelia jotta:

— Mihkähä frouva on paiskannu mu piaksusaaphani? Mä pansin

ne ny jalkoohini.

Mä sanon jo etukäthe, ett'että ouroksuusi, jotta se meirän frouva

on turski ihmine, jok’ei yhtää kruusaa eikä karahteeraa meitä
kumpaakaa, Juppeja sen paremmin ku muakaa.