Abstract
This article examines how corporate, state and donor interests have converged in attempts to craft South Africa’s youngsters into an army of entrepreneurs as the last frontier for creating growth in a post-job world. We investigate the apparatus designed to engineer this entrepreneurial revolution and the actors hoping to seed enterprising aspirations in school-age kids. Our ethnographic findings show that while the ideology of entrepreneurial education enrols kids in anticipation of an entrepreneurial future, it falls short of both its enticing promise and its transformative intentions. As enterprise education fails to deliver on the New South African Dream, we argue, the aspirations it propagates withers, generating disaffection rather than a generation of entrepreneurial subjects faithful to the neoliberal creed of making it on your own.
Highlights
Corporate, state and donor interests converge in attempts to craft South Africa’s youngsters into an army of entrepreneurs as the last frontier for creating growth in a post-job world as South Africa’s generation of business leaders
Both were attending an extra-curricular schools programme for disadvantaged high-achievers in South Africa backed by some of the country’s leading corporations. Both had been handpicked by corporate selectors who comb through results from public schools in the municipality looking for the ‘thirty-five most promising Historically Disadvantaged South African (HDSAii) kids’ to join others at LearnLife, an elite summer academy in Johannesburg
This article investigates how corporate, state and donor interest converge in attempts to craft young lives in South Africa in the model of junior businesspeople and turn ‘generation jobless’ iii - as the Economist (2013) dubs those coming of age in the new millennium - into job-creators
Summary
State and donor interests converge in attempts to craft South Africa’s youngsters into an army of entrepreneurs as the last frontier for creating growth in a post-job world as South Africa’s generation of business leaders. As the pathway from formal education to employment becomes ever more uncertain, hopes for the future come to rest increasingly on a millennial generation of precocious youngsters, ready to seize the entrepreneurial moment, and create rather than await the opportunity to empower themselves through enterprise.
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