Hegemonic policy discourses on entrepreneurship: A comparison between the Netherlands and Kosovo

Abstract

Policymakers have prioritized conventional forms and understandings of entrepreneurship in their political agendas, enforcing a rhetoric that seems to be bound to the promise of economic progression. This rhetoric has often helped generate hegemonic discourses of entrepreneurship that seem to be difficult to challenge. This paper combines textual analysis techniques and critical discourse analysis to analyze political agendas in the Netherlands and Kosovo to research the specific hegemonic workings of such discourses on entrepreneurship and problematize their consequences. We found that these political agendas invoke hegemonic discourses of (economic) power, discourses of protectorate, and discourses of enterprise. We also found that the prominence of such hegemonic discourses diverge between contrasting social settings and are more apparent in a precarious context. While the discourses of (economic) power and the discourse of protectorate are most explicit in the case of Kosovo, the discourse of enterprise is present in both countries. This paper contributes to the literature taking a critical approach to entrepreneurship, questioning the hegemonic allure given to entrepreneurship, and highlighting the consequences of such hegemony in shaping the entrepreneurship image by uncovering and problematizing ideological discourses invoked by policy discourses.