The good old days yet to come: postalgic times for the new spirit of capitalism

Abstract

The spirit of capitalism has been read from biographies, accounting methods and popular managerial texts. Here we explore it by report on a ‘compressed ethnography’ of a festival-type event for practising and budding entrepreneurs, the Do Lectures. Our analysis provides insight into a developing spirit of capitalist enterprise not yet discursively settled into text or organizational practice. We suggest that the event and its surrounding virtual community constructions contain intimations of a different spirit founded on the incorporation of a range of temporally conditioned beliefs related to the natural environment, work and organization. This in turn, we argue, suggests that spirits of capitalism can be understood as temporally more complex than as a series of linear progressions. We conclude by noting the potential for conceptual development to better interpret and understand the pasts, presents and futures of capitalism through this approach.