Enterprise Discourse Research Articles

‘Money Probably Has Something to Do with My Life’: Discourse and Materiality in the Working Lives of Start-Up Entrepreneurs

This article contributes to an understanding of work-intensive entrepreneurial lives as part of analysing the intensification of work in society. It offers an empirical extension of Foucauldian analyses, which attribute commitment to work to the influence of neoliberal enterprise discourse while often neglecting the material conditions of entrepreneurial work. The article draws on moderate constructionism and materialist discourse analysis to offer an account that pays attention to discourse and material realities. This ethnographic study shows how participants evoked norms of enterprise discourse to explain their commitment to work. However, they also understood these norms to be fundamentally shaped by their material conditions. The major contribution of the article is to show that the interpenetration of discursive norms with the investment logic of enterprise tends to displace boundaries between work and personal life and shift temporal arrangements of work from work–life ‘balance’ to prospects of free time in the imagined future.

Worlds Apart

The concepts of social enterprise and social entrepreneurship have been ever more present in public discourse during the past 20–30 years, along with radically different views of the kind and level of socioeconomic or political change that these specific economic ventures (should) aim for. Although social enterprise discourse is often dominated by neoliberal perspectives, which present market-based activity as simply an efficient means of solving all kinds of more or less local and isolated social problems, more critically minded strands of research have been questioning this approach and calling for a broader and more critical perspective. This paper aims to see how these opposing discourses are represented in the Croatian news media, as a discursive sphere which is accessible to a broad public. The analysis focuses on online media in the period 2007–2019 and is based on a comparison between three media types: the online versions of a national daily newspaper and a regional daily newspaper, as well as an online-only progressive non-profit news site. A stark contrast is apparent between mainstream commercial media and alternative non-profit media, i.e. a dominance of neoliberal “enterprise discourse” in the former and more emphasis on a broader political and economic agenda calling for more fundamental, comprehensive and long-term change in the latter.

Channelling compassion towards change: elite volunteerism, corporate philanthropy and education reform in urban India

ABSTRACT This article explores how young elite urban professionals and fresh graduates in Mumbai and Delhi are fostering diverse aspirations of service, entrepreneurship and charting new professional mobilities through volunteering opportunities at a well-known corporate-supported non-governmental organisation (NGO), the Teach for India (TFI) programme. Mostly with commerce, engineering and management educational backgrounds, the TFI intervention operates as a nodal site for these elite youth to not just serve underprivileged children through ‘acts of compassion’ but also channel their experiences to understand the education system and reinvigorate it through corporate management values of enterprise and performance. Through examining the trajectories of these individuals, I foreground the nascent terrain of technocratic expertise being shaped through an interlinked collective of corporate NGOs that have become prominent in advising the Delhi state government, under the leadership of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), to improve public education through discourses of enterprise and performance.

The Dynamics of Control of Migrant Agency Workers: Over-Recruitment, ‘The Bitchlist’ and the Enterprising-Self

This article explores migrant workers’ experiences of organisational control while undertaking temporary agency work. This study is based on a ‘covert’ ethnographic study set at a temporary employment agency that short-term contracts workers to the catering and hospitality industry. The findings show how control is perceived by workers to emerge from the over-recruitment, coupled with the allocation of work through an informal ranking system. Migrant workers’ specific socio-economic circumstances and their race and gender identities informed their responses to these systems, resulting in the buy-in to discourses of enterprise. The result was actors who are complicit, if not active, participants in self and peer regulation. As such, this article contributes to the literature on enterprising-selves, control of temporary agency workers and the wider manufacturing consent literature.

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

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.

Workplace spirituality and social enterprise. A review and research agenda

Workplace spirituality is a social movement about purposeful work that has both personal and broader societal considerations. Social enterprises are alternative organizational forms that strive to create value by simultaneously pursuing social, economic and environmental goals. Both workplace spirituality and social enterprise discourses have a value creation orientation for self and others, framed as serving and contributing towards the common good. However, only a few studies have addressed the relevance of workplace spirituality for social enterprises. Based on the literature for workplace spirituality and social enterprise, respectively, this paper argues that these phenomena have a common ground: prosocial motives, doing well (value creation) and being well (flourishing). Workplace spirituality can help preserve social enterprises’ integrity, while the social enterprise context can support the incorporation of workplace spirituality to generate positive outcomes. Further studies could explore this potentiality, and the present paper provides some future research suggestions.

Enterprise discourses in Dutch urban policies; a comparison between two cities in the Netherlands

ABSTRACT Local governments make use of ‘enterprise language’ to encourage citizens to adopt entrepreneurial behaviour in managing their daily lives and solving problems that emerge in their neighbourhood. In this paper, we examine the use of enterprise language and the promotion of enterprise in Dutch urban policy focusing specifically on how Dutch cities use enterprise language to influence and encourage their inhabitants to undertake entrepreneurial action. Our analysis shows how the language of enterprise helps cities to reinforce a local identity, to legitimize institutional change in local government functioning and to formulate expectations of how citizens (and professionals) should behave.

Mapping social enterprise to sustainable development goals

Sustainable development addresses global challenges while social enterprise (SE) discourses agenda of creating positive social change. The aim of the social enterprise is completely align with sustainable development goals (SDGs), which is to harness a better quality of life. In providing a further understanding of how social enterprise maps to SDGs, this study was conducted with two objectives; first is to reduce the SE measurement complexity by synthesising the triple bottom line approach, and second is to link the SE values to sustainable development goals. The results of the thematic review provide three significant outcomes: 1) SE imbalance measurement; 2) SE capabilities and relationship with governance, and partner support; 3) reaching to SDGs by investing in basic SE infrastructure development for the society.

Mapping social enterprise to sustainable development goals

Sustainable development addresses global challenges while social enterprise (SE) discourses agenda of creating positive social change. The aim of the social enterprise is completely align with sustainable development goals (SDGs), which is to harness a better quality of life. In providing a further understanding of how social enterprise maps to SDGs, this study was conducted with two objectives; first is to reduce the SE measurement complexity by synthesising the triple bottom line approach, and second is to link the SE values to sustainable development goals. The results of the thematic review provide three significant outcomes: 1) SE imbalance measurement; 2) SE capabilities and relationship with governance, and partner support; 3) reaching to SDGs by investing in basic SE infrastructure development for the society.

Constructing an entrepreneurial life: liminality and emotional reflexivity in identity work

ABSTRACT This paper examines the identity work of a budding entrepreneur through a longitudinal case study based on his ongoing personal reflections as he tries to construct an entrepreneurial life. In particular, we investigate the role of emotional reflexivity and liminality, concepts that give us analytical purchase in exploring the complex dynamics of this identity work. The liminal condition of multiple identity positions enables our informant to experiment with and integrate several parallel identity narratives as he tries on socio-political constructions of ‘the entrepreneur’ for size; and it is the permanence of the liminal condition that makes emotional reflexivity necessary so he can handle the constant lack he experiences. The contribution of our work lies in exploring how the operation of the discourse of enterprise never closes on the centre of subjectivity that is imputed in that discourse, and how our subject, through emotional reflexivity, deals with this fundamental lack.

Mark Twain and Money: Language, Capital, and Culture

Mark Twain and Money: Language, Capital, and Culture

Craft entrepreneurialism and sustainable scale: resistance to and disavowal of the creative industries as champions of capitalist growth

ABSTRACTCraft and design-led creative practices are presently enjoying a zeitgeist moment of popularity, driven by consumer demand for unique, innovative and/or handmade objects. However despite the capacity to scale-up, craftspeople and designer makers continue to challenge conventional capitalist ideas of what entrepreneurial “success” looks like. Drawing upon data from a 4-year study of Australian designer makers, this article problematizes the digital content-friendly growth and enterprise discourses at the heart of governmental desires for the creative economy; discourses that seemingly presume every entrant into the creative field aspires to be the multi-millionaire director of their own creative success story. It examines how the complex intersectionality of old understandings of artistic value and “doing what you love”, today mingle with ethical consumption values, environmental attentiveness, non-urban creative practice, the gendered exclusions of the creative workforce, and human desires for “good work” (Hesmondhalgh & Baker, 2011), to present a more complex, socially embedded picture of the contemporary creative economy. One where the more-than-capitalism values of the arts and cultural industries persist.

Understanding social enterprise, social entrepreneurship and the social economy in rural Cambodia

PurposeThis paper critically assesses Western views on the social economy in contrast to everyday realities in a low-income country, and challenges ethnocentric epistemologies in the discourse of social enterprise and social entrepreneurship that is prevalent in international development. It charts the changing trajectory of the social economy and different influences.Design/methodology/approachQualitative data is used to explore views of members of social enterprises in Northern Cambodia. Three enterprises with different characteristics were selected. Semi-structured interviews and a group discussion took place in each case, exploring motivation, values, empowerment, participation, equity, innovation and risk appetite.FindingsThe important roles social enterprises play in rural community development are sometimes at odds with the reasoning of Western development agencies. The social economy in Cambodia is undergoing change with the advancement of capitalist market forces. This suits formal businesses but could exacerbate the exclusion of various community actors.Research limitations/implicationsThree case studies are in close proximity in Northern Cambodia, and the situated dynamics may not transfer well to other contexts. Some limitations are offset by the selection of different types of social enterprises.Practical implicationsThe study gives insights of value to the designers of programmes or projects to support social enterprise who work within international development agencies and non-government organisations. For academics, it offers critical insight into assumptions about social enterprise that emanate from Western management literature.Originality/valueThis paper meets the need for close-up inter-disciplinary work on social enterprise development in under-represented contexts.

Deconstructing the ‘older worker’: Exploring the complexities of subject positioning at the intersection of multiple discourses

This study adopts an intersectional approach to explore the complexities and contingencies of subject positioning in the case of an individual older worker. Five deconstruction strategies are applied to an older worker’s account of his experience of the workplace to unveil the variety of discourses and taken-for-granted assumptions that regulate individual identity formation and contribute to perpetuating the marginalization of the aging organizational subject. Deconstruction analysis shows how the unique positioning of the research subject emerges at the intersection of complex discourses of age, enterprise, family, death, and mental and physical health, casting him as both victim and perpetrator of inequality across a kaleidoscope of interacting categories of oppression. The analysis contributes to the critique of the binary dualism implicit in the victim–perpetrator paradigm dominating mainstream research and policy making on age discrimination in the workplace. It also advocates for new conceptualizations of aging at work that recognize the systemic nature of inequality as the product of intersecting systems of power relations.

Manifestations of Neoliberal Governmentality in Contemporary Work and Employment Relations

This paper advances knowledge of the manifestations of neoliberal governmentality in contemporary work and employment relations by examining the mechanisms of biopower and managerial control that generate–and produce consent to–precarious, non-standard employment relationships. Based on an ethnographic case study, the paper shows how a globally operating direct-sales organization, deploys particular technologies of government to program and reconfigure its employment relationships in a way that allows the organization to mobilize and manage its distributors as a network of ‘enterprise-units’: as a community of self- regulating individuals who willingly reconstitute themselves and their lives as ‘enterprises’ so as to pursue self-efficacy, autonomy, and self-worth as individuals. The paper contributes to the literature on organizational power, Foucauldian studies of the workplace in particular, by elaborating theory on the manifestations of neoliberal governmentality in organizational power relations in two main ways: First, we contribute to the literature on organizational power by the building a ‘biopolitical’, ‘analytics of government’ -perspective on human resources -related managerial control that shifts attention to the biopolitical mechanisms of governmentality and manaberial control that underpin the ongoing transformations in the sphere of work. Second, we contribute to Foucauldian studies of the workplace by extending the theory on the ‘discourse of enterprise’ and the ‘enterprising self’ to the domain non-standard employment relationships and precarious work to examine and empirically illustrate the biopolitical mechanisms of governmentality and management control that underpin the ongoing transformations in the sphere of work.

A Psychoanalytical Exploration of the Enterprising Self in Alternative Forms of Work

There has been a growing scholarly interest in how enterprise discourses provide a means through which organizations are able to control the actions of their workers through positioning them as autonomous and independent. The focus of existing work, however, is predominantly on organizations’ attempts to produce enterprising individuals, rather than on how discourses of enterprise create a desire for more enterprising forms of employment. The latter is particularly important as we see an increasing number of organizations embracing new modes of working that enable workers to “be your own boss” and own a legally independent business that is set up to work towards organizational ends. Through employing psychoanalytic approaches we focus our attention on the relationship between discourses of enterprise and a psychology of desire. As such, we bring individuals as desiring subjects back into studies of organizational control. The paper contributes to three levels. First, it furthers our understanding of the entrepreneur as the sublime object of desire and its role in individuals’ experiences of enterprise culture. Second, at the individual level we provide an insight into the willing volition through which organisations might recruit entrepreneurs not just at one point in time but are able to secure their continued effort. Third, at the organizational level, we contribute to understanding how such discourses facilitate forms of organizing that are at the interface of employment and entrepreneurship.

“Deregulation is so nineteen eighties, we’re into ‘better regulation’ now”

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore how organizations operate in the absence of a clear regulatory authority in a self-regulating environment. Significant moves towards self-regulation by various political administrations, together with successive waves of deregulation raise questions about the ability and effectiveness of industries and markets to regulate their own behaviour. This is a topical political and social concern with governments often appearing to favour self-regulation as opposed to the constitution of an official regulator. The absence of a regulator and the possibility of voluntary compliance raise a number of issues for the way in which organizations operate and the consequences, both intended and otherwise for organizations and society at large. Design/methodology/approach Empirically the authors explore the case of an industry leader within the Passive Fire Protection industry, as it adjusts to an increasingly self-regulated market environment. The authors document how organizational members make sense of the regulatory environment and the behaviour of actors within it. Findings The authors find that discourses of enterprise that underpin self-regulation permit actors a choice between compliance and non-compliance. Whilst also noting the prevalence of notions of morality in terms of how actors make sense of both compliant and non-compliant behaviour. Despite common sense notions that morality is seldom clear cut or unambiguous, the case study reveals that frameworks for understanding behaviour allow participants within the industry to make very clear demarcations between moral (compliant) and amoral (non-compliant) behaviour. Originality/value The authors learn how those that are compliant within the industry come to question the effectiveness of the regime to which they comply, thus ultimately undermining the integrity of the regime. In the absence of a strong regulatory regime, some agents draw upon notions of enterprise to justify an individualist, economic and pragmatic approach that makes non-compliance permissible. Thus the discourse of enterprise is present in the justification of both “moral” and “amoral” behaviour, this leads the authors to question the wisdom of policy that promotes the idea of enterprise as effectively ensuring compliance.

“Cooking Doesn't Get Much Tougher than This”: MasterChef and Competitive Cooking

:Television cooking does link back to Reithian principles, in that it sets out to teach the audience; this has now been co-opted in favor of competitive individualism. MasterChef is yet another site for the discourse of enterprise, in which passion and competitiveness are required in the interests of neoliberalism.

Giving Form to Finance Culture: Neoliberal Denizens in Wall Street (1987), Boiler Room (2000), and Margin Call (2011)

A GREAT MARKET EUPHORIA SWEPT THROUGH United States by 1990s, with two deregulatory bills signposting a neoliberal triumphalism. President Bill Clinton's advocacy to repeal Glass-Steagall Act (1936) and replace it with Gramm-Leach Bliley Act in 1995 was greeted with near unanimous support by both Washington political establishment and Wall Street, each seeking further deregulation after Reagan era. In close succession was 1996 Telecommunications Act, which dissolved legal barriers that once had separated media industries and ushered in right for multinational conglomerates to own and vertically integrate television, news, and film companies. It is no coincidence that this unprecedented expansion of financial and media industries marked a new logic in development of capitalist life in 1990s. Yet something else in this decade needs further reflection-that is, financialization of daily life, a far more ephemeral thing to couch within these two congressional bills.For many, this neoliberal triumphalism is directly tied not just to deregulation of markets in media and finance but also to deregulation of human capacity to resist or comprehend these market forces on culture. In words of David Held and Anthony McGrew, neoliberalism includesthe extension of market to more and more areas of life; creation of a state unburdened by excessive intervention in economy and social life; and curtailment of power of certain groups (for instance, trade unions) to press their aims and goals. A free order, in this view, is incompatible with enactment of rules which specify how people should use means at their disposal. (186)Along with incursion of market into cultural sphere (Kapur and Wagner), there is also a psychological aspect to neoliberalism. As Walkerdine and Bansel's pioneering chapter has demonstrated, identity produced in relation to work has yielded subjects that self-actualize through their own labor. The terms of this selfactualization are tautly strung between discourses of freedom and enterprise on one hand, and regulatory and punitive practices of government on other, with work positioned and promoted as best way to improve one's situation (3). In other words, identity politics takes on a decidedly market formation and rationale for conducting tasks, evaluating productivity, viewing colleagues and coworkers as competition, and seeing every decision as economical and as a social determinant to success.What I see as specific to Walkerdine and Bansel's notion of government work is also specific to private-sector employment, in particular type of work being done on and off Wall Street that self-actualizes: financialization. Conceived along lines of money markets, banking institutions, brokers' houses, and deregulation in 1990s, financialization came to erode regulatory measures in order to replace them with far more abstract capitalextracting processes, and these processes motivated those working in finance industry to believe they could attain fantastical levels of profit as well as positions of prominence. Such financialization rides on crest of corporate culture, in what Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker call the vaporization of public resources, rupturing of social contract, and disappearance of forms of health and safety protection long understood to be intrinsic to working lives of citizens in Western democracies; these developments accompanied emergence of extraordinary new protocols of preference for corporations (10).Through financialization and corporate culture, labor force has increasingly sought riskier modes of doing work that can be attributed to behavior brought on by an inexhaustible set of financial instruments and money-making schemes endorsed under neoliberalism. Rey Chow has recently pondered what she and others have called data capitalism, where algorithms, altogether bypassing more traditional agencies that are bound to human sensorium, human perception, and human subjectivity, overwhelm many working with these finite formulas and exchanges of capital. …

Discourses of Enterprise in Hyperlocal Community News in the UK

In recent years, a new wave of hyperlocal community news websites has developed in the United Kingdom (UK), with many taking advantage of new opportunities provided by free open-source publishing platforms. Given the trend in the UK newspaper industry towards closure and retrenchment of their local and regional press titles, it is perhaps understandable that policy-makers have shifted their gaze to these sites. This article examines the viability of hyperlocal news services with a particular focus on those that are independently owned and managed. Such operations often have a longevity that sits in contrast to a number of failed attempts by major media organisations to operate in the hyperlocal space. Yet many of the business models that underpin these sites seem precarious, often benefiting from a degree of self-exploitation. Drawing on 35 interviews with hyperlocal news publishers from across the UK, this article argues that publishers draw upon a civic discourse in order to make sense of their practice. This framing may limit the potential to develop economic sustainability and risks alienating policy-makers keen to work with an idealised “fictive” hyperlocal entrepreneur.