Paper short abstract:

What does it mean to be an entrepreneur in contemporary Brazil? In this contribution, I seek to address critically the issue of neoliberal and Post-Fordist "subjectivation" and its political, economic and reflective implications through an ethnographic focus on Brazilian startup companies.

Paper long abstract:

The phenomenon of entrepreneurship at large is closely tied to the spread of the neoliberal agenda as a process in which the state assumes a more technocratic and managerial role based on a belief in freedom of market, leading to deregulation, technologization, flexible working, liberalization of capital bringing about a complex array of forms of governance, self-governance and market agencements.

The image of the entrepreneur as "the neoliberal subject" (COOK, 2016: 142), an agent that dwells in this economic environment of risk and uncertainty, is an example of economic subjectivities that began to emerge from contingent conditions in different levels of vulnerability of the Post-Fordist era. Ethnographic approaches are beginning to complexify the understanding of entrepreneurialism, especially the work of Julia Elyachar (2005) in Cairo and Carla Freeman (2014) in the Caribbean, in order to produce a more textured account of the contemporary experience of living under changing socioeconomic structures.

In this contribution, I seek to continue on this critical perspective through an ethnographic focus on Brazilian startup companies, an ongoing research initiated in 2014. During fieldwork, my research subjects whilst striving to incorporate the ethics of the startup business scenario reflected upon their lives and visions of the future in the midst of Brazil's profound political and economic crisis situating their experience as entrepreneurs as a form of critique of neoliberalism. I propose to think about this emerging form of political project that takes shape in elite business landscapes.