Paper short abstract:

This paper examines entrepreneurship as a poverty alleviation policy through the notion of moral economy. Using ethnographic data from rural Bangladesh it analyses why and how development institutions 'embed' entrepreneurship in local social institutions.

Paper long abstract:

This paper interrogates entrepreneurship as a modernizing policy. Building on a renewed interest in 'moral economy', it explores how the spread of entrepreneurship sits with the social institutions of Northern rural Bangladesh. Key findings evidence that the moral economy of entrepreneurship rests on the diffused idea of moral entrepreneurial idols and on traditional inter-personal networks of gendered obligations within households. Individuals participate to avoid risks and conform to traditional social institutions. I conclude that the imagined modernizing effect of entrepreneurship, the promised revolution, has been aborted by the very structures that support its expansion.