Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the ontological difficulties that the heterogenous forms of life manifested in the arena of Mapuche entrepreneurship have to overcome when they are confronted to the univocal requirements imposed by Chilean society and state.

Paper long abstract:

Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out among both rural and urban Mapuche people in south and central Chile, this paper aims to discuss three aspects we deem as key in order to understand contemporary Mapuche entrepreneurship. First, the need of an intensive negotiation with Winka, or non-Mapuche people, and the desired and undesired outcomes it produces. Secondly, the emergence of a strong tension among Mapuche people, derived partially from this closeness to Winka people, and partially from a disagreement concerning notions of authenticity, moral, commodification, and what is to be a proper Mapuche person. Finally, the irreducibility of this disagreement, inasmuch is predicated on a social philosophy that is extremely respectful of the reality and certitude of each personal perspective. Eventually, the interaction between these elements produces a multiplicity of alternative perspectives that are based on a profound respect towards what each person thinks or believes, but that are forced to compete, by the requirements of the state and NGOs-subsided entrepreneurship programs, in order to define which one is the one having the right to succeed.

Paper short abstract:

I look at the grooming schools that train the aspirational class in India to negotiate the global world. Via an ethnography of a grooming school, I will probe into the new worker-subject learning image development. Does this impact our understanding of labour and selfhood in a neoliberal regime?

Paper long abstract:

The new economic reforms of 1991 signalled the beginning of a consumption driven economy and paved the way for an aspirational class in India. The globalized economy made way for an active enterprising citizen who was no longer dependent on the state, but had to be a self-regulating, self-disciplined subject, treating her life and self as an enterprise. An allied development has been the expanding service sector that demands workers to equip themselves with skills suitable for the globalized market. Aspirations to be part of the global culture of leisure and work are verbalized in the form of training modules like "Transaction Analyses", "International Etiquette", "Personalized English Conversation", "Image Management", "Cosmopolitan Diva" and "Interview Skills Training". What are the methods deployed in the classroom that will bring about this "transformation" of turning one from a "pupa to a butterfly" in the age of 'self-development'? My paper aims to look at the grooming institutions that familiarize, teach and train the aspirational class to negotiate the new world that they desire and actively want to be a part of. Through an ethnography of one such grooming school, the paper will probe into how the new subject is modelled in these schools. Subsequently, who is the new subject emerging as a product of these institutions that specialize in addressing one's aspirations? More importantly, how does this impact our understanding of the seeming democratization of grooming, labour and selfhood in what is understood as a 'neoliberal' regime?

Paper short abstract:

In the South African startup scene, the actors involved always negotiates over what entrepreneurship constitutes. To show how different actors understand discourses of entrepreneurship, my paper discusses how entrepreneurs and facilitators held differing views on how to enact entrepreneurship.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I discuss how different actors in a South African technology incubator enact entrepreneurship and negotiate what being an entrepreneur means. I collected the material discussed during a one year long ethnographic fieldwork in Johannesburg (2018-2019), where I looked at the training and mentoring of young aspiring entrepreneurs. Funded through corporate social responsibility projects, the incubator offered training primarily for black South Africans in an effort to reduce economic and racial inequality created over years of racial discrimination. Reflecting neoliberal policies of responsibilization, training programs at the incubator sought to instill the aspiring entrepreneurs with sometimes conflicting personality traits, e.g. studiousness on the one hand and disobedience on the other. Further, they learned practical knowledge considered useful for building a successful business: such as using Microsoft Excel, business pitching skills, and ways to present themselves appropriately to potential partners and customers. These lessons were often based on Silicon Valley developed practices of entrepreneurship and startup culture.

Based on their own interpretations on what entrepreneurship entailed, and how they wanted to do business, the novice entrepreneurs sometimes disagreed with the facilitators, and would doubt the facilitators' "realness" as fellow entrepreneurs. Building on these conflicts, my paper elaborates how they form part of an ongoing negotiation of what being an entrepreneur means, and what kind of virtues and vices it requires. In doing this, my paper will shed light on how entrepreneurship is performed, and how transnational discourses on entrepreneurship are understood in the localities they are being taught.

Paper short abstract:

The paper examines extractive capital social investment in Indigenous Communities. It traces tensions between funding for micro-entrepreneurship and community governance projects and considers what such frictions tell us about the vexed moral economy of late capitalism.

Paper long abstract:

In the Salar de Atacama, northern Chile, a number of mining companies have made legal agreements with Indigenous Communities (as collectivities) for transfers of social investment funding such as health, education, and welfare programs and infrastructure projects. SQM, a lithium producer that operates with Chilean-Chinese capital, has differentiated its corporate social investment from other extractive capital. It has explicitly avoided dealing with Indigenous Community governance, investing only in company-defined projects, local business support through a competitive funding program to which individuals may apply (a form of microfinance). Speaking to a meeting of the Junta de Vecinos (neighbourhood council) in one community, an officer of SQM explained, 'we fill a niche', and outlined the ways in which the objective of the company was to support viable local business, not Indigenous Communities per se.

This paper will consider the claims to distinctiveness made by the company - it's 'niche' - as against a range of corporate led social investment in the region that promises 'development' for Indigenous Communities. I am particularly interested in the diverse ways that mining projects imagine a better indigenous 'self' through programs of 'creating capacity' (capacitación), Indigenous community responses to these programs and the local governance effects of corporate social investment delivery. The paper analyses tensions created by extractive capital social investment in Indigenous Communities, focussing on the tensions between fostering micro-entrepreneurship and projects of community governance and more broadly, what such tensions tell us about the vexed moral economy of late capitalism.

Paper short abstract:

One of the strongest aspirations of Dalits across India to achieve economic independence by setting up their own micro-enterprises. Drawing on ethnography from rural Tamil Nadu, this paper explores why such entrepreneurial attempts tend to fail, often pushing Dalits back into debt bondage.

Paper long abstract:

While Dalits across India mobilise various political tools to challenge exploitation and discrimination, one of their strongest aspirations is to achieve economic independence by setting up their own small-scale production units. However, despite the promises of neoliberal opportunities, Dalit aspirations to escape relations of debt bondage and carve out spaces for independent entrepreneurship remain heavily undermined by a sheer lack of assets and other resources.

Based on ethnographic data from the rural hinterland of Tiruppur in Tamil Nadu, we explore 3 strategies recently used by Dalits to escape dependency on higher castes in the rural powerloom industry. They include attempts 1) to run their own powerloom enterprises rather than to work as labourers for higher castes; 2) to escape forms of labour bondage by using microfinance to settle debts with powerloom employers; and 3) to take up garment work in Tiruppur, with the aim to escape powerloom work and village dependency altogether.

The paper describes these strategies and explains why each of them ended up being a mixed success, if not altogether a failure, often pushing Dalits further into debt or back into forms of labour bondage. Drawing on Berlant's concept of 'cruel optimism' (2011), the paper shows how Dalits' aspirations for a better life through micro-enterprises and independent labour backfire and why they end up being an obstacle to their flourishing rather than a means to achieving independence. We discuss the ways in which higher-caste recruitment strategies, ongoing technological transformations, and Dalits' precarious fall-back position undermine their entrepreneurial endeavours.

Paper short abstract:

My paper studies the temporal dynamics of labor subjectivity and capital accumulation within informal micro-factories, or jiagongchang, in Guangzhou, China. Here, migrants view entrepreneurship as a condition of departure, rather than as a means of arrival or as an end in itself.

Paper long abstract:

My paper studies the temporal dynamics of labor subjectivity and capital accumulation within informal micro-factories, or jiagongchang, in Guangzhou, China. Standing in the shadows of formal Fordist-style factories, jiagongchang are small-scale assembly workshops that are connected to transnational supply chains via the labor of migrant factory bosses and temporary workers. Situated in makeshift garages, dens, and abandoned temples, jiagongchang are owned operated by rural migrants who have served as the first generations of wage workers employed in larger export factories in Shenzhen, Dongguan, and Guangzhou. Collectively, they struggle to break away from the constraints of poverty and immobility by forming profit-driven and cross-cultural links with West African and South Korean intermediaries. As these domestic and transnational migrants work to craft the global supply chains for low-cost, "just in time" fashion, they seek gaps between multiple temporal scales in their efforts to accumulate capital. These timely gaps, which I call, rhythms of anticipation, challenge the conceptual overemphasis on space in the processes of capitalist accumulation via spatial "fixes" or the creative destruction of space and place. Rather, I emphasize the temporal and contingent dynamics of capital accumulation and commodity exchange, whereby post-socialist notions of land, labor, and personhood in Guangzhou are transformed to synchronize with the rhythms of global capital. For the domestic and transnational migrant entrepreneurs, "freedom" via low-wage labor offers a prospect of fulfillment and opening of possibility. Migrants view labor as a condition of departure, rather than as a means of arrival or as an end in itself.