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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.