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Paper short abstract:

This paper presents business owners who are not concerned with or motivated by profit maximation, high material wealth or accumulation of capital. The ethnography illustrates entrepreneurs who set out and make a point out of ensuring that their business does not grow beyond a certain size.

Paper long abstract:

Denmark is a capitalist welfare-state nurturing values of free market capitalism. Danish niche business owners operate side-by-side multinational, mass producing corporations. In this paper I argue that a group of small-scale niche business owners represent a form of entrepreneurship that resists values of profit-maximising, economic growth, and expansion. Analysing the economic actions of this group of small-scale niche business owners, I show that while operating in a neoliberal market economy, the business owners make an active choice to resist values of growth and profit-maximation. The ethnographic analysis illustrates that the entrepreneurs were motivated to start, manage, and maintain business in order to fulfil desire for freedom to create, socialize, and fulfil personal aspirations. They have in common a desire to stay small in an economy constructed on principles of eternal growth. I argue for an understanding of entrepreneurship that include the entrepreneurs who operate within but against the (neoliberal free) market.

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Using social media for running businesses is on rise among young women in Tehran, Iran. With an ethnography of online entrepreneurial activities, I show the embeddedness of online businesses in between women's marginality as a structural condition, as well as material and nonmaterial value creation.

Paper long abstract:

My research investigates Iranian women’s online home-based businesses as a response to the condition of inclusion and exclusion following the Islamic Revolution. Even though users’ entrepreneurial activities on social media have been identified as being exploitative, Iranian women’s narratives show a different story. From their point of view, Instagram can provide them with an opportunity to overcome socio-economic restrictions, including high rates of unemployment and gender segregation in the job market. While the rise of “entrepreneurship” is theorized as the result of the neoliberal economic restructuring, close anthropological attention to the phenomena points to a variety of value regimes that account for both the expansion of women’s online businesses and their struggles. In my project, analyzing the emergence of new forms of economic activities that are justified to be more suitable for women is a key. Through contextualizing women's entrepreneurship in the history of development and empowerment plans, I will document the embeddedness of micro-enterprises in various value regimes, material, or non-material, competing, and forming the possibilities for social action. Moreover, this project understands Iranian women’s online businesses as livelihood projects and focuses on “making a living” instead of “exchange” in analyzing online entrepreneurship. Through an analysis of what women entrepreneurs aspire to, and how they strive to create a plan of action to realize these aspirations, this project aims to understand entrepreneurship as a socially embedded activity that cannot be theorized without considering the specific arrangements between “public” and “private” patriarchy under a certain gender regime in Islamic Republic.

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This study examines white Western digital entrepreneurs shaping identity in China. Applying critical race theory, it explores daily interactions, branding, and the impact of gender, ethnicity, and media. Digital ethnography reveals insights into evolving dynamics in Chinese entrepreneurship.

Paper long abstract:

This research explores innovative trajectories in entrepreneurship by investigating how white Western digital entrepreneurs construct and navigate their identity within the dynamic landscape of China. Utilizing anthropological analysis and critical race theory, the study concentrates on the daily interactions and branding strategies employed by entrepreneurs. Emphasizing the influence of gender, ethnicity, and media in the entrepreneurial context, the research employs digital ethnography and visual analysis of Chinese social media to elucidate emerging patterns. The findings contribute to a nuanced understanding of the evolving dynamics of entrepreneurship and identity, offering valuable insights into the intersection of global business practices and cultural contexts, especially within the expansive and influential Chinese market.

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This presentation draws on ethnographic fieldwork in three European countries and offers insights into the extent to which migrant food couriers rely on market rationality to interpret their social relationships and strategies and to what degree these rationalities evade a market-driven logic.

Paper long abstract:

Digital platforms promising 'entrepreneurship for the masses' have managed to establish themselves as technology disruptors across the world while relying on precarious migrant workers. This presentation draws on ethnographic fieldwork with platform food couriers in three European countries and offers insights into the extent to which migrant couriers rely on market rationality to interpret their social relationships and strategies and to what degree these rationalities evade a market-driven logic. By analysing three practices, my presentation challenges the notion of neoliberal agency, which frames the entrepreneurial imaginaries of migrant workers. Instead of conceiving the self as 'a flexible bundle of skills that reflexively manages oneself as though the self was a business' (Gershon, 2011: 537), my research participants' experiences scrutinise universalizing forms of neoliberal agency and highlight the essential role played by the social organisation and epistemological differences. First, these workers engage in migration projects in the hope of realising their entrepreneurial dreams upon returning home. At the same time, the responsibility to provide financial relief to families back home impacts their capacity to exert a neoliberal agency. Second, I show how the use of WhatsApp groups challenges prevalent entrepreneurial discourses. Such networks are used to organise strikes and create solidarity against police raids, street attacks or disreputable restaurants. Third, I focus on account buying and renting, a practice of 'identity loan' (Andrikopoulos, 2023) common amongst irregular migrants. I show that its pervasiveness remains important, despite the high fees paid by riders and the constant risk of losing them.

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This paper will explore the changing and contested social meanings of entrepreneurship at the northern periphery of Japan through an examination of the career choice event in which entrepreneurship is featured as an emerging alternative to the stable, rational, and proper life course.

Paper long abstract:

The scope of possible work futures has long been limited for Japan's brightest young talent. Systemic and socio-cultural forces in post-war society have channeled top students from non-professional tracks (often male) onto a predetermined ‘rail of life’ leading to two primarily acceptable career choices: longterm employment contracts with large firms or life in the public service. Despite recent top-down efforts by Japanese policymakers and universities to promote entrepreneurship, it has yet to find acceptance among the general public as a viable alternative to these traditional career pathways. The persistent association of entrepreneurship with risk makes it an economically insecure work choice in the eyes of many.

And yet, a growing number of elite students in Sapporo, Hokkaido are expressing the authentic desire to go ‘away from the rail’ and attempt life as an entrepreneur. This unconventional career decision entails a conscious rejection of stability and economic security in exchange for economic, as well as social, risk. Through careful analysis of the aspirations and experiences of these ‘pioneers,’ this paper will argue that the decision to become an entrepreneur in this context represents the pursuit of a new relationship between the worker and their labor, as well as the pursuit of a divergent conceptualization of the good life. This paper will explore the changing and contested social meanings of entrepreneurship at the northern periphery of Japan through an examination of the career choice event in which entrepreneurship is featured as an emerging alternative to the stable, rational, and proper life course.

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This paper draws on ethnographic research with social entrepreneurs in India’s education development industry to argue for an anthropological theory of entrepreneurship that centres on affect and subjectivity.

Paper long abstract:

This paper draws on ethnographic research with social entrepreneurs in India’s education development industry to argue for an anthropological theory of entrepreneurship that centres on affect and subjectivity. While much has been written on what makes entrepreneurs successful, and their degree of social embeddedness in the environments they work, we lack insight into what it feels like to live with the pressure of as presenting as inexhaustibly entrepreneurial. This pressure is particularly dominant with social entrepreneurs who must both appear economically investable (to gain funding), and ethically impeccable (to gain partnerships and public trust).

The Indian Education Reform Movement is a multi-sited network of non-government organisations (NGOs) aiming to ensure the provision of quality schooling across India. At the forefront of the Movement are university-educated middle-class individuals who launch ‘start-up’ social enterprises to counter specific ‘problems’ with universal education provision. In the education NGO start-up culture of Delhi, social entrepreneurs suffer anxiety and exhaustion as they present as moral servants of the nation who democratise education, and as wholly dedicated individuals who are ‘married’ to the problem of education inequity. This dual demand induces entrepreneurs to see no boundary between their own self and the organisation they run, and they begin to assess their ethical integrity with metrics drawn from economics – with complex emotional results. I argue that the case study of the social entrepreneur offers a new direction for an anthropology of entrepreneurship, with a focus on entrepreneurial subjectivity that centres the psychological and emotional experience of entrepreneurs.

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Paper short abstract:

New initiatives in Kenya’s mountain-focused recreational tourism sector, under Kenyan leadership and targeting Kenyan clientele, spur questions about how to live a good life while making a living. How are Kenyan mountain enthusiasts trying to set new moral norms for entrepreneurialism?

Paper long abstract:

Kenya is a paradigmatic ‘hustler economy’ with Kenyan youth cast as the resources fueling the entrepreneurialism that is embraced as the country’s official business model and held up as an example for other youthful countries. Accounts of young people’s business acumen in traditional (e.g. farming) and non-traditional sectors of the economy (e.g. digital platform mediated work) highlight the reproduction of many inequalities and conventional norms, including the entrenchment of neoliberal subjectivities. However, another growing youth-driven entrepreneurial sector may be uniquely challenging some of these norms by distinguishing what it means to do business as Kenyans, for Kenyans, in Kenya. The growing mountain-focused recreational tourism sector, targeting Kenyan clientele specifically, is raising new questions about how to live a good life while making a living, and specifically how to embed capitalist interests in a broader moral framework for living well which is conceptualized in relation to both social justice and ecological sustainability.

While clashes between moral and business values are common in eco-tourism everywhere, the case of the burgeoning Kenyan mountaineering economy holds different stakes: Kenyans encouraging other Kenyans to access their country’s mountains have framed this pursuit in terms of decolonization and nationalism, as well as seeking alternatives to consumer-focused, urban lifestyles. And yet, in an economy that is officially celebrated as a ‘hustler economy’, can the mountains actually prove an escape from dominant modes of profit-driven entrepreneurialism? Are Kenyan mountain enthusiasts navigating new ways for overcoming historical injustices, nurturing human-nature relations, and setting moral norms for capitalist entrepreneurialism?

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Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on market-making as a social and political process in postcolonial Nigeria. By theorizing the ‘conditions of exchange,’ I turn ethnographic attention to the social worlds, collective mobilizations, and political projects that make entrepreneurial profit possible.

Paper long abstract:

Nigeria’s importation markets are strikingly monopoly-resistant, sometimes paramilitarized, and actively defensive against corporate and non-black foreign actors. This paper follows modes of marketcrafting amongst Nigerian entrepreneurs who are mobile across the Global South over the course of a decade and focuses on one of Nigeria’s largest wholesale commercial spaces that has been collectively financed, constructed, co-owned, operated, and policed by decentralized but modular business associations. Rather than simply being an attempt of market ‘disentanglement’ (Callon 1998), this paper traces how market association leaders coordinated a massive self-organized relocation as a deliberate process of building a new kind of strategic platform (Guyer 2016) for ‘non-indigenes’ of the Lagos area. Based on ethnographic and archival fieldwork amongst Nigerian commercial networks of the Global South, this paper situates these racialized and nationalist protective market logics in longer histories of decolonization and postcolonial anxieties around economic sovereignty in Nigeria. Combining insights from older sociological and anthropological literature on market-making and embeddedness, along with newer political philosophy on commodity exchange and political infrastructure (Karatani 2014; Balibar 2016), the paper considers how Nigerian entrepreneurs are centrally concerned with defining what we might call the ‘conditions of exchange,’ which challenges the often masculinist, liberal, and individualistic framings of entrepreneurship, instead turning ethnographic attention to the social worlds, collective mobilizations, and political projects that make profit possible.

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Paper short abstract:

The paper investigates family businesses in Russia asking how the politics of exclusion are enacted within family firms and how this informs the processes of self-categorization among family businesses

Paper long abstract:

Drawing upon an ethnographic investigation of small-scale family-based firms in Russia, I explore how divorce and a change in meanings and uses of social relatedness affect a family firm as a type of kinship enterprise. The paper argues that family businesses in Russia are entangled into relational webs of kinship so that their self-identification is primarily enacted according to relational principles rather than categorical ones. Since the webs of social relations based on ties of kinship and marriage are not stable and fixed in time but are subject to negotiation and change, any possible regroupings in relational dynamics within family networks would complicate the politics of organizational identity and identity claims within family businesses. The very act of categorizing a firm as a family project can be performative inasmuch as it operates as a statement of inclusion that affirms relatedness and augments a sense of belonging to an enterprise and its goals. And vice versa, the refusal to see business as a collective family project can signal exclusion and convey unwillingness to recognize belonging of a family member to a collective entity termed a family enterprise. These mechanisms of organizational categorization, which simultaneously operate as mechanisms of inclusion or exclusion, are embedded into the wider circles of social relatedness and include the groups of non-family social actors such as employees, customers, stakeholders, and state.

The research has been conducted with financial support from the Russian Scientific Foundation (project N23-18-00962 «Economic anthropology of household in contemporary Russia outside metropolitan areas», https://rscf.ru/project/23-18-00962/)

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Paper short abstract:

An intimate look into family entrepreneurship, based on longitudinal ethnography in and around dairy farming and cheese making in the Lombard mountains, shows how caring while competing informs 'futuring', for kin, rivals, migrant laborers, residents, researchers and tourists.

Paper long abstract:

This paper offers an intimate look into family entrepreneurship in Northern Italy based on longitudinal ethnography, informed by about two decades of fieldwork in and around dairy farming and cheese making in the Lombard alpine valleys north of Bergamo. I show how global capitalism affects and informs daily decision-making and strategizing about the future, and how this ripples through generations of kin, competitors, migrant laborers, residents and tourists.

The language of ‘caring for the territory’ (through sustainable growth, a rhetoric of belonging, and more-than-human ecologies) informs by now both marketing imagery and governance discourse. However, embracing these ecologies only in word does not deliver 'futuring'. Lack of predictability (of climate, supply, market, and state aid) leads to elusive conservativism and stagnation (demographic and economic).

Beyond cynical costs/benefits rationalizations, this paper utilizes a personal narrative of ‘para-ethnography’ with a young female entrepreneur, one of many “subjects who are deeply complicit with and implicated in powerful institutional processes”, while only remaining “moderately empowered people”, to use the words of George Marcus (2000). 'Parasitic and adjacent' on a field that keeps calling her back in, the anthropologist registers a quiet revolution affecting and undoing embedded social and economic assumptions about solidarity and diversity. Unorthodox kin relations, compliance with USDA regulations for export, and dependence on migrant labor are some of the elements of the social, political and epistemic transformations rippling over the surface of profoundly unsettled ecologies and economies. Broad, new entrepreneurial skills and challenging decisions about scale inform these transformations.