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Accepted Paper:
Resisting growth: beyond profit-oriented entrepreneurship in a neoliberal market economy
Anne-Erita Berta
(University of South-Eastern Norway)
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 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.