Paper short 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.

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.