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Short abstract:

This paper reconstructs a pedagogical imaginary of assetization in the teaching of Georges F. Doriot, a pioneering U.S. venture capitalist, at Harvard Business School, emphasizing its focus on training students to imagine and manage themselves as capitalist enterprises.

Long abstract:

Building on the recent literature at the intersection of STS and the history of American capitalism that has emphasized the role of the Pragmatist movement in shaping the business pedagogy in the U.S. and elsewhere (Giraudeau 2018; Muniesa 2017; Muniesa 2016), this paper focuses on the teaching career of Georges F. Doriot, the co-founder of American Research & Development Corporation, one of the first venture capital organizations in the U.S. Doriot taught at Harvard Business School for 40 years (1926 to 1966) and impacted several generations of business leaders, including many pioneering venture capitalists. Using an extensive collection of archival materials and oral histories, most importantly Doriot's teaching notes, this paper reconstructs his pedagogical philosophy. Specifically, it focuses on a set of "techniques of the self" proposed by Doriot that were meant to teach prospective business leaders to imagine themselves as bundles of assets and liabilities, continuous with going business concerns, and manage their personal lives accordingly. In so far as assetization involves a form of imagination -- of imagining things as assets (Muniesa et al. 2017; Birch and Muniesa 2020) – Doriot’s teaching of imagining selves as assets merits attention, while his pedagogical career can be seen as an articulation of an imaginary or a "spirit" of venture capitalism avant la lettre, and an important early precursor of the current "investmentality" (Cook 2017).