The Anthropology of Entrepreneurship. Cultural History, Global Ethnographies, Theorizing Agency.

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP The Anthropology of Entrepreneurship provides a comprehensive overview of the unique contribution from anthropology to the field of entrepreneurship studies. Insights from anthropology illuminate the wider socio-cultural implications of entrepreneurialism, a moral order and social practice that is profoundly shaping contemporary society. Revisiting classic works in anthropology from a new angle, this book provides an exciting introduction to diverse conceptual framings of economic agency. The author also examines a wide range of 21st century ethnographies from the Global South, alongside his own research from across Europe. Readers meet ordinary people struggling with new social landscapes, including neoliberal urbanism, informal credit, heritage marketing, social enterprising, gift competition, and silicon utopias. With sensitivity to different theoretical, temporal, and ethnographic perspectives, the author presents a thorough cultural history of the entrepreneur—this ubiquitous, yet ambivalent contemporary character. This important volume will be of interest to scholars and students of anthropology, business studies and other related social sciences. Richard Pfeilstetter is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Seville. THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP Cultural History, Global Ethnographies, Theorizing Agency Richard Pfeilstetter First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Richard Pfeilstetter The right of Richard Pfeilstetter to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Cover photo: La Pescadilla que se muerde la cola (2013, detail) by Veredas López. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Pfeilstetter, Richard, author. Title: The anthropology of entrepreneurship : cultural history, global ethnographies, theorizing agency / Richard Pfeilstetter. Description: First Edition. | New York : Routledge, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021024116 | ISBN 9780367424398 (Hardback) | ISBN 9780367407483 (Paperback) | ISBN 9780367824136 (eBook) Subjects: LCSH: Economic anthropology. | Entrepreneurship. | Ethnology. Classification: LCC GN448 .P44 2022 | DDC 306.3--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021024116 ISBN: 978-0-367-42439-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-40748-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-82413-6 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9780367824136 Typeset in Bembo by Taylor & Francis Books CONTENTS Preface and acknowledgements ix Introduction 1 PART I The social life of entrepreneurship 11 1 Entrepreneurialism: The first 50 years 19 2 Talking entrepreneurship 35 3 Entrepreneurship studies and entrepreneurial academia 43 PART II The history of entrepreneurship in anthropology 55 4 Agency-driven social change 59 5 Culture theories of entrepreneurship 73 PART III Global contemporary entrepreneurialism 91 6 The social in entrepreneurship 95 7 Oppressive entrepreneurship 107 8 Entrepreneurialization 118 Conclusions 127 References 133 Index 145 viii Contents PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It is the fate of many authors that they can only mention the latest catastrophe in the preface. Like the Chernobyl disaster in Ulrich Beck’s book Risk Society for example, or the 2008 financial crisis in Hann and Hart’sEconomic Anthropology. Besides thousands of daily deaths, the corona virus pandemic produces new global scenarios of inclusion and exclusion. But it does not put the rationale of this book into question. Before and after, entrepreneurs in business, politics, culture, and science are expected to find solutions to the latest pressing societal challenges. This book is about the sociocultural conditions of possibility of such a collective expectation. How does faith in—or disillusion with—creative, individual, and rational agency play out in ordinary life? I have been concerned with those kinds of questions since starting my PhD in 2007. To some extent, this book is about what I have learned so far. Along the way, I have benefitted from many people and institutions, and I can only mention a few of them here. Discussions, fieldwork, and writing on this project were enhanced by inspiring encounters at the Departments of Anthropology in Munich, Berkeley, Manchester, Oxford, and the LSE, all kindly hosting me as a guest researcher. Thanks to the European Commission’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, I could make long-term visits to organizations in Berlin, Glasgow, and Vienna, some of which are presented in this book. The Cajasol Foundation supported my PhD research in Spain and Germany, where I gathered the first materials for this project. Four anonymous reviewers for this book—and many others of my previously published papers—helped me to develop a balanced argument over time. I have included condensed or modified versions of some of these articles here. Subsections in chapters two and four draw on data from my paper “Mann der Tat, Enterprise Culture and Ethno-preneurs”published in Sociologus. “Doing Good and Selling Goods”published in Voluntas is the source of a section in chapter six. The data on Manchester in chapter seven is taken from “Silicon Utopias” (Suomen Antropologi) and “Startup Communities”(Compaso). A very compressed version of my paper “Heritage Entrepreneurship”published in the International Journal of Heritage Studies is included in a subsection in chapter eight. Taylor & Francis, Springer, and Duncker & Humblot have kindly allowed me to reproduce some of my thoughts here. My special thanks goes to all informants, colleagues, and students who have influenced this book in any way or appear in its pages. Against tradition, I do not want to single some people out. I might risk forgetting somebody or reveal identities without consent. Those of you who personally know me and read this: thank you for your support or collaboration. Without you, this project would not have been possible. To my family—thank you for your encouragement. Finally, my gratitude goes to the anthropology editor of the Press. She and her team believed in this project early on and helped me to move successfully through the many stages up to publication. xPreface and acknowledgements INTRODUCTION Forbes magazine recently put it this way: “Entrepreneurship is one of the hottest topics in economic development today, and cities, States, regions, and countries all over the world are trying to build entrepreneurship ecosystems”(2014). The World Economic Forum encourages the idea of social entrepreneurship to “improve the state of the world”. The UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is promoting education in entrepreneurship. The European Union urges member States to foment “entrepreneurial culture”. Corporations finance university chairs in entrepreneurship, multinationals give prizes to young entrepreneurs, and banking groups are relaxing the loan criteria for entrepreneurs on behalf of governments. Popular literature on self-marketing and self-employment is on the rise. Here are some recent headlines from the magazine Entrepreneur:“How to become a millionaire by age 30”;“Ready for greatness?”,or“How to stay sane during a crowd-funding campaign”. What can anthropology tell us about such developments? Isn’t this discipline known for asking other, much larger questions, like: What makes us human? In his number one world bestseller on the history of humankind, Harari (2014) starts by explaining the evolutionary difference between sapiens and his fellow animals. He explains this difference with the “legend of the Peugeot”. It is the unique language of sapiens that allowed him/her to imagine things that do not exist, like Peugeot and other corporations without physical substance. Besides gossip—Harari argues—collective imaginations of this kind were crucial. It allowed large scale cooperation required for war, trade, or “entrepreneurship”in the case of the invention of the limited liability company (2014: 33). I am interested in pointing to some patterns of the occasional appearance of this notion in Harari’s popular book. Entrepreneurship and Peugeot are obviously secondary examples that Harari puts forward to illustrate that collective imaginations were the crucial evolutionary advantage of sapiens. He is not interested in studying entrepreneurship or corporations. Nevertheless, entrepreneurship is framed DOI: 10.4324/9780367824136-1 changes in economic habitus among the Kabyle people in late colonial Algeria, to present each chapter’s content. The following three chapters are concerned with issues such as social enterprising, informal credit, neoliberal urbanism, heritage marketing, do-it-yourself development, or socialist informal economics. Can social improvements and individual profit go together? This is the question posed in Chapter 7. Enlightenment thinkers, such as Adam Smith in his famous The Wealth of Nations, had no doubt about giving a positive answer. In the 21 st century though, even in the West, ordinary people are increasingly thinking that this is nothing but a joke. This is among the reasons why “social”entrepreneurship has strong advertisers in politics and the corporate world in recent years. The label is used to promote the idea that private initiative can bring social innovations as well as good life to clients, founders, employees, and shareholders. In Chapter 6, I will approach the issue of “the social”in entrepreneurship more broadly through the lens of Marcel Mauss’theory of the gift. He shows that human transactions are never completely selfish or uninterested. The point for him is different. We must act as if our interests were beneficial to the community and do the same with the interests of others. I will present three empirical examples to show how such a gift economy operates in practice. We will learn how traders in Bolivia and Venezuela capitalize on gifts in the form of informal credit and deferred payment. Trust, reputation, and fidelity is not a side product, but the essential element of their business operations. My analysis of an Austrian work integration enterprise shows how commodities can acquire enhanced social status of quasi-gifts. In this case, small scale production posited in opposition to large scale manufacturing can have such a social refinement effect on things. A third example will be the effort of organizations—like my local bank mentioned earlier—to produce “corporate social responsibility”by linking their activities to positively sanctioned moral values. Suggesting that we are donating instead of buying is one of the many fantasies produced by social entrepreneurship. What if nudging the youth into entrepreneurship is the most effective way to accustom them to unemployment, with the positive side-effect that they will start blaming themselves for it? I have called the seventh chapter “oppressive entrepreneurship”, because there are many ethnographic reports from around the globe that suggest exactly that. The young city dwellers of Cairo, Manchester and Nairobi that we will meet in the chapter, are trained and supported by corporations, universities, and non-profits. They produce or sell products and services, even if this does not really allow them to make a living. Yet, hopes and aspirations are constantly fuelled by those who do make a living in stable jobs—by selling the idea of entrepreneurship to others. These promotors are at the heart of my own research in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. I follow the work of local lobbyists who get the intentions of government and investors into the hearts and minds of mostly young male “coders”. They do so by creating a sense of community at “networking events”celebrated in “coffices”and “coworkspaces”. But I will also take the reader to rural Costa Rica and Bangladesh. There, Anke Schwittay and Juli Huang have found much more subtle ways in which young women are 8Introduction exploited. Trying to gain a little degree of economic freedom—without failing their families and communities—they find themselves frustrated in both endeavours. In the meantime, they are playing the advertising agency for foreign corporations and NGOs. Throughout this chapter, I will deliberately put very different experiences from four continents in the same box. But I will also discuss the extent to which the coercive element varies from case to case, between simple deception of Western middle-class dreams to systematic exploitation of the poor in the south. In addition, I will provide a critical examination of the limits and problems of research exaggerating the oppressive dimension of entrepreneurship. If we do not consider the anthropological groundwork set out in the second part of the book, we are condemned to (unwarily) repeat old debates from the 1960s. In the last chapter, I assemble a diverse set of concepts and case studies. What they have in common is an innovative attempt to push the boundaries of what we might understand as entrepreneurship. I start with Howard Becker who described in the 1960s how norms, values, and “outsiders”are created from scratch by “moral entrepreneurs”. But Becker is not especially interested in exploring all the theoretical consequences of his neologism (like Andersson was not with his neologism of the “fear entrepreneur”mentioned earlier). This is why I give more space to the presentation of the Comaroffs’book Ethnicity Inc., where they expand on a more self-consciously produced series of imaginative concepts, including “ethno-preneurialism”. Commodification of ethnic identity works through the marketing of one’s own body-as-culture. This is what the authors have found, among many other places, on the French side of Catalonia. Therefore, presenting their concept is the prelude to my own example of gastronomic heritage construction in the Catalan capital Barcelona. There, the Mediterranean diet is labelled and incorporated on behalf of the food and tourism industry by a specific“nonprofit”foundation, that I conceive of as a “heritage entrepreneur”. The example is followed by Xin Liu’s ethnography of high-tech entrepreneurs in China. In cities like Beihai or Nanning, doing business often equates to simply accumulating money, sex and power. Liu reports how entrepreneurship is corroding the historical or moral self-understandings among the local elites. Throughout the chapter, I bundle all these experiences and theories together under the title “entrepreneurialization”. This is the term I use to describe how an increasing number of social situations around the globe have an entrepreneurial nature. But the term also helps me thinking about where an anthropological concept of entrepreneurship might go from here. “Framing structures as agents”is one suggestion that I make. In the conclusions I make the case for an anthropology of entrepreneurship and rebut some of the major possible objections. I explain how I tried to avoid painting a too narrow picture of the field, despite seeking some common ground, mainly by classifying and justifying my classifications. I primarily gathered evidence of serious and prolonged scholarly engagement with this subject, despite all the differences in aim, scope and focus. Methodologically, I tend to stick to the authors’texts— instead of schools, themes or other heuristics—showing that both in past and present entrepreneurship has served anthropologists to creatively think about agency, Preface and acknowledgements 9 power, culture change, the personal and the impersonal. By tying the story of entrepreneurship research into the larger history of anthropology, I keep a distance from any sort of partisanship or hyperspecialization. I also avoid sterile conversations about whether the anthropological contribution to the topic is mainly critique, ethnography or studying non-Western scenarios. Differences, but also similarities with the rest of the social sciences and humanities are given credit. Historical, contemporary, and global everyday experiences are an integral part of all chapters—like those of Elsa in the Andes, Juan in Andalusia, or Haihun in Guangxi. Personal engagement with such ordinary entrepreneurs and an empirical interest for microeconomics—both past and present—is one of the features of the anthropology of entrepreneurship. But asking the big philosophical questions about human emancipation and its discontents is another. Critically self-observing our entrepreneurial academic lives vis-à-vis the entrepreneurs we study, together with a sensibility for language and cultural history, contributes another important twist. But the anthropology of entrepreneurship is not a postmodern science. It has evolved historically, especially through ethnographic encounters in the (post-) colonies, which resulted in two major thought traditions. One is concerned with explaining agency-driven social change, and the other with describing history, culture, and morality of entrepreneurialism. In my book I give room to this overall complexity, but I also make an effort to combine the different pieces of scholarship into a coherent new picture. This picture—the anthropological interrogation of entrepreneurship—offers fascinating views on the contemporary world. 10 Introduction