Keywords

Current society relishes entrepreneurship, almost to the absurd, and treat entrepreneurs as celebrities. The cultural ideal of entrepreneurship is mostly infused with a popular image of the entrepreneur as the “jet-setting, Silicon Valley-residing engineer who along with a couple of his buddies, has raised millions of dollars of venture capital to start a new company to make a patent-protected gizmo” (Shane 2008: 3). This image of the entrepreneur is a myth, but it works effectively to strengthen the individualism of current society and to offer escapist imaginaries in the shape of a promise of “individual autonomy, of self-valuation and of an escape from a currently humdrum and boring life” (Jones and Spicer 2009: 110).

The United States, which not only has a “uniquely entrepreneurial approach to religion” but also, during the twentieth century, “developed an unusually religious approach to entrepreneurialism” (Andersen 2017: 409), led the way in the global development of entrepreneurship from simple productivity factor to a technological and institutional “road to salvation” and a “means to emancipation” for individuals and for whole communities and societies (Brattström and Wennberg 2022: 5–6). As a result, society’s thirst for entrepreneurship seems unlimited. Entrepreneurs “are seen as almost having a magical effect on economies—alchemists, whose innovatory capacity allows for water to be turned into wine, lead into gold” and they appear “omnipotent: able to create markets, shape markets, and, ultimately, destroy markets” (Greene et al. 2008: 3). In current society, entrepreneurship is therefore “supported without questioning of its validity” (Brandl and Bullinger 2009: 159–160) and has become “a cultural ideal (…) to which everyone is supposed to adhere” (Brattström 2022: 134). The positive valuation of entrepreneurship is itself neither mysterious nor wrong, given the remarkable achievements of entrepreneurs in the past few hundred years, upon which much of the health and wealth of our societies has been built (McCloskey 2016; Mokyr 2016). However, the idea that entrepreneurship should be applied to every kind of problem and embraced by every kind of actor—individual, organizational, institutional—is both novel and absurd.

More important, this bundle of ideas and ideals makes entrepreneurship into something essentially contradictory. On the one hand, the concept of entrepreneurship has been expanded to cover almost anything, “far beyond establishing new enterprises; it spreads into all areas of life” (Brandl and Bullinger 2009: 160). On the other hand, it alludes to a very specific type of actor, typically the “self-made man” who spots a gap in the market and builds a successful business, typically without much resources at all, and against all odds (Jones and Spicer 2009: 10). But neither of these images is even remotely close to real-world entrepreneurship, which is usually rather mundane and nothing out of the ordinary. Most entrepreneurs are middle-class men in peripheral places who build small businesses to make a living in spite of limited education and lack of jet set stardom, and their businesses are most often very low-tech, catering to basic needs of people like retail, accommodation and food services, and construction (Shane 2008). We will return to the myth, and the myth-busting later in this chapter. Right now, the contradiction itself is of greater interest, because it can perhaps explain why entrepreneurship is in so high regard in our culture: The very specific cultural ideals that are inscribed in the concept of entrepreneurship can, namely, be viewed as a popular culture phenomenon in its own right.

The Entrepreneurship Industry

Critical analyses of entrepreneurship as a present-day cultural phenomenon have emphasized the imagery and storytelling that surrounds it, and the importance of the creation of narratives around entrepreneurship that help in crafting the identities of entrepreneurs and promote their efforts in relation to a range of stakeholders (Down 2006; Jones and Spicer 2009). Some of these narratives are most likely true and accurate descriptions, but they may also be mere myths, especially when transmitted into popular culture, mass media, social media, and public discourse. Current society buys into these narratives, and puts great faith in the entrepreneur as a mythical figure with out-of-the ordinary talents and capacities to transform and renew the supply of consumer products and services, industrial sectors, and whole economies. Therefore, a whole entrepreneurship industry has been built up to promote these narratives and imagology of the entrepreneur.

This entrepreneurship industry comprises not only of entrepreneurs (and would-be entrepreneurs) themselves, but a whole range of other actors—mostly organizational—who uphold and sustain the positive cultural ideal of entrepreneurship and turn it into a profitable business by claiming to enable and stimulate entrepreneurship, educate and train entrepreneurs, and assist and promote entrepreneurial efforts (Hunt and Kiefer 2017: 232). Among many other actors in this essentially fuzzy organizational field, we find conferences and expos, incubators and accelerators, policymakers and bureaucrats, inspirational speakers and coaches, consultants and matchmakers, books and magazines, competitions and TV-shows, education and training programs, and a lot more. The industry is both difficult to overview and difficult to understand. As summarized by one “entrepreneurship support actor” in a recent study: “There are a thousand different actors and no one understands what they are doing. It all just costs a lot of money” (quote in Brattström 2022: 138).

And it is, indeed, big business. On basis of a comprehensive study, Hunt and Kiefer (2017: 234) conclude that in one year alone (2014), “at least $13 billion in worldwide revenue was generated (…) through the sale of goods and services to current and prospective entrepreneurs”, an increase of a factor of 26(!) since 1987, which makes the “entrepreneurship industry” into “one of the fastest growing sectors over that 27-year period”. Three quarters of the industry (in the United States) is estimated to consist of “outsourced start-up support, consulting and advisory services, and entrepreneurship conferences and expos”, but there is a lot more to it, including not least direct government support to startups, venture capital, and entrepreneurship training in higher education (Hunt and Kiefer 2017: 235).

The latter is a crucial feature. Entrepreneurship courses and modules are nowadays offered at very early stages of higher education (Heilbrunn 2010), in most universities (Chen and Goldstein 2022: 4). However, neither the content of the curricula or the apparent purpose of these educational efforts seem to be to teach any substantial skills of the type that may be necessary for would-be entrepreneurs, such as management, leadership, accounting, business strategizing, or fundraising. Instead, their purpose seems to be to maintain and promote the cultural ideal of entrepreneurship, and instill in the students the aim to become entrepreneurs (Souitaris et al. 2007; Pittaway and Cope 2007). In Sweden, for example, all universities and colleges offer courses and programs in entrepreneurship, and those with knowledge about these programs—both teachers and former students—explain how they reproduce the “cultural ideals and artifacts” that are essential in training would-be entrepreneurs “in how to be an entrepreneur, over and beyond how to start a new venture” (Brattström 2022: 143). The startup pitch has a crucial role, and students are carefully trained in the art of conveying their entrepreneurial potential to whatever audience is imagined—typically a pool of potential investors (Chen and Goldstein 2022: 2)—but it is doubtful whether this is a viable route to entrepreneurial success given the disconnect of “the pitch” from any real entrepreneurial activity. The pitch is considered “super important” without anyone ever asking themselves what its purpose is, or what it represents (Brattström 2022: 142). Instead, it seems to be all about acting: “One of our respondents, a recent graduate and startup founder who impressed others with his entrepreneurial performances, dubbed this constant focus on presenting a speculative self the ‘theater of entrepreneurship’” (Chen and Goldstein 2022: 2).

The emptiness of this theater is rather evident. The entrepreneurship industry lives off specific cultural beliefs about entrepreneurship, not real entrepreneurship (Hunt and Kiefer 2017: 238). In a way, this is not at all surprising, given how hard it is to teach creativity and innovative behavior, compared to style, presentation techniques, and other superficial attributes that can make individuals and their projects signal creativity and innovativeness. But the identification of the entrepreneurship industry as an organizational field—yet a very fuzzy one—also invites a further exploration of what the central tenets of neo-institutional organization theory can offer to the analysis. As noted in Chap. 1 of this book, its basic premise is a separation of formal and informal structure in organizations, and the tendency of formal structure to become myths that have little or nothing to do with reality, which instead is found in the informal structure. Importantly, the gap between myth and reality has broader relevance as a tool in the social sciences, and this probably explains the popularity of neo-institutional theory far beyond organization studies. The myths that society perpetuates, and that are transformed into expectations on organizations (and individuals) on how to act, or really, what to say and what to write in official plans and policies, are crucial for legitimacy (Meyer and Rowan 1977: 344–345). In the entrepreneurship industry, where real signs of legitimacy of new ventures are rare—these new ventures “typically do not have a strong brand, obvious assets, or preexisting track record”—it is crucial for the (would-be) entrepreneur to adhere to cultural ideals and manifest these by certain behaviors, talk, and symbols (Brattström 2022: 151). In lieu of real, substantial resources, image and looks become very important to create social legitimacy.

The entrepreneurship industry seems even to have transformed entrepreneurship from a type of achievement to an area of consumption. Enabling the people at the receiving end to identify with the culture of entrepreneurship and placing themselves in the position of the hopeful aspirant to become one of the heroes of contemporary capitalism, the entrepreneurship industry has become the supplier of goods and services that are the subject of what sociologist Thorstein Veblen once called “conspicuous consumption”. Launching this concept in his seminal work The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen viewed “conspicuous consumption” as a consequence of consumerism and the development of a non-Nobility upper class, that goes together with “conspicuous leisure”. Together they imply consumption of luxury goods and services with the aim of demonstrating economic power and wealth, in order to obtain higher social status. Useless in broader perspective, as it contributes marginally or not at all to the economy, it has no purpose for the useful production of the various goods and services that modern society needs in order to function (Veblen 1899/1994).

It is, in historical and sociological perspective, not very surprising that lifestyles and identities become an arena for such “conspicuous consumption”, given the transition from the “affluent society” (Galbraith 1958) into the “post-affluent society” (Alvesson 2013/2022), where the standard of living has long since reached levels only available to a tiny fraction of the population some hundred years ago. As part of this development, the relative decline of the role of necessity-driven consumption in society has made Veblenian “conspicuous consumption” available to the masses and pushed consumption toward desires and wishes rather than needs (Chaudhuri and Majumdar 2006). It is likewise unsurprising that the entrepreneurship ideal has become a sought-after lifestyle and identity, given that the past decades also have seen a continuous blurring of boundaries between work and leisure, and the rise of work into far greater importance than a mere source of income and social security (e.g. Boltanski and Chiapello 2005). Occupation is today a far greater part of individual identity today than in previous times, and as we will analyze in greater detail later in this chapter, ideals of personal autonomy, creativity, and self-expression are nowadays also completely integrated into society and culture.

With the expansion of the entrepreneurship industry, the entrepreneur’s continuous rise in status in society, and the increasingly strong association of entrepreneurship with specific personality traits, behavioral patterns, habits, ways of expression, and physical attributes, entrepreneurship has therefore become an arena of itself for Veblenian “conspicuous consumption” (Hartmann et al. 2020). By consuming the products of the entrepreneurship industry, individuals can simply consume their way to the entrepreneurial identity without making any substantial contribution of the kind typically identified with entrepreneurial acts. This kind of “Veblenian entrepreneurship” is an activity driven most of all by a want of identity, which means that the main activities of a “Veblenian entrepreneur” is to build and maintain a lifestyle with certain specific attributes. But the phenomenon is broader, and includes reinterpreting failure as success (Hartmann et al. 2020: 880) much in the same way as expectations with uncertainty built in are mobilized as causes for action (Chap. 5)—whatever the signs of things not going according to plan, it can always be reframed as opportunities to act on. This, in combination with the tendency of downplaying negative experiences of entrepreneurship, and constantly putting the spotlight on positive examples, regardless of the relative frequencies of these (Zacharakis et al. 1999; Hayward et al. 2010), contributes greatly to our society’s false image of entrepreneurship and innovation as inherently good and always desirable.

In this climate, addiction to being entrepreneur is a simultaneously absurd and expectable phenomenon (Spivack et al., 2014; Spivack and McKelvie, 2018). The actors and organizations of the entrepreneurship industry have no incentives to try to break such addictions—quite the opposite. In this sense, the entrepreneurship industry is in good (or, shall we say, bad) company: At the intersection between today’s service economy, and the atomistic individualism of society, is a huge market of products and services that supposedly help (especially young) people to achieve things that were previously (and by many people still) done as part of everyday life, like getting into college, or simply dealing with the demands of adulthood. Services like “life coaches” and online sites that give career advice, not to mention commercial services like essay mills that assist students in cheating their way through their studies (Newton 2018), were unheard of some decades ago but seem nowadays to be routinely used by young aspiring individuals as “products that satisfy their personal wants and help them express themselves as individuals” (Twenge 2006: 288). Entrepreneurship, it seems, is one major route to such self-expression.

The Me Generation

Sociology has long acknowledged that the two perhaps most prominent features of modernity are rationalization and individualism (e.g. Durkheim 1893/1969; Weber 1922/2019; Parsons 1971). This means that in contrast to premodern times, when families, clans, and smaller communities were society’s key entities, in modern society the individual has the central role. This means both that under the modern condition “the nature of the individual is a matter of public importance” and that “every modern ideology of public life and society includes the individual as a prominent component” (Frank et al. 1995: 361), but also that individualism has evolved into a cultural ideal that permeates most of society (Lukes 1973; Hwang and Powell 2005). Economization and the rise of the enterprise culture models society after the economy, and the economy caters to the aspirations of individual self-fulfillment, by its atomistic and short-sighted way of reducing social life to business transactions, consumption, and entrepreneurship.

Importantly, therefore, individualism is not just a personal attitude or orientation, but has become “an ideological doctrine that pervades all areas of Western societies” (Brandl and Bullinger 2009: 161), and “a matter of collective public concern” (Frank et al. 1995: 361). To some extent, individualism is a fundamental and instrumental factor for the functioning of liberal democratic societies—humans are assumed to have specific individual rights and obligations—but it is also stressful and trying, both for individuals and societies, and a source of unrealistic and superficial cultural imaginaries.

In the mid-1970s, American novelist author Tom Wolfe famously identified his present times as the “me decade” (Wolfe 1976) and thus popularized the notion that a new attitude had spread across the United States after the social upheavals of the 1960s, which gave way to an escalation of the atomized individualism, at the expense of the social values of community and solidarity that had characterized American society at least since the days of the Great Depression and the New Deal (McNamara 2005). Only a couple of years later, cultural historian Christopher Lasch explored a similar line of argument in his book The Culture of Narcissism, claiming that the individualism of American culture had transformed narcissism from an individual disorder to a nascent social epidemic and a condition of society as a whole, and individualism from not simply a counter-reaction to the social awareness and communitarian political struggles of the 1960s, but a profound culture of entitlement and self-actualization that makes it harder for Americans to attain the sense of continuity and community that arguably built both American society and most of modern society overall (Lasch 1979/2018).

The writings of Lasch and Wolfe must have seemed prophetic just a few years into the 1980s, when several of the trends spotted in these influential writings—escalating consumerism, increased focus on private self-actualization, the wider appearance of celebrity politicians and businessmen—just seemed to accelerate. And thusly it has, by all accounts, continued. It is still far too early to judge what the digital revolution and the profound transformation of mass communication in the 2000s will bring in terms of deeper changes to society and the individual’s place in it, but there is no lack of qualified and able analyses of the effects of the internet and especially social media on individuals and communities (e.g. Jackson 2008; Baron 2008; Carr 2010; Twenge 2017). Others have, in similarly skilled and insightful studies, put the digital revolution in broader cultural and social context and argued that social media and the constant self-promotion it invites (or compels) individuals and especially the youth to engage in, is only one piece in the puzzle that Christopher Lasch and Tom Wolfe, among others, began to lay out almost half a century ago.

Thus there are highly capable and insightful analyses that depict current society as an “impulse society” (Roberts 2015; cf. Chap. 5), that claim that we are living in “the age of absurdity” (Foley 2010), and that we are currently experiencing the “triumph of emptiness” (Alvesson 2013/2022). Shortsightedness, immediate gratification, a profound individual sense of entitlement, and a deafening lack of attention to the values and virtues that took us here, seem to be the hallmarks of current society (for a deeper analysis, with proper historical contextualization, see Putnam 2000). And like in any other social transformation in the past, the standard-bearers of the change are the new upcoming generations, whereas the critics are usually old(er) commentators, who watch troubled and dumbfounded as the times run away.

Among the most elaborate critics of the current seeming intensification of these trends that have been spotted for several decades, is psychologist Jean Twenge. Reflecting Tom Wolfe’s choice of words, Twenge has coined the term Generation Me for those born in the 1980s and 1990s, and in a series of books and articles diagnosed it with widespread (if not epidemic) narcissism, hugely inflated but very sensitive egos, difficulties in connecting with others, and a rejection of social norms, all of which has made anxiety, depression, and self-harm a common feature of adolescence and youth adulthood right from the start of the twenty-first century (Twenge 2006, 2017; Twenge and Campbell 2009). These are but some of the several very worrying observations and predictions in academic and journalistic works that deserve attention and scrutiny as part of public debate over the direction society is heading in, and the sociological analysis that parallels it, but most of that lies outside of the scope of this book and should therefore be seen as forming a deep background to the discussion in this chapter. The aspect of atomic individualism and its expressions most clearly relevant here is what Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han has identified in his book The Burnout Society, where he ascertains that the Foucauldian “discipline society” has been replaced by the “achievement society”. Han (2015) argues that the destructive forces of discipline and punishment that Foucault (1977) theorized and analyzed have been abolished and replaced by a deceitfully positive, affirmative, and encouraging spirit. Contemporary society is composed of individual “achievement-subjects”, writes Han (2015: 38), and they do not “pursue works of duty” or subject themselves to “obedience, law, and the fulfillment of obligation”, but seek “freedom, pleasure, and inclination”, although it all, in the end, amounts to nothing but “self-exploitation”, sustained by society’s constant cultural reproduction of the message that only self-actualization and achievement that can be acknowledged and at a very minimum recorded in some digital medium, counts.

This profound cultural feature of current society is not reducible to consumerism, the enterprise culture, and market fundamentalism although as argued in Chap. 3, economization and related developments are in no small part to blame. The hegemonic role of the economy in current society is an unmistakable feature of the “achievement society”, due to its way of satisfying desires and thus adjust expectations upward (Smith 2007: 57), and the powers of economic thinking and economic organizing in promoting the individual as both a consumer subject and an achievement subject (Chap. 3). Sociologist C Wright Mills acknowledged the role of the economy in promoting an individualist culture in American life decades before the comments and analyses by Wolfe, Lasch, and Twenge: “The salesman’s world has now become everybody’s world, and, in some part, everybody has become a salesman” (Mills 1951/2002: 161).

What Entrepreneurship Really Is

We need not look deep into sociological and social-psychological analyses of current society to see that the individual and her achievement are viewed as the foundation and key resource of social life. Entrepreneurship might very well be the epitome of this historical development: An act of individual achievement that brings about progress and saves the self, the community, and society at large from whatever impasses they have been put in by fate, bad luck, incompetence, populism, rigidity, or indifference. Personal success is the key to collective success. Self-actualization is the key to a better future for all (Brandl and Bullinger 2009: 161).

Of course, even if this was true in a general sense—and there are reasons to speculate that it is, given the enormous success of liberal, democratic, capitalist societies and the individualism that build them up, in comparison with previous or contemporary collectivist and traditionalist societies—it is doubtful whether entrepreneurship really is what individual achievement, responsibility, and accountability should be about. Overgeneralization of a concept is always potentially hazardous, and should be avoided. Entrepreneurship has a very specific role in the economy and society, one that we risk losing sight of when expanding the general use of the term and making entrepreneurship into a vague but pervasive cultural ideal, and a universal solution (Jones and Spicer 2009: 70).

But also beyond the culturally promoted myths about entrepreneurship as the road to salvation for individuals, communities, and society as a whole, entrepreneurship is misunderstood. As Aldrich and Ruef (2018) have shown, major selection biases in the attention paid to innovation and entrepreneurship in popular culture, policymaking and public administration, and also academic research, have contributed to what they call a “Silicon Valley mania”. Although only a tiny fraction of all entrepreneurship and innovation in the world happens in Silicon Valley, it is the “unicorns”, “gazelles” and other rare events from that sunny region in California that get the media attention and set the standards for the policies adopted across the globe, for promoting entrepreneurial success (Hwang and Powell 2005; Boyle and Kelly 2010). Innovation and entrepreneurship research plays along, neglecting the mundane reality and the empirically accurate in favor of the exciting but unrealistic, thus reproducing heroical myths about startups overcoming major obstacles, battling monopolies, perhaps even “moving fast and breaking things” in the process (see Chap. 5), and almost single-handedly turn grim prospects for a region into bright futures with growth, jobs, and sustainability (Brattström and Wennberg 2022).

It matters little that entrepreneurship in the real world is something rather mundane and dull, as entrepreneurship researcher Scott Shane (2008) has demonstrated. People are more likely to become entrepreneurs, that is, to start their own businesses, in countries that are poor and agricultural, than in countries that are richer and reliant on manufacturing. Most new businesses are started in “run-of-the-mill industries” such as retail, accommodation and food services, and construction. Most entrepreneurs are not in search of opportunities to exploit but form businesses based on what they are good at, and what they want to do. Most entrepreneurs get no funding from venture capitalists and business angels, but invest their own savings (Shane 2008: 28, 31, 38, 68–69, 89–91). Not much of this seems to matter for the popular image of entrepreneurs. It likewise matters little that most evidence suggests that policies that encourage startups are unnecessary, since there is no evidence that too few new businesses are started when such policies are absent, and a lot of evidence that such policies mostly lead to businesses that fail, that have very limited economic impact, and generate few new jobs (Shane 2008: 157). These and other irrefutable facts aside, current society still views the typical entrepreneur as “a hero with special powers that lead him to build a great company, which innovates, creates jobs, makes markets more competitive, and enhances economic growth” (Shane 2008: 160).

Most entrepreneurs are not like that. There is no specific personality trait shared by all successful entrepreneurs, quite the opposite—they seem all to be dissimilar (Rauch and Frese 2007; Kerr et al. 2019; Levine and Rubinstein 2017). Most entrepreneurs earn less than they would do from comparable employment (Åstebro 2012), and have weaker social security coverage (Hessels et al. 2006). There are also studies that show that entrepreneurs tend to experience more negative stress and anxiety, not less (Dahl et al. 2010; Hessels et al. 2017), and that many end up disappointed or even depressed (Jennings et al. 2016). All this gives good reason to argue, as Hartmann (2021) does, that “entrepreneurship is a terrible idea for most people, most of the time”, because all available evidence suggests that success in entrepreneurship is like winning the lottery—“wildly unlikely, and more or less random”—which in turn means that entrepreneurship should not be promoted among the many, but rather be viewed as something comparable to “a career in professional sports or the high arts”.

The main challenge to a healthy and balanced view on entrepreneurship and innovation today is probably not that individuals are encouraged to seek self-actualization, but that self-actualization is so squarely identified with entrepreneurship, and that entrepreneurship, to a dangerously extensive degree, is empty. We will return to this theme in the next chapter, but with regard to incentive structures on the individual level, and most of all how they are encoded in culture, it is clear that the shallowness or even emptiness of the entrepreneurship ideal makes the prospects of actually achieving necessary and desirable innovation through entrepreneurship grimmer. Innovation requires hard work, and if the entrepreneurship industry sells an image of entrepreneurship that fails to acknowledge this vital aspect of the process, then it sells a lie.

Hunt and Kiefer (2017: 239) argue that the entrepreneurship industry is especially good at promoting the “‘mythology’ of entrepreneurship” and that this “mythology” might “disproportionately influence ill-equipped and weakly resourced aspirants”. Their data and analysis consequently show that while consumption of the products and services of the entrepreneurship industry seems to be conducive of the propensity to enterprise, it also seems to be conducive of failure—on average, businesses founded by the “heaviest consumers” of the products and services of the entrepreneurship industry “experience shorter lifespans and fewer successful exits than businesses started by nonconsumers” (Hunt and Kiefer 2017: 249). This is, in itself, a devastating consequence, both for the individuals that are affected, and for society. Entrepreneurship education and extra-curricular activities to encourage entrepreneurship among students seem, in many cases, to just divert attention, and many students who pursue the promise of entrepreneurship end up wasting time and money on nothing; they eventually take a day job to pay for student loans and/or returning to their studies with disillusionment (Chen and Goldstein 2022).

Thomas Alva Edison, lauded as one of the greatest innovators and entrepreneurs of all time, is said to have claimed that creativity is “two percent inspiration and ninety-eight percent perspiration” (Jones 1932/2021: 371). Twenge and Campbell (2009: 290) conclude that “today’s culture suggests that it is 50% inspiration, 10% perspiration, and 40% self-expression”. Save for the fact that many acts of creativity—perhaps especially including technical and social innovation—do not gain anything from self-expression of its originators (or anyone else who seeks to share some of the credit, rightly or wrongly), this also begs the question of what gets lost when the “perspiration” part is reduced from 98% to 10%, or something like it. In other words, what gets lost if hard work is subtracted from the equation, and hot air takes its place?

It would not come as a great surprise if it would lead to less durable, sustainable, and profoundly less qualitative products, services, and policies. Emptiness instead of substance.