The Entrepreneurial Self: Fabricating a New Type of Subject

Being an entrepreneur is more than just a profession or even a vocation, nor is it merely a variety of economic activity or the legal status of being self-employed. It is an interpellation to everyone. An entrepreneurial self is something we all are supposed to strive for. In Western societies, the imperative to orientate thinking and behaviour on the objective of market success has become ubiquitous. The call to act as entrepreneurs of our own lives initiates and sustains a never-ending process of constantly shaping the self. One is only ever an entrepreneur à venir, only ever in a state of becoming one, never of being one. As such a system must produce winners and losers, programmes for self-management and coaching flourish aiming on the optimization of the personality. 

The call for entrepreneurship may tap unknown potential but it also leads to permanent over-challenging. It may strengthen self-confidence but it also exacerbates the feeling of powerlessness. It may set free creativity but it also generates unbounded anger. Competition is driven by the promise that the most capable will reap the most success, but no amount of effort can remove the risk of failure. The individual has no choice but to balance out the contradiction between the hope of rising and the fear of decline, between empowerment and despair, euphoria and dejection.

Ulrich Bröckling’s seminal sociological study analyses these ambivalences and points it to a critical diagnosis of contemporary society.