Abstract
Ulrich Bröckling claims that the imperative to act like an entrepreneur has become ubiquitous. In Western society there is a drive to orient your thinking and behaviour on the objective of market success, which dictates the private and professional spheres. Life is now ruled by competition for power, money, fitness and youth. The self is driven to constantly improve, change and adapt to a society only capable of producing winners and losers.
The Entrepreneurial Self explores the series of juxtapositions within the self, created by this call for entrepreneurship. Whereas it can expose unknown potential, it also leads to overchallenging. 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 only the capable will reap 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.
When considered in sociological terms, the word ‘entrepreneur’ conveys the idea of an individual, rather than the state, being a provider and manager of their own labour. Early career fellows in the UK, for instance, will be familiar with the mindset that exists in academia and the broader job market as indicated by the phrase, ‘What are your unique selling points?’ In other words, what differentiates you from your competitors?
What does Ulrich Bröckling mean by the entrepreneurial self? He describes an entrepreneur as a subject answering ‘the call to act as an entrepreneur of one’s own life’, which ‘produces a model for people to understand what they are and what they ought to be, and it tells them how to work on the self in order to become what they ought to be’ (p. viii).
The Entrepreneurial Self was originally published in 2007. This 2016 edition is the first English translation. The book is based on Western concepts of the self, subjectification of the self, socialization and individualism in the context of globalist, consumerist and neoliberal times. Bröckling places his work in critical management studies with a Western and a German perspective. Still, the book remains applicable to other countries despite its German nuances, due to the prevalence of capitalist economic systems shaping people’s day-to-day lives across the world.
The argument of this book is how the idea of an entrepreneurial self arises and is communicated. So how management practices encourage employees to engage in entrepreneurial practice via autonomy, flexibility and responsibility. In stating the book’s thesis, Bröckling acknowledges two limitations. First, that the academic texts, management literature and self-help guides the book is based on lack coherency in their approach. Second, there is a difficulty in measuring the effects of such literature on readers. However, Bröckling does an excellent job of weaving often paradoxical texts together to construct a narrative of our entrepreneurial selves. In doing so he reveals how entrepreneurs are under constant pressure to demonstrate creativity and innovation, customer orientation, managing risks, self-optimization, acquiring knowledge and adapting. He brings to light that an entrepreneur lives in the hope that effort equals success, placing the risk of failure on their shoulders rather than flawed social systems. The paradox of the entrepreneurial being is that although attempting to supersede powerlessness through self-sufficiency the self is formed by its own actions in response to structures of power that create the conditions for the entrepreneurial spirit to exist.
In Chapter 1, Bröckling lays the methodological groundwork before broaching the tricky subject of the subjectification of the self. The reference materials used involved the analysis of macroeconomic, psychological and sociological theories, guidebooks on management programmes, creativity, communication, cooperation and advice books. Texts that outline entrepreneurial practices and methods. In Chapter 2, the techniques and ways of thinking about the self as a subject inform how information on macro to wider discourses result in the self as a subject with skills to be traded. Chapter 3 outlines the history of economic and political theories surrounding how the concept of being entrepreneurial arose in the labour market and effected other personal ways of being: for example, the idea that one must not only be productive at work, but also in one’s hobbies and private life. The responsibility is assumed by the individual through constant self-motivation, further education and personal growth. In the bestselling management books of all time an individual is tasked with defining and selling themselves as a product. Although recognizing that different ideas are contained within neoliberalism, overall neoliberal governments promote competition and self-governing, which involves an individual promoting their skills above others. Entrepreneurial activity then becomes a mode of social organization through competition between individuals.
The most illuminating and pleasurable part of the book was Chapter 4, which discussed what an entrepreneur is, and what distinguishes an entrepreneur from other forms of human activity. Four functions of enterprising activity emerged: an individual must (1) speculate, (2) innovate, and as such (3) bear risk of failure, which also includes (4) coordinating the actions of others being a leader rather than a follower. A successful economy, Bröckling argued, requires followers to create stability, but also new ideas to remain competitive in a global market.
Chapters 5 through 9 discuss entrepreneurial activity as a form of social contract that governs exchanges between people: innovation or creativity is viewed as a central human component, a social, learned skill that has great benefits to the economy; grass roots social movements focus on the emancipation of workers through the values and ideals of entrepreneurialism; and the entrepreneurs self-market themselves as human capital, which involves quality control and self-optimization. Bröckling reaches the conclusion with a growing sense of unease. To exist, the entrepreneur acts against the status quo, yet entrepreneurialism has become such a big part of Western ways of being (recall the pressures placed on job seekers in the current job market to sell themselves as unique). An individual that views themselves as a nonconformist entrepreneur ultimately is conforming to a way of thinking that benefits political and economic structures. A measure of how pervasive conformity is. The author however does not make a personal statement about whether he thinks that this is a necessary part of our economic and political structures and more personal ways of being.
There is something for every sociologist in the book as Bröckling’s argument spans the fields of economic, cultural and political sociology, narrative of the self, sociology of work and industry, organization and anthropology, among others. However, the book assumes a highly educated reader familiar with sociological terms, and because of this the one downside is that the language is not always clear. For instance, ‘field of force’ is repeated many times without a definition. Unfortunately, the phrase suggested Jedis fighting with light sabres – which I don’t think was what the author intended. ‘Field of force’ may be a German or academic phrase I am not familiar with. However, picturing the entrepreneurial self as a battle yet to be concluded seemed an apt point on which to end this review.