Young entrepreneurs and non-teleological temporality in Portugal and the UK

Abstract

The promotion of young enterprise is central to European Union youth policy, particularly since the financial crisis of 2007/2008. Expectations that young people need to be enterprising and eschew dependency on formal structures of salaried employment are a key narrative in European and national youth policies. These policy initiatives correspond with recent theoretical development of the entrepreneurial self as a managerial version of the governable individual. Endorsements of entrepreneurship implicitly promote a normative expectation that young people’s future orientations need to be innovative, flexible and creative. There is, therefore, an implicit temporality to youth entrepreneurship. This paper’s contribution to scholarship on how young lives are promoted and produced as entrepreneurial selves is to document how young people’s engagement with entrepreneurship fosters orientations to present and future. Conventionally entrepreneurs are assumed to be goal-orientated. In our qualitative study of young entrepreneurs in two European countries (n = 28), we find that this assumption of goal-orientation needs qualification. Young entrepreneurs in our study engage with the idea that being an entrepreneur is about being creative rather than seeking to maximise financial profit. Their focus on creativity, innovation and problem-solving is realised through a non-teleological commitment to what they are doing in the here and now, rather than calibrating their activities in relation to predetermined goals and worrying about the possibility of future failure.

Keywords

Young people entrepreneurship present future non-teleology

Introduction

Young people’s entrepreneurship has received significant political endorsement in recent years, particularly since the global financial crisis of 2007/2008 (Council of European Union, 2014; European Commission, 2018). The promotion of young entrepreneurship encourages new entrants to the labour market to be responsible for their own economic trajectories and not be dependent on conventional career pathways in order to create new employment opportunities, products and services. Entrepreneurs are simultaneously depicted as saviours, heroes, risk takers, creators and innovators. Although the number of young people in Europe who set up their own business remains relatively small (Green, 2013), the promotion of entrepreneurial activity transcends the specific focus on business development; for young people it applies to governing the self. Thus, while the endorsement of young entrepreneurship has heightened since the 2007 crash, this revisioning of the labour market is part of a much wider social and economic change that reorganises social relations around the centrality of enterprise (Davies, 2014; Gane, 2012; Martilla, 2013; Rose, 1999).

The technologies of the self that are inherent to entrepreneurship are implicitly about time. The premise of youth entrepreneurship is that young people need to innovate in the present moment to secure both their own future and that of their generation. This promotion of the possibility of youth entrepreneurship cuts across traditional preoccupations in youth studies on the relevance, or otherwise, of future ‘plans’. Debates about youth temporalities have pivoted around young people’s future orientations and their ability to realise these. Evoking entrepreneurship suggests a subtle intervention as rather than separating the present from the future, young people enact possible or imagined futures through innovation in the present. The extent to which creative entrepreneurial activity is driven by goal-orientated behaviour is, however, contested. Creativity may be approached as a solution to securing specific goals, or as non-teleological practices that respond to particular assemblages of opportunities and networks and for which the future is unknown. In this paper, we examine the temporal orientation of young entrepreneurs and how they relate their entrepreneurial experiences to non-teleological temporality through prioritising meaningful, bearable and even hopeful everyday agency rather than orientation to ‘in order to intentions’ (Reiter, 2003).

Our account of the temporalities of entrepreneurship develops recent scholarship on the young people’s tuning to an entrepreneurial mind-set (Holdsworth, 2018; Ikonen and Nikunen, 2019; Oininen, 2018) through considering the temporalities of enterprise. We begin by outlining the relationship between the entrepreneurial self and scholarship on creativity and enterprise and how this can be related to scholarship on youth and time. We then present the analysis of 28 biographical narrative interviews with young entrepreneurs in the UK and Portugal that explores their orientations to entrepreneurship and how these are resolved through a commitment to making the everyday possible and investing themselves into their enterprise. The contribution of the paper is to establish an empirical basis for re-visioning the entrepreneurial self, not as the ubiquitous legitimising of economic rationality, but as a form of selfhood tuned through creative behaviours that are orientated to non-teleological agency, rather than calibrated by specific outcomes.

Enterprise and the entrepreneurial self

The appropriation of entrepreneurship as a political strategy for ‘fixing’ the challenges of youth unemployment assumes that it a self-evident activity and has relatively little to say about what entrepreneurship is. In contrast, in academic scholarship it is possible to encounter a range of concepts surrounding the notion of enterprise. At one end, it refers to business entrepreneurialism measured by economic activity and the potential to create jobs for others. At the other end, being enterprising is about the ability to be creative, to exercise initiative in order to solve problems (Cunningham and Lischeron, 1991; Gartner, 1988; Kirzner, 1997; Low, 2001; McKenzie et al., 2007; Obschonka and Silbereisen, 2012; Sarasvathy and Venkataraman, 2011; Shane and Venkataraman, 2000; Williams and Nadin, 2013). Entrepreneurship may, therefore, infer calculated economic behaviours orientated towards profit and business growth, or, following Schumpeter (1942), it can be associated with the capacity to be creative. As Schumpeter suggests this latter activity does not equate with acting according to rational economic criteria. Bringing new products or services to market involves taking risks that cannot be calibrated by economic rationality (Dahms, 1995). In response to debates in the literature on how to define entrepreneurship, scholarship has shifted towards emphasising creativity and the contexts that stimulate innovative activities. Creativity is not simply equated with individual inspiration but how it unfolds through particular assemblages of opportunities which include identification of new products or services and personal networks that facilitate bringing new ideas into actuality (Hjorth, 2004; Puhakka, 2012). Rather than focussing on individual characteristics and behaviours, this orientation towards creativity foregrounds a relational interpretation of how entrepreneurs respond to business opportunities through facilitating networks. Evoking entrepreneurship as a creative act can also reveal how it ‘plays the very role of creating disruptions and breaks with normalizing and regulating forces’ (Hjorth, 2005: 396) to bring about social change.

It is towards the interpretation of enterprise that foregrounds innovation, creativity and flexibility that the conceptualisation of the entrepreneurial self has been developed (Weiskopf, 2007). The capacity to be entrepreneurial is not assumed to be inherent but rather can be developed as a project of the self (Bröckling, 2015; Kelly, 2006, 2013). The conceptualisation of the entrepreneurial self is aligned to Foucault’s (1977) central claim of governmentality that the individual is not given but produced through technologies of power. Foucault’s (2008) later writings on biopolitics interpret governmentality not just as institutional forms of surveillance and discipline but as ‘broader analysis of what he calls the liberal “art of government”’ (Gane, 2012: 612). The entrepreneurial self is a managerial version of the governable person. It espouses the principle that self-development should cultivate ‘a form of personhood that sees individuals as being responsible for conducting themselves, in the business of life, as an enterprise, a project, a work in progress’ (Kelly, 2006: 18 emphasis in original). The entrepreneurial self can never be completed, as responsible individuals are called upon to be adaptable, flexible and open to change and to ‘enhance and capitalise on existence itself through calculated acts and investments’ (Rose, 1999: 164). Being entrepreneurial is not therefore calibrated by the rationality of profit-maximisation assumed in classical economics, but instead promotes the continual development of the working subject who is ‘portrayed (and prescribed) as being enthusiastic, and even passionate’ (Weiskopf, 2007: 142). The requirement to engage in the continual production of the entrepreneurial self through emotional commitment to enterprise equates with Foucault’s claim that the creation of oneself is a ‘work of art’ that evolves in a non-linear form (Weiskopf, 2007: 149).

This mode of existence is necessarily hypothetical as there are no clearly defined set of criteria through which the project of entrepreneurial self can be achieved (Bröckling, 2015; Martilla, 2013). Foucault’s claim for governmentality does not propose defined criteria of how life should develop as a work of art, but that this incitement is intended as a way of regulating the self. Empirical studies of young people reveal how they judge their own lives against the assumed aesthetics of entrepreneurial practice (Ikonen and Nikunen, 2019; Oininen, 2018). The governing of the self is not proscriptive and young people’s tuning into entrepreneurial aesthetics and practice embraces strategies for resistance as well as compliance. In particular, the hustle of entrepreneurship is calibrated by commitment to self-care to make the project of entrepreneurship manageable and bearable (Ikonen and Nikunen, 2019).

The entrepreneurial self and youth temporalities

One of the enduring challenges for youth researchers’ conceptualisation of time is that youth, as a time of liminality, simultaneously embraces both present and future. As Reiter argues the presence of the future in young people’s lives has stimulated teleological interpretations in which actions in the present are understood as ‘in order to intentions’ (Reiter, 2003). Studies of youth temporality have therefore focussed on if and how young people make future plans and how these are conditioned by prevailing social, economic and political contexts. In particular, the study of time and youth has developed through the lens of individualisation and risk and the extent to which it is possible for young people to make future plans and realise these (Brannen and Nilsen, 2005). As Cook (2015) describes, there are two main interpretations of how the precarity of youth transitions impacts on young people’s temporality. According to theories of individualisation (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002), the demise of structural traditions requires young people to take responsibility for their own futures and carve out their own transitions. In contrast, writing from the perspective of social acceleration, Rosa (2013) suggests that uncertainty generated by acceleration (both social change and the pace of life moves quickly) means that it becomes impossible for people to plan. From either perspective, young people experience the intensity of uncertainty brought about by the collapse of structured transitions (Woodman, 2009) and the acceleration of social life (Leccardi, 2012). As Cook (2015) finds for Australian youth, it is not possible to discern a singular youth temporality. The empirical evidence suggests a range of options between those who developed clearly articulated plans of the future and others for whom future planning remained unbearable. Differential future-orientations are also related to experiences of waiting. For example, Jeffrey (2010) examines the experiences of extreme waiting for young Indian men through the concept of ‘Timepass’ and Cuzzocrea (2019) investigates procrastinations of transitions to adulthood among Italian youth as experiences of ‘moratorium’. Quantitative and qualitative interpretations of ‘waiting’ are politically and culturally contingent and deeply embedded in institutional and social contexts (Baraister, 2017). The corpus of youth research that has developed around accounts of postponed, extended or yo-yo transitions to adulthood interjects a further dimension to temporality in which the future is dislocated from the present.

The particular interest of this study is to develop understanding of youth temporality through the lens of the entrepreneurial self to examine if and how young people’s tuning into this mindset further unsettles the assumption of teleological rationality. The expectation that the entrepreneur should create herself as a ‘work of art’ and to be open to a non-linear process of personal development and innovation evokes a lived present which signifies the future. Entrepreneurs innovate in response to opportunities around them. This emphasis on creativity foregrounds the fusion of present and future, though there remain competing interpretations of how this is realised (Korsgaard, 2013). On the one hand, creativity can be approached as a teleological process that emphasises how the creative process is orientated towards a particular outcome (Alvarez and Barney, 2007; Buenstorf, 2007). This interpretation aligns with quantitative analysis of entrepreneurial activities which finds that entrepreneurs are more goal-orientated (Przepiorka, 2016). In contrast to this goal-orientated approach, creativity can be theorised as innovating new products, services or behaviours, which emphasises the transformative nature of enterprise (Buchanan and Vanberg, 1991). The development of non-teleological economics advances a radical subjectivist paradigm in which the future is indeterminate and entrepreneurial activity unfolds over time rather than being oriented to a definable future goal (Lachmann, 1976; Zivdar and Imanipour, 2017). In contrast to a teleological approach for which the future is anticipated and knowable, from a non-teleological perspective, entrepreneurial activity is stimulated by uncertainty, rather than the certainty of achieving predetermined goals. If outcomes are accepted as unknown, orientation towards creativity is realised through activities in the present time, such as piloting ideas, developing networks of investors and clients, and bringing prototypes to market.

Developing a non-teleological approach to entrepreneurship does not infer that outcomes are insignificant, but suggests a rethink about how activities are related to outcomes. One way in which this can be reconceptualised is in relation to failure. Research on entrepreneurship identifies failure as a psychological factor that both inhibits and motivates entrepreneurial activity and this causal approach is essentially teleological (Cacciotti and Hayton, 2015). Yet failure does not have to be considered as a final outcome to be avoided, but rather as an essential and experiential learning experience (Cope, 2011; Politis and Gabrielsson, 2009). This mantra of ‘fail first’, that an entrepreneur can learn from her mistakes, softens the neo-liberal requirement of the necessity of failure as an inevitable outcome of competition. Through turning failure into a potential future success, failure is not considered to be a definitive final outcome. Early setbacks are celebrated as endorsement of the unique vision of the entrepreneur and how these individuals have succeeded because they learnt from early failures. Embracing failure and overcoming its fear has spawned a publishing frenzy of books on the challenges and opportunities of failure (see for example Hartford, 2011, Harvard Business Review Staff, 2011). The doctrine of ‘fail first’ also reveals the limitations of teleological rationality. In particular, a substantive critique of teleology is goal-failure, which is that actions do not necessarily result in their intended goal (Wright, 1968). Failure is not an intended outcome, and through turning it into a ‘success’, or at least a springboard for something new, it negates its status as an outcome.

While the notion of learning through failure unsettles the application of teleological rationality to the study of entrepreneurship, it does implicitly suggest that achieving future success is the main temporal orientation for entrepreneurs. Against this preoccupation with avoiding failure that dominates studies of enterprise from a business/management perspective, sociological studies of creativity and enterprise have explored how these are hopeful, rather than necessarily fearful, endeavours. In particular, Alacovska’s (2019) study of creative workers develops an account of hope as ‘an active moral practice oriented towards the present’ as well as an existential position. Her empirical study of creative workers draws attention to hope as a quality of mundane, everyday practices. But more than this she suggests that hope is not just a blunt manifestation of resilience, but an expression of ‘generating more generous and politicized alternatives to adaptability’ (p. 1133). Her study underlies the necessity of documenting the everyday experiences of entrepreneurship not just because these confirm the brutal force of governmentality but can equally reveal the hopeful potency of agency that resists the mantra of adaptability and the necessity of learning through failure. This resonates with empirical studies of young people’s orientations to an entrepreneurial mind-set, and how they attune to the necessity of maintaining everyday practices of self-care to mollify requirements of adaptability. Our empirical study probes the significance of everyday practices that foreground what is happening in the present among young entrepreneurs in Portugal and the UK.

Methodology

The data for this paper are taken from a project on youth entrepreneurship in Portugal and the UK funded by the European Union, through a Marie Curie Actions individual fellowship. The research was carried out from November 2014 to November 2016. The rationale for the research was to compare young people in different labour market contexts. The UK has lower youth unemployment (13.0% in 2016, OECD, 2016) but more developed formal support networks for young entrepreneurs. In comparison to other European youth, British young people are more likely to perceive that entrepreneurs generate beneficial products for all and create jobs (Eurofound, 2015). Portugal is characteristic of other Southern European countries in recording higher rates of youth unemployment (27.9% in 2016, OECD, 2016) and young self-employment compared to Northern Europe (e.g. Eurofound, 2015; Kelley et al., 2016).

The recruitment of participants followed a similar procedure in both countries. First, we explored and established contact with organisations that provided support to young entrepreneurs (e.g. entrepreneurship training programmes, business nests, incubators). Recruitment was carried out in the Metropolitan area of Porto in Portugal and in the North West and West Midlands regions of UK. Stakeholders who agreed to collaborate with the study were asked to participate in an interview and facilitate access to young entrepreneurs whom they supported. Following these stakeholder interviews, potential young participants were sent an invitation email with an information sheet about the study. Young entrepreneurs were reimbursed with a voucher worth £20 or 20€ (depending on the country). Additional young participants were also recruited directly via entrepreneurial events and activities. The definition of ‘young’ for this sample was 18 to 35. The ‘older’ upper age of 35 for recruiting the young participants was appropriate for this study as definitions of youth incorporate older ages in Southern Europe. In terms of entrepreneurial activity, we defined this as having established their own venture, this was not necessarily their only source of income and no criteria of economic profitability was used in this definition. The interviews with young people used a biographical approach, during which they were asked to tell their story about how and why they became entrepreneurs, and the interviews lasted between 45 minutes and 2 hours (Wengraf, 2001). This interview approach was used as it foregrounds participants’ own experiences and uses these to frame the subsequent interview, rather than relying on pre-determined questions or themes.

In total, we carried out 10 interviews with stakeholders and 28 biographical interviews with youth entrepreneurs in each country. Of the 28 interviews with young people, the sample consisted of 16 Portuguese young entrepreneurs and 12 British entrepreneurs. There is a gender bias in the sample with more men than women; 3 of the 16 Portuguese participants were women and 4 of the 12 British interviewees. The young people self-identified as entrepreneurs and were involved in a range of activities including social enterprise. Five and two members of the Portuguese and UK young people, respectively, were involved in social enterprises. Moreover, some respondents were working as employees and their entrepreneurial activities were not their only source of income.

For this paper, as we are interested in entrepreneurial experiences, we use the interviews with young people only. These interviews were analysed by repeated readings and identification of major themes and was carried out in the original language of each interview. In this paper, we present the analysis of how young people articulate the development of everyday entrepreneurial activities and how these are calibrated by three leitmotifs: commitment, freedom and failure. For this paper, we do not specifically compare the UK and Portuguese experiences, though this was the rationale for the original project. The justification for this approach is that our analysis of the temporalities of entrepreneurship did not reveal differences between young people in the two countries, rather we found similarities in the narratives, even accounting for the fact that the interviews were carried out in two different languages.

Analysis

Commitment

Although the interviews were carried out using a biographical approach and were not directed to pre-determined themes and questions, there are some topics that almost all respondents talked about, demonstrating how entrepreneurship is a shared and normative experience. One unifying theme that young people talked about is the expectation that they had to commit time to their ventures. References to ‘keep on going’ and working ‘24 hours’ were ubiquitous and we present short extracts from four interviews to illustrate the similarity in which the concept of ‘keep on going’ is evoked among British and Portuguese young people:

You have to build something. You have to do things. You have to go out there. You have to keep going, keep going, and keep going. Aidan UK –Tech start up

You’ve just literally got to keep going. It’s your positivity that keeps you going … for me it was sort of, like, you know, I’m going to keep going, I’m going to find more work and just get on with it. Lisa UK – Organic foodstore

It’s like, this is 24-hours, I can’t get out of here and stop thinking about it, right? I can’t wake up and not think about it. Gonçalo, Portugal – Online bikini store

because being an entrepreneur, as a rule, is working 24 hours, you may not be working physically in the company but you’re always thinking Tiago, Portugal –multiple enterprises.

This temporal commitment is developed in two ways. First is the commitment not to stop and calculate the effectiveness of entrepreneurial activities. As both Aidan and Lisa describe their commitment to ‘keep on going’ reveals the non-teleological orientation of starting a new venture, as what matters is to retain focus on developing the business, to keep on working and not be preoccupied about future goals but to focus on the task at hand. This form of commitment confirms a central claim of governmentality that the project of self-development is a continual process that never comes to an end (Weiskopf, 2007).

The second aspect of this temporal commitment is that it is all consuming. The claims for 24-hour working should not be taken literally; these young entrepreneurs were not spending all of their time at work, but felt as if they could not get away. Echoing Bröckling’s (2015) suggestion that the entrepreneurial self is a hypothetical force that is impossible to achieve in reality, our respondents endorsed the idea that the commitment to enterprise should be all encompassing. Even if not actually at work, as Tiago suggests they are thinking about enterprise. Tiago associates 24-hour commitment with preoccupation about problems that need to be resolved, as only he could respond to these. His continual focus on problem-solving is simultaneously draining and rewarding. Through identifying entrepreneurship as a continual commitment, respondents endorsed the heroic qualities of enterprise (Sørensen, 2008). One young British entrepreneur, Anna who is establishing a social enterprise, suggests the commitment to ‘keep on going’ demonstrates self-commitment, as the ‘only thing holding it back is your own mind’.

Temporal commitment is also associated with facilitating creativity. Rather than equating creativity with a time-limited definition of inspiration, commitment to enterprise enables the development of new products, as Natasha describes:

I’m lucky in that my business is so creative and I’ve got full control over what happens and what I do. I dream about something, I get up the next day and I make it. Natasha, UK – Online cosmetics store.

Commitment is not therefore equated with drudgery but is essential to realise young entrepreneurs’ creative aspirations. The capacity to be always working contributes to the opportunity nexus that facilities entrepreneurial innovation. What matters is being able to act on new ideas or solve problems and these challenges need to be addressed in the present and not procrastinated.

Young entrepreneurs’ commitment to invest in themselves through dedicating time to business projects contrasts with their attitude to investing money. For the most part, young people were more reluctant to invest financially in new ventures or risk getting into debt. Lack of financial investment was a reality for most young entrepreneurs who did not have any capital to invest. Not being home owners they have no equity to put against a loan nor have they been able to save up significant savings. The main sources of financial aid include parents as well as the small amount of money that can be leveraged through start-up grants. The lack of financial investment also endorses the necessity of investing time, as Jonas describes:

Yes, in terms of we’ll start with financial. It doesn’t take a huge financial gain to set up a business. It may be useful, but there are ways of doing it without having that financial push, and it’s just about finding a solution to do that. And I think in modern day life, time becomes a factor setting up a business Jonas, UK – Multiple enterprises.

Young entrepreneurs were reluctant to invest money without a sense of what this would achieve. One British respondent, Ben who at the age of 19 has set up a business recycling mobile phones, referred to the behaviour of throwing money at a business as ‘clinging onto barbed wire’. The absence of capital to invest in a new venture is not a limitation for young entrepreneurs, as financial capital could be replaced with personal commitment. The trade-off between time and money reinforces the need for young entrepreneurs to dedicate themselves to a non-teleological endorsement to ‘keep on going’.

Freedom

A second generic theme related to time in the interviews is freedom, which corresponds with the celebrated quality of entrepreneurial activity to engender autonomy. The well-rehearsed mantra of neoliberalism is that the calibration of social and economic activities by the market allows for more personal and business freedom (Davies, 2014). Not surprisingly we find the mantra of individual freedom to have the time to do what they want to do repeated throughout the young entrepreneurs’ accounts, as Francisco and Josh describe:

Because for me to have freedom, it’s not every day, but for me to have the freedom to, today I come home and say: I’m tired, I really feel like going out for dinner … it doesn’t matter, with what my income is, it’s critical for my quality of life. I think one of the things I value the most is my freedom. Francisco, Portugal – Tech start up.

It’s more fun, I’m in control of everything, which means that, like, I don’t need to worry about other people’s… like, I’m not following what other people think is best, I get to do what I think is best, which I guess is, kind of, the same thing, of choosing my own hours and, yes, it’s, kind of, fun to be in charge of stuff, because I can do things that other people wouldn’t ordinarily do. Josh, UK – Tech start up.

Freedom is equated with creativity and having the time to develop new ideas. But it is also associated with the ideal of resisting the tedium of everyday routines. Josh for example contrasts the freedom of thinking for himself as an entrepreneur with being an employee where he had to follow what other people thought and did. This included arriving at work at nine in the morning.

There are though important limitations to this endorsement of personal freedom. The freedom that young entrepreneurs buy into is having control over their everyday life. Being able to do what you want and when is easier to achieve if you do not have to take other people’s interests and commitments into account. However, running a business venture depends on other people. An important dimension of entrepreneurial freedom is that it is not just about doing your own thing, but also about maintaining business networks. As Tiago discusses setting up your own enterprise might in theory make you the boss, but it also requires that you have to respond to many more bosses who are your clients:

Another factor that we naturally take into account but that sometimes backfires, is the issue of freedom. I think there is too much freedom of decision, meaning, to be an entrepreneur… So it's a bit of a fallacy the issue of freedom, because you actually no longer have a boss and you have 50, 100 or 200 that are clients. Tiago Portugal - multiple enterprises.

If we add to this list the other co-dependents that are involved in a business, from those who lend money or facilities to those who give support, particularly family members, the reality is that establishing a new venture requires assembling, maintaining and responding to complex networks (Puhakka, 2012). Entrepreneurs might evade the drudgery of the nine-to-five, but their everyday practices revolve around continually developing and maintaining these relationships. In the absence of the hierarchical structure of an organisation, individual entrepreneurs have to simultaneously respond to multiple bosses and as such their sense of personal freedom is calibrated by how they work with others (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005). Developing entrepreneurial orientations is essentially about being responsible and this is achieved not just through self-control but through relationships with others.

There is a second way in which commitment to ongoing entrepreneurial activity curtails individual freedom. While young entrepreneurs were eager to describe their temporal commitment to their ventures, they recognised that this was achieved by putting other aspects of their lives on hold. There is therefore a duality between engaged activity and moratorium among these youth entrepreneurs (Cuzzocrea, 2019). Among our respondents, becoming an entrepreneur is facilitated by delaying, or even reversing, other key stages in the transition to adulthood, such as leaving home to establish an independent household and/or start a family. In the UK, this is more closely identified with living at home; in Portugal, it is associated with abstaining from leisure activities associated with young adulthood, as Aidan and Vasco describe:

I kept going and stayed at home rather than move out, even though I was desperate to move out. So I stayed at home, saved money, used that to get the coders in, and things like that. You've got to struggle quite a bit. It's not the easiest thing, moving back to my house. Aidan, UK –Tech start up.

And the part about having to give up a lot in our lives. In my case, at 19, I shouldn’t be doing any of this. I should be studying, going out at night with friends. Having that sort of life, and not this life of always being everywhere. Travelling everywhere. I can’t study. I don’t have enough sleep. I can’t go out at night. I can’t be with my friends. So this is part of the life that we leave aside. Vasco, Portugal – social entrepreneur.

We can reflect on what this means for the entrepreneurial self. There are trade-offs between investing oneself into a business that necessitates taking fewer risks in other ways, for example living at home or not spending time and money going out with friends. This messy, complex relationship between autonomy and enterprise is more than simply balancing the assumed freedom to become one’s own boss against having to put some aspects of life on hold. The sleight of hand of the entrepreneurial self is that it decentres the individual, being responsible for innovation limits the capacity for young entrepreneurs to enrich their existence beyond the confines of the enterprise. It is simply not possible for young people to be entrepreneurial in all aspects of their lives.

Failure

A third generic temporal theme that all respondents talked about in relation to their enterprise was the risk of future failure. Participants engaged with the belief that they should be prepared to learn from their failure rather than be fearful (Hill and Hlavacek, 1977), as both Gonçalo and Emma describe:

Now, I’m not afraid of failure, ok, my perspective is the more I fail, the closer to success I will be, right? That's math, it’s statistics Gonçalo, Portugal – Social entrepreneur.

I think sometimes you need to learn from mistakes, learn from failures and then let that, kind of, shape your next step. Emma, UK – Developing skincare products.

While on face value these young people appear to endorse the myth of success through failure, their orientation towards future failure is more nuanced. While recognising the possibility that their current investment might fail and they might have to walk away and stop ‘keep on going’, the possibility that this might happen was negated through focussing on what they were doing in the present. If young people focus on what they are doing now and do this well rather than worrying about the future, this orientates them towards success in the future, as George suggests:

I think if you worried about failure you just stop thinking about how you do things well, whereas if you just concentrate on how you do things well and how you want to do them better in the future, then your failure avoids itself. George UK - Gin Distillery.

Hence, rather than simply accepting the rhythm of moving on from one investment or project to another, some young entrepreneurs endorsed the non-teleological orientation that through focussing on doing well in the present, failure becomes a non-outcome.

Discussion

The experiences of and attitudes towards commitment, freedom and failure of young entrepreneurs in Portugal and the UK are broadly similar. The two countries have different labour market structures, which are less favourable for young people in Portugal, and as a consequence Portuguese participants were more likely to acknowledge the necessity of setting up their own business due to limited employment options. The repetition of key themes throughout the sample of young entrepreneurs in both countries illustrates the normative force of the entrepreneurial self that creates a credible fiction of how young people should engage with the project of entrepreneurship and self-responsibility (Bröckling, 2015).

Young entrepreneurs in this sample associated entrepreneurship with creativity and problem-solving (Puhakka, 2012) rather than risk-taking. Their experiences correspond with the development of entrepreneurship scholarship that focuses on activities and the opportunity nexus that facilitates the initiation of new ventures, rather than equating entrepreneurship with the unique characteristics of the entrepreneur (Gartner, 1988; Shane and Venkataraman, 2000; Venkataraman, 1997). For the most part, they endorsed the expectation that anyone could become an entrepreneur. Participants reject the view that entrepreneurship is an inherent quality but associate it with dedication and commitment. This is not to say that they completely disavowed the unique experiences of being an entrepreneur as they did compare themselves with peers in salaried positions. The focus of this comparison was mostly related to practical issues about the working day, opportunities to engage in non-work related activities and housing choices. Young people articulated this commitment of time through the metaphor of sacrifice, and this appeal to the heroic qualities of entrepreneurship justifies their commitment (Sørensen, 2008).

One of the most consistent themes in the narratives of entrepreneurship was the necessity of commitment and reluctance to take financial risks, and these two were often articulated together: invest time rather than money. This commitment of time also evades the possibility that young entrepreneurs might stop to make a judgement about whether their investment is worthwhile. The mantra of ‘keep on going’ was not calibrated with reference to defined goals, and in the interviews participants did not discuss how they could use economic criteria to assess the success or otherwise of their enterprise. Their engagement was focussed through a non-teleological ethos that what matters is what they are doing in the present moment rather than be concerned about an unknown future (Buchanan and Vanberg, 1991). This commitment to ‘keep on going’ emphasised the significance of the everyday not as mundane but as vitalist, emergent and energetic.

Committing oneself to a venture is simultaneously associated with freedom. While young entrepreneurs bought into the heroic ideal of 24-hour commitment, they also endorsed the mantra that they have more flexibility over when they worked. This celebrated everyday, temporal autonomy was calibrated by restrictions in other aspects of their personal lives and the metaphor of ‘sacrifice’. Their commitment to non-teleological experiences is facilitated through delaying or reversing other dimensions of the transition to adulthood (Settersten and Ray, 2010). For example, living in the parental home and not pursuing more personal aspects of youth transitions. The expectation that young people need to be entrepreneurial and constantly develop the self as a project may limit young people’s ability to invest in other aspects of the transition to adulthood, particularly around housing. This suggests a further interpretation to the concept of ‘waithood’ for young people (Cuzzocrea, 2019). Young entrepreneurs are not putting off the responsibility of adulthood through focussing their everyday agency on entrepreneurial practices. They do though feel unable to engage in other structural dimensions of youth transition (e.g. housing) or the freedom of leisure and spending time with friends. Their experience of waithood can be equated with resilience as young people are limiting the personal and financial fallout if their ventures fail.

This non-teleological pledge to focus on the present also influences young entrepreneurs’ orientation towards failure. While they acknowledged the potential experiential learning opportunities of failure, the young entrepreneurs in this study rejected the future-orientated overtones of learning through failure (Cope, 2011). They did not endorse the belief that they have to fail to prove themselves, but that they could avoid failure through getting their activities right in the present. Rather than fearing failure or buying into the machismo celebration of ‘fail first’, they remained hopeful that their commitment to focussing on the present would nullify future failure.

Conclusion

The conceptualisation of the entrepreneurial self is essentially abstract. It is not a practice that can be easily realised but rather represents an ideal of how the self can be calibrated in late modernity. Research with young entrepreneurs provides an opportunity to empirically contextualise how young people respond to the promotion of entrepreneurship, not just in its strict economic form, but also as a way of contouring the self. This research illustrates that as entrepreneurship becomes more widely enfranchised, it inevitably takes on new forms. Among the young entrepreneurs who we spoke to, some were more motivated by the need to secure financial success, but achieving economic goals was not a unifying theme. What was common is the realisation that setting up a business is a project of the self, which is realised through the hustle of intensive, everyday commitment. Theirs is not an everyday of mundane routine but one of continual activity to realise the potential of creativity in the present. This focus on getting it right in the here and now and channelling energy into keeping the venture going encompasses hopeful aspirations that their ventures will eventually flourish. Intensive commitment can, therefore, subtly resist the requirement for the entrepreneur to be continually open, adaptable and flexible to the possibility of new ventures.

By its very nature, young entrepreneurship is nascent and as such cannot be easily measured against measures of economic success, and it does readily correspond to a non-teleological rationality, emphasising the creative potential of developing enterprise against an unknowable future. The extent to which this is applicable to entrepreneurship across the life course needs further consideration. It is though reasonable to assume that the future does not become more knowable over the life course. As Lachmann writes, ‘all economic action is of course concerned with the future, the more or less distant future. But the future is to all of us unknowable, though not unimaginable’ (1976: 55). This certainly corresponds to the experiences of youth entrepreneurship encountered here. Young people articulate what they would like to achieve out of their enterprise, which is their imagined future. How they measure their progress in moving themselves towards this imagined future is related to how they are achieving in the present, not to specific outcomes tied to an unknowable future. Their futures are not fantasies but are imagined in relation to current activities. Thus, while orientations towards time always shape economic action, the assumption that entrepreneurship develops through defined goal-orientations does not correspond to the experiences revealed through this research. The development of non-teleological interpretations of entrepreneurship will be particularly pertinent as enterprise becomes more widely enfranchised, particularly among young people.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the young entrepreneurs in the UK and Portugal who took the time to take part in this research project. We would also like to thank Simon Pemberton and the three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and helpful comments.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This paper was supported by the European Commission under Grant Number PIEF-GA-2013-625889 as part of the Marie Curie Actions—Intra-European Fellowships (IEF) Scheme.

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