Abstract
Through a consideration of the Singapore government’s moves to encourage citizens to create innovative, high-technology enterprises—or to become ‘technopreneurs’—this essay looks at how government efforts to promote innovation, can articulate with prevailing national and social imaginaries, in ways that reshape notions of citizenship and nationhood and that have potential ramifications for the kinds of risks and burdens that citizens can be asked to bear. I show, specifically, how the new value of innovation is being incorporated into Singapore’s older narrative of national survival in a way that changes this narrative’s mode of emplotment from one of comedy to one of satire. Through this shift, promises of collective prosperity and progress, which are integral to the nation’s founding era of industrial manufacturing-based development, are withdrawn, while new notions of individual and financial risk and reward are introduced. I argue that attending to modes of emplotment may be a useful way to identify the broader entailments of different governments’ innovation policies and programmes.
Introduction
Government organisations in Singapore have, since the early 2000s, been engaged in a national-scale effort to encourage citizens to eschew the ‘traditional’ ideal of a stable, nine-to-five job and instead aspire and endeavour to make themselves into technologically savvy and innovative entrepreneurs. Numerous government investment schemes, programmes and grants have been implemented to entice and equip younger citizens, in particular, to try their hand at creating novel, digital technology-based startups—or at becoming what popular parlance now calls a ‘technopreneur’—in order to help both themselves and their country to stay ‘relevant’ and competitive in a future global economy, characterised by constantly ‘disruptive’ industrial, commercial and financial innovation. At both the administrative and discursive levels, the Singapore government has been at work, promoting technologically innovative entrepreneurship as something, which has become increasingly essential to the individual citizen’s economic viability as well as the nation’s economic ‘survival’.
These initiatives, which are underway in Singapore, are similar to those being undertaken by many other national governments across the world, which are responding to the way that new technologies and applications are transforming industries and refiguring commerce, by ramping up their efforts to nurture and promote business and industry-related innovation. The array of innovation policies and programmes being implemented in different countries, under varying political, economic and infrastructural conditions and with varying degrees of success, has become the subject of an extensive body of scholarly literature—arguably constituting a new field of ‘innovation studies’, which is distinct from the more general study of science and technology (Fagerberg, Fosaas, & Sapprasert, 2012; Martin, 2012). One important aspect of the emergence of innovation as a national policy priority, which has not been commonly examined in the field of innovation studies, however, and which older branches of Science and Technology Studies remain well-placed to take up, is the question of how government efforts to promote innovation are articulating with different national imaginaries. That is, how national investments in innovation do not only impact research and development activities, but also grow entangled with popular understandings of what nationhood entails, and of what the relation between the nation and its citizens consists in, in ways that can more broadly influence prevailing forms of social and political life.
STS scholars have shown how research and development in science and technology both influence, and are influenced by, the imaginaries of the communities they pertain to (Fortun & Fortun, 2008; Jasanoff & Kim, 2009, 2013, 2015; Kelty, 2008; Marcus, 1995). Jasanoff and Kim, in particular, have argued that the ‘collectively imagined forms of social life and social order’, which emerge in relation to nation-specific science and technology projects, may usefully be conceptualised as ‘national sociotechnical imaginaries’ (Jasanoff & Kim, 2009, p. 120). They argue that these imaginaries influence concrete decisions—about state investments and public expenditures, about what constitutes permissible conduct for citizens and what demands citizens may legitimately make of the state—through the way that they ‘encode and reinforce particular conceptions of what a nation stands for’ (Jasanoff & Kim, 2009, p. 120). National sociotechnical imaginaries, they write, ‘shape not only the narrow issues surrounding those specific enterprises, but also wider social and political understandings about a nation’s past, present and future’ (Jasanoff & Kim, 2009, p. 124). Through their influence on such narratives of nationhood, sociotechnical imaginaries shape the concrete and material forms of life that emerge and coevolve with them.
This article builds on Jasanoff and Kim’s argument by analysing the figure of the technopreneur in Singapore as the site of a newly emergent national sociotechnical imaginary; a site where government efforts to promote business and industry-related innovation are articulating with—being shaped by, and shaping—particular conceptions of Singapore’s nationhood. Where Jasanoff and Kim have focussed primarily on how sociotechnical imaginaries relate to a nation’s specifically political culture, influencing its practices and forms of democracy and dissent, however, I look at how the figure of the technopreneur may be contributing to the shaping of a broader form of governmentality in Singapore—leading citizens to conduct themselves as new kinds of subjects, with ramifications that are at once and inseparably social, economic and political.
I set out to do so by looking at how the emergent imaginary both draws on and modifies the dominant narrative of Singapore’s nationhood, altering the form of collective life that the nation of Singapore is described as instantiating. Drawing from Hayden White’s (1973) analysis of narrative structures, I argue that the figure of the technopreneur changes the established narrative’s mode of ‘emplotment’. A mode of emplotment, for White, is a way of organising facts to give them the structure of a story. Through the rise of the technopreneur, I argue that the story of Singapore’s nationhood shifts from one which was emplotted in what White refers to as a mode of ‘comedy’ to one which bears a closer resemblance to what he calls a mode of ‘satire’. In and by effecting this change, I suggest that government efforts to encourage and promote innovation in Singapore are redrawing imagined relations between the nation and its citizens in ways that may have concrete ramifications for the kinds of socio-economic goals that citizens can be induced to pursue as well as the levels of socio-economic risk that they can be made to bear.
Besides offering an empirical case-study of innovation in Singapore, this article thus seeks also to present a methodological demonstration of how the study of government-led innovation projects may be enriched by attending to the narratives of nationhood they entail and to the modes of emplotment, which these narratives are characterised by. I seek to show how this approach can be useful for discerning the way that such projects may not only impact a nation’s capacity for innovation, but also entail changes to the notions of individual and collective being that the idea of the nation is imbued with; the kinds of work, and forms of endeavour that its government institutions are inclined to recognise and reward and hence, the kinds of dispositions and rationalities that these institutions posit and work to foster in citizens.
This article is organised as follows. I begin with an overview of the efforts to promote technopreneurship being undertaken by the Singapore government and by the education and media institutions that follow its lead. I show how these diverse initiatives can be seen as the elements of a new sociotechnical imaginary, which builds on, and seeks to extend, the narrative of Singapore’s existence and ‘survival’ as a nation that was established during its founding period of manufacturing-based economic development. Whereas the established narrative is emplotted in a mode of comedy, however, I explore three features of the figure of the technopreneur that work to shift this narrative’s mode of emplotment closer to that of satire. These features are the technopreneur’s definition of ‘success’, her attitude towards stable employment and her vision of the global future. Finally, I conclude the essay by reflecting on what such a shift in narrative modes may tell us about how government efforts to promote innovation in Singapore are articulating with and modifying established notions of citizenship and nationhood as well as what this case study suggests about how current approaches to the study of national innovation policies may be fruitfully broadened.
The Emergent Imaginary of the Technopreneur
Ever determined to anticipate and adapt to global trends and developments that are likely to affect its economy (Clancey, 2012), Singapore’s government has since the early 2000s maintained that as new technologies transform businesses and industries at an ever quicker pace, it has become increasingly essential for Singapore to produce more technologically and commercially innovative enterprises in order to remain an economically viable and prosperous country. In 2010, the government-commissioned Economic Strategies Committee listed the increased and accelerated creation and development of such enterprises as a key strategy for sustaining Singapore’s economic growth over the following decade. To this end, the Committee recommended that the younger generation of citizens, in particular, be encouraged to pursue technopreneurial careers, through university programmes that aimed at ‘cultivating and training entrepreneurs’ and other initiatives that used ‘the education system to inculcate a mindset for innovation amongst young Singaporeans’ (2010, p. 25; emphasis in original). The Committee also recommended making policies to attract incubators, patent agents and start-up mentors to Singapore, to teach new and aspiring entrepreneurs how to develop and scale-up their businesses. The 2017 follow-up report, authored by a purpose-convened Committee on the Future Economy, built upon these earlier recommendations to propose that Singapore strives to become ‘a startup and innovation capital’ (2017, p. 15). It recommended that the government encourage the creation of new enterprises, particularly in high technology industries by taking measures to provide seed funding and help start-ups gain access to networks, mentors, technology and further financial investments.
In line with these recommendations, many government offices have developed programmes to nurture and support technopreneurialism. The Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI), for example, created and runs SPRING Singapore and International Enterprise, as ‘enterprise development agencies’ that provide grants, informational and professional services to help local startups grow and internationalise. MTI also created the Action Community for Entrepreneurship (which has since been privatised) ‘to help startups and promote youth entrepreneurship’ (ACE, 2017). This organisation’s self-designated missions include ‘reach[ing] out to schools and youths to support their entrepreneurial efforts’ and helping entrepreneurs turn their ideas into business by providing them with resources, networks, mentorships and access to overseas opportunities. Technopreneurship grants and develop ment programmes are also offered by the government’s Infocomm Media Development Authority, which encourages citizens to create information technology-related enterprises, particularly in the emerging areas of cloud services, data analytics and cybersecurity. Still, other government programmes that do not directly promote technopreneurship, but contribute to creating a conducive environment for its development, include the Smart Nation initiative, which facilitates collaborations between public and private sector actors, aimed at creating digital solutions to Singapore’s urban infrastructural and logistical problems; GovTech, an organisation that focusses on improving government and administrative offices’ digital services and SkillsFuture, a programme launched by the Ministry of Manpower, to help citizens adapt to changing work and employment demands by funding their enrolment in retraining and skills upgrading courses.
Following this lead from the government sector, many research and educational institutions have also become active in working to nurture and support technopreneurs by running training and exposure programmes, organising workshops and networking events and providing workspaces and other business support services. The National University of Singapore (NUS), for example, has created an office, named NUS Enterprise, which organises exchange programmes in places which it has identified as ‘leading entrepreneurial hotspots’, such as Silicon Valley and Israel and runs a start-up incubator, named Block71, with branches in Singapore, San Francisco, Jakarta and Suzhou (NUS, 2018). The recently established Singapore University of Technology and Design, meanwhile, has made the cultivation of technologically innovative industry leaders one of its core educational missions and built industry-oriented design and entrepreneurship modules into its main curriculum.
Government officials, executives and other spokesmen for these organisations speak tirelessly of high-tech innovation and enterprise as something that Singapore citizens must do to ensure that their nation will be able to survive in the global economy of the future. Ministers continuously tell local companies how new technologies are driving the creation of new business models around the world and urge them to realise that they too will have to come up with new ways to stay competitive ‘no matter how painful it is, or risk being left behind’ (Lee, 2015). Members of Parliament tell citizens how the future will see technological advances redefining their jobs, economies and lives, in shorter and shorter cycles and implore them to see how ‘a spirit of innovation’ has thus become ‘crucial for Singapore’s survival’ (Lim, 2016). Educators, consultants and journalists reproduce and embellish these claims by telling citizens of the younger generation that while the future economy will no longer guarantee stable employment, it will reward risk-taking entrepreneurs and calling on them to adapt to this fact by daring to veer off the beaten track and create new businesses that offer something ‘different’ (Oh, 2016).
Taken together, this welter of government-led policies, programmes, grants and discourses promoting technopreneurship can be seen as the elements of what Jasanoff and Kim refer to as a national sociotechnical imaginary. This imaginary describes a global future in which capital flows are constantly being diverted to the industries and businesses that serve them best and thus, prescribes a national future in which citizens are constantly working to keep Singapore’s economy thriving by creating newer, more technologically innovative and hence, more commercially profitable enterprises. It is ‘instrumental and futuristic’ (Jasanoff & Kim, 2009, p. 123)—projecting a vision of a Singapore that enables its citizens to acquire the skills and dispositions that they need to become innovative and successful technopreneurs such that they will, in turn, work as technopreneurs to keep globally mobile capital streams flowing through Singapore, enabling its economy keep growing. The government’s anticipation of a global economy characterised by continuous technological disruption and its corollary goal of a becoming a national economy that is able to harness and thrive under such conditions are thus articulated, through the figure of the technopreneur, in such a way as to ‘create the political will or public resolve to attain’ (Jasanoff & Kim, 2009, p. 123) this goal.
It is important to see how this particular rendering of the nation and its future builds on—and modifies—the already established and largely dominant narrative of Singapore’s nationhood, which was constructed and popularised during the early decades of its development as an export-oriented manufacturing economy. This narrative told of Singapore being a nation that survived on the willingness and ability of its citizens to make their country’s economy attractive to foreign capital by making themselves into the kind of workforce that foreign businesses and investors would put money in. Building on the widespread acceptance of this national story, the sociotechnical imaginary of the technopreneur seeks to extend the narrative by framing technopreneurship as simply being the new kind of work that Singapore’s citizens must now engage in to maintain their country’s economic survival or to extend its economic success into the technologically more advanced, innovative and disruption-laden future that awaits. I argue, however, that the particular outlook or disposition towards others, which the good and exemplary technopreneur is figured as having, leads to a shift occurring in the nature of this narrative, even as it is extended. In Hayden White’s terms, the emergent figure of the technopreneur changes the mode in which the narrative of Singapore’s national survival is emplotted, from one of comedy to one of satire. To show how this extension and transformation comes about, I first turn to a closer examination of the established national narrative.
The Comedic Narrative of Singapore’s Survival
When the small Island city of Singapore was expelled from Malaysia in 1965 and forced to become an independent national economy, its government adapted to its changed circumstances by developing what has since been called an ‘ideology of survival’, supported by a professed commitment to ‘pragmatism’ (Chua, 1995, pp. 18–19; also Chan, 1971; Tan, 2012). The country’s charismatic founding Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, promulgated the view that the only way for such a small country, with so few natural resources, to become viable as an independent nation, was for its government and its people to set all cultural and ideological differences aside and forge a common determination to do whatever was practically best for the country’s economic development.
In line with its export-oriented manufacturing-based development strategy, Lee’s government argued that what Singapore’s economy needed was for its citizens to transform themselves into a highly skilled and disciplined workforce, which could attract business and investments from foreign companies and investors. Framing the hard work and sacrifice that this transformation demanded from individual citizens as a necessary condition for their continued existence as a nation and a people, the government illegalised strikes, subordinated trade unions and instituted pro-business labour conditions. Popular discontent over these measures was strictly suppressed and uniformly countered by the insistence that ‘any process that contributed to economic growth was therefore ‘practical’, indeed ‘necessary’ for the survival of the nation’ (Chua, 1995, p. 19).
The high level of continuous socio-economic development that was achieved in Singapore over the following decades—reflected in such areas as public housing, healthcare, education and infrastructure, and branded by Lee as the nation’s triumphal leap ‘from third world to first’ (Lee, 2000)—has since worked to lend credence to this claim. It has given purchase to the story of Singapore as a nation and a people, who have secured a stable and prosperous existence for themselves by doing what they had to, to make their economy attractive to global business and investment capital. The narrative of nationhood, which the government continues to adhere to and which has remained widely accepted among citizens, is thus of Singapore as a country that, against the odds, has survived and thrived by the willingness of its people to conform to the demands, which their country’s position in the global economy makes upon them. It is the story of a country that has prospered and progressed by its citizens having worked to make themselves into the kind of workers that global capital values and remunerates.
Approached from the angle of its narrative structure, this story of Singapore’s nationhood can be seen to be emplotted in what Hayden White would have identified as a mode of comedy. Comedy, in White’s use of the term, does not refer to the quality of humour or jest, as in its colloquial usage. Rather, the comedic mode of emplotment is one in which the facts are organised into a story of collective or societal integration. The comedic narrative begins with an array of disparate actors, who struggle through adversities, which end in their transformation into a morally and sentimentally unified whole. Individuals’ sufferings are subsumed within and redeemed by their collective achievement of a state of universal betterment. Comedies, White writes, end in ‘reconciliations of men (sic) with men, of men with their world and their society; the condition of society is represented as being purer, saner, and healthier as a result of the conflict’ (1973, p. 9). The tribulations and hardships that were suffered by each are rendered meaningful and worthwhile when they are eventually revealed to have been ‘the means to the establishment of the social order which is finally achieved’ (1973, p. 190) and which constitutes a qualitatively better state of existence for all.
The established narrative of Singapore’s nationhood is comedic in the sense that it organises the hard work and sacrifices of its individual citizens, into a story of their transformation into, and progress as a unified nation. Citizens, in this story are called on to overcome their self-centred impulses and give themselves over to the needs of the national economy by making themselves into the skilled and disciplined workforce that it needs to attract foreign capital. The hardships and sacrifices, which this brings upon the individual, are narratively constructed as the means to their collective progress from a state of socio-economic underdevelopment, where indigence and insecurity prevailed, to a state of modern development, where their stability and well-being would be assured.
If the nation can be understood, qua Benedict Anderson (1983), as an ‘imagined community’ or a community whose members relate to one another by way of the ideas and sentiments that they have about the greater whole to which they all belong, this narrative can be seen as one that encourages citizens to regard themselves as individuals who are bound to one another by their common investment in and common enjoyment of a more socio-economically developed future. It fosters a sense of Singapore’s citizens being members of a single socio-economic whole and encourages citizens to conduct themselves and relate to one another in faith and with confidence that their individual well-being will be improved by the socio-economic advancement of this whole to which they all belong. In framing the work of the technopreneur as the work that Singapore’s citizens must do to maintain their country’s economic success or extend it into the dawning era of technology and innovation-driven global economics, the sociotechnical imaginary of the technopreneur draws on and projects this notion of the nation as a socio-economic whole into the future. Yet, to be a good or effective technopreneur, I suggest in the next section, involves adopting an outlook, which runs counter to this holistic conception and which works to shift the narrative of national survival away from a comedic mode, towards a mode that is closer to what White has called satire.
The Technopreneur and the Shift Towards Satire
Satire, in White’s usage, also differs from the colloquial meaning of the term, in that it refers not to the quality of parody, but to a narrative structure in which the individual actors’ tribulations do not end in and are not redeemed by the achievement of any form of integration or collectivity. The satire, White writes, is ‘a drama of diremption’ (White, 1973, p. 9) or separation. Human individuals, in such narratives, are framed as being divided from one another by nature and incapable of overcoming this ontological fact. Any yearning on the part of the individual actor for a less solipsistic form of existence is thus bound to be disappointed for ‘all apparent communities [turn out to be mere] delusions’ (White, 1973, p. 239). The human condition is represented as, in essence and immutably, the condition of being ‘irredeemably cut off from other individuals, whom we are able to contemplate only as contending wills’ (White, 1973, p. 241).
Because no collective form of existence is possible, in the narrative structure of satire, no universal or lasting kind of progress can be conceived of as much less achieved. Change occurs, but leads to ‘nothing developing’ and to ‘no progressive evolution’ (White, 1973, p. 230). The individual’s passage through time thus becomes not only a solitary journey, but also one which is characterised by no permanent or definitive transformations from which any sense of meaning can be derived. Life is ‘all transition’ (White, 1973, p. 246)—it draws the individual from one arbitrary arrangement to another without ever bearing fruit in a qualitative or meaningful form of progress.
When we examine the specific outlooks and dispositions, which the good or exemplary technopreneur is figured as having, we see that they are premised on a conception of the individual’s condition and of their relation to others, which closely resembles that which is given by this narrative structure. This resemblance is rooted in the fact that the economic endeavour of the technopreneur no longer posits a world in which capital is drawn to and remains with people who constitute themselves as a unified and disciplined workforce; but rather, presupposes one in which capital flows run quickly and fickly to every newer and more potentially profitable business to emerge. The exemplary technopreneur, consequently, can no longer relate to others as the members of a unified industrial collective, who share a common social and economic fate; but rather, must regard them as so many unassociated and divergently bound individuals. While the underlying narrative remains, one in which the nation of Singapore survives by its citizens’ ability to adapt to and attract global capital, the relation among citizens, which is presupposed, thus changes from one of progressive integration to one of unremitting dissociation. The condition of the citizen, correspondingly, changes from one of hard work and sacrifice, which is redeemed in and by the attainment of progress and security to one of thoroughly individual ventures, or gambles, which—whether or not they pay off in economic returns—will only result in further endeavours and renewed tribulations.
A look at the following three attributes of the good or exemplary technopreneur will show how such a shift comes about.
The Technopreneurial Definition of ‘Success’
In the manufacturing-based narrative of national survival, ‘success’ was portrayed as a thoroughly collective phenomenon. It was a process of individual citizens transcending the divisions of race and culture to commit to a common cause, dedicating their labours to it and eventually being uplifted as one people by the fruits of this collective endeavour. An illustrative symbol of this idea was the mascot from 1982 to 1999 of the National Productivity Board’s campaign to increase workforce efficiency, Teamy the Productivity Bee (see image). A racially unmarked hive member, the worker bee works hard and happily at the particular task before her, confident in the knowledge that all her fellow bees are doing the same and that together, their efforts will serve to enrich and ensure the perpetuation of their hive. This was both the disposition that Singapore’s manufacturing-based economy demanded of its workforce and that which the developmental nation demanded of its people. With his motto, ‘Together, We’ll Succeed’, Teamy was thus able to represent both the ideal worker and the ideal citizen in a ‘a drama of consummation, fulfillment, and ideal order’ (White, 1973, p. 190) that saw individual lives become unified in and by their common perseverance and collective transformation of themselves from a third world ‘backwater’ (Shen & Lee, 2015) into a first world nation.
For the technopreneur, however, ‘success’ is by definition a highly individual and individualising event. This is because the effective technopreneur is not someone who falls in with the group and submits to its demands, but someone who thinks and works differently from everyone else around her. Recognising that tomorrow’s capital flows will not run to the most disciplined workforce or the most unified people, but to whoever who can create, own and sell a newer and more profit-making idea, she strives not to subordinate her individual efforts to the call of the collective’s endeavours, but to come up with unique innovations that ‘succeed’ by making her uniquely wealthy.
This is the portrait that is commonly painted in the laudatory profiles or technopreneurial ‘success stories’ that are published in the mainstream media. The technopreneur is figured as a non-conformist by nature, who is driven to go against conventions and take risks that others would not take—and who ‘succeeds’ when the company she has created is invested in or bought over for millions of dollars. One report on a pair of graduates from NUS Enterprise’s Overseas College programme, who created and sold a software start-up, Zopim, for almost US$ 30 million, for instance, rudely introduces them as ‘both 32 and multimillionaires’ (Davies, 2015). It tells of how ‘bubbling with ideas and wanting to do their own thing’, they turned away from conventionally coveted jobs and after a period of struggling to turn their vision into a viable business found themselves wealthier than they had ever ‘in their wildest dreams’ imagined. Another write-up of a successful ecommerce logistics firm, Anchanto, reports that its founder was entrepreneurial even as a child, making more money than his siblings and friends had (Wong, 2016). It tells of how he quit his job to start the logistics company and determined to ‘give everything’ to the venture, ‘sold his house and wiped out his savings’ at its lowest point; but later managed to turn it around, raised large sums of investment funding and developed a patent-pending product that now promises to make him a very wealthy man by ‘[changing] the way we do delivery’.
These and other such portraits figure the ‘successful’ technopreneur as an individual whose story begins, develops and ends in distinction, or separation, from those of her fellowmen. Rather than a person who is absorbed in and consumed by the communal endeavours of the nation, they portray her as someone who has the ‘gumption’ (Davies, 2015) to move her life prospects out of the mainstream channels in which others’ are embedded; take her fate into her own hands and achieve vindication for her non-conformity by winning far greater sums of investment and buyout money than her more ordinary job-working peers could ever imagine earning. ‘Success’, in these renderings, is defined less as a process in which all individuals unite to bring about a better or more prosperous Singapore and more as a process in which certain individuals manage to pull apart from the common herd and enter the elite, but ‘growing club of Singapore’s internet millionaires’ (Chng, 2015a). It is not something to be achieved by identifying with, relying on or conforming to the calls of any overarching collective, but only by honing in on the pursuit of individual ideas, gambles and returns.
Requisite Attitudes to Comfort and Security
For Teamy the Bee and his development-minded compatriots, work was the means to the end of a more comfortable and secure life. One generation’s hard work was meant to create better living conditions as well as better educational opportunities and employment prospects for the next. Under the sign of ‘progress’, citizens were encouraged to believe that the sacrifices they made as blue-collar workers might enable their children to secure better, white-collar jobs and enjoy the comforts and securities that such employment would afford. For the technopreneur, however, comfort and security are not ends that one can aspire to achieve and enjoy, so much as traps, or temptations that must be avoided. This is because one only becomes a technopreneur by walking away from other (often higher-paying and more stable) forms of employment to start a company of one’s own—that is, by risking the comforts and securities that are available for a shot at the bigger prize of technopreneurial ‘success’.
Government officials, consultants and educators, who advocate technopreneurship, regularly lament that Singapore citizens are too ‘risk-averse’ and ‘afraid of failing’ to strike out on their own. They complain that many aspire only to ‘take up “secure” employment’ in the civil service or at a multi-national corporation or bank (Narasimhalu, 2015). This ‘conservativism’ is said to be part of a local ‘culture’ or ‘mindset’ that is too ‘rational’ and ‘materialistic’, too lacking in ‘passion’ and in the spirit of ‘adventure’, to produce truly innovative entrepreneurs (Chia, 2015, 2016; de Meyer, 2016). Parents, in particular, are blamed for inculcating this misguided mentality in their children by ‘relentlessly stress[ing] the need for good jobs and incomes’ (Krishnadas, 2015).
Instead of perpetuating this outmoded mindset, promoters of technopreneurship call for a change in national attitudes. They argue that citizens must learn not only to be more ‘risk-willing’, but also more ‘risk-seeking’ (Krishnadas, 2015); not only less afraid of failure, but more willing to embrace it or more ‘willing to fail again and again’ (Chng, 2015b). To be a technopreneur, advocates say, means trying to create and develop new ideas into profitable businesses; but some ideas can become commercially viable, while others cannot—and it takes trying them out, to determine which are which. Given that ideas are abundant, while financial resources are scarce, the chances of a given idea proving to be a failure are, in fact, far greater than the chances of it becoming a ‘success’. ‘It is axiomatic’, writes one consultant in a newspaper op-ed, ‘that in innovation, one must accept the certainty of pain in return for the uncertainty of a reward’ (Krishnadas, 2015). Young people must, therefore, learn to be ‘less uptight about failure’ (Yuen, 2016). Rather than trying to avoid it, the current Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong advises them to cultivate Silicon Valley’s ‘fail fast, learn quickly’ attitude—to embrace repeated failure and continuous adaptation as a normal condition and persist in trying to bring new ideas to market, in the hope that one may one day hit on a winner (Chng, 2015b).
Thus, where the older, manufacturing-based narrative enjoined citizens to work on the promise that their efforts would bring greater comfort and security to them and their future generations, the new discourse on technopreneurship spurns the desire for comfort and security as a mark of citizens’ lack of originality and ambition. Rather than encouraging citizens in the rational hope that hard work will bear fruit in a more comfortable life, the new discourse asks them to turn away from the ‘conservative’ alternative of high-salaried, stable employment, to dive into an arena of business ventures where failure is a likelier outcome than ‘success’.
Visions of the Global Future
Finally, the manufacturing-based narrative of national survival, in charting a route ‘from third world to first’, sketched a vision of the global future in which a growing sector of the world’s nations would successfully progress from a ‘backward’ state of underdevelopment to a state of developed modernity, joining the ranks of an ever-expanding first world. The technopreneur, by contrast, cannot hold to such roseate views, but must instead see the future as a relentless series of real and potential ‘disruptions’, brought about by rivalrous enterprises that are constantly trying to steal one another’s livelihoods. As someone whose livelihood lies in the profit-making capacities of her novel business innovations, that is, the technopreneur must always be on the lookout for threats to her revenue streams that might come from other, newer innovators. Rather than resting on the business models that she has already developed and leaving others to find their own way to prosper, she must constantly train her gaze on what rival enterprises may be trying to do to shunt capital flows out of her market and into their own.
This outlook is regularly advocated not only by ordinary government officials, but by top-level political leaders, such as PM Lee and Deputy PM Tharman Shanmugaratnam, who consistently use public speeches and interviews to tell Singapore companies and citizens how their business and jobs are certain to soon be threatened by technological and business innovations that are already taking place. Lee opened his 2016 National Day Rally speech, for instance, with a discussion of how companies like Uber and Grab are ‘disrupting’ the livelihoods of traditional taxi drivers and companies—citing this as but one of many instances to come. ‘Because of technology [and] globalization’, he warned, ‘disruption will happen over and over again relentlessly’. Singapore cannot hope to escape or be spared the impact of such innovations, but must adapt and learn to anticipate or even better originate the next disruptive idea, so as to be among its beneficiaries rather than its victims. Discussing ‘disruption’ on a separate occasion, Lee suggested that instead of allowing a more innovative or enterprising company to disrupt one’s revenue flows, Singapore companies must more proactively work to disrupt others’, or as he put it, ‘must make sure you steal somebody else’s lunch’. Similarly, Tharman has urged Singaporeans to prepare for a future that will consist of ‘one wave of change after another’ by learning to ‘embrace change’ and working to ensure that they are not among those who are drawn under, but among those who benefit from the new opportunities that each wave creates (Lee, 2016). Asserting that companies, which do not innovate, will soon have ‘their meals taken away from them by new players’ who do, Tharman has argued that sticking to established practices is no longer a viable option in today’s global economy—for when others are constantly creating new products and models, ‘you have to be part of the same game of disrupting existing ways of doing business’ (Boon, 2015) or risk losing your own means of survival.
Through such warnings and reminders, top government leaders continuously, thus urge Singapore citizens not only to be more innovative and entrepreneurial, but also and as part of this effort to adopt what Lee himself describes as a more ‘paranoid’ outlook on the future (Tay, 2015). Current conditions may be good, these voices argue, but companies and citizens cannot assume that they will last, for there are many others out there, who are constantly working out new ways to draw business and investments away from Singapore’s economy and rob its people of their riches. Rather than resting content and enjoying the progress that Singapore has made, citizens must prepare themselves for their established ways of living to be taken from them, by the continuous emergence of ever new innovations. Rather than subscribing to the rosy modernist ideal of a world of nation-states progressing towards development, that is, they should cultivate a bleaker vision of reality, which sees how ‘hungry’ competitors are everywhere striving to rob them of their livelihoods.
The New Narrative of Survival
Where the manufacturing-based narrative of national survival told of collective endeavour and common progress, the technopreneur thus thinks in terms of individual ideas, gambles and returns. Where the former nurtured citizens’ rational hope that hard work would bear fruit in higher levels of comfort and security that could then be enjoyed, the technopreneur must eschew this ‘conservative’ ‘mentality’ for a life of riskier ventures, which come with no guarantee that her efforts will pay off, and indeed, greater chances of failure than success. And where the older narrative drew on motifs of global development and progress, the technopreneur learns to see a world of continuous disruptions, coming from innovative rivals who are out to steal her livelihood and to try to pre-empt this by stealing theirs first.
While the new sociotechnical imaginary frames technopreneurship as a mere extension of the economic effort that Singapore’s citizens have historically made to enable their nation’s survival, the orientation towards others, which the good and effective technopreneur is required to have, thus runs counter to the collectivist conception of progress—and hence, to the comedic conception of the nation—which was previously posted. The technopreneur’s intent focus on private ventures and fates conjures no greater, collective entity whose progress might redeem their individual sufferings and unite them with one another. It does not see actors who can strive to overcome an initially divided condition and succeed in and by improving their common state of existence, but actors whose orienting objective is to enrich themselves by beggaring their rivals and who to this extent, are irredeemably cut off from one another, able to engage only as contending wills in a world of unrelenting and internecine competition. The technopreneur’s drive to pursue high-risk, high-return ventures over stable and comfortable employment, meanwhile, is undergirded by the sense of a world, which cannot be relied on to reward diligence with security or determination with progress; but rather, is constituted by endless ‘waves’ of arbitrary and unpredictable disruptions that the individual can only accept and adapt to.
The ‘wave’, for White, is a quintessential motif of satire—for the ‘image suggests the notion of constant change’, that yet produces no qualitative or lasting difference (1973, p. 249). The individual whose story is emplotted in this mode expends herself in the effort to ride one wave after another. Her struggles are not rendered meaningful or worthwhile by any meaningful difference that the changes, which she weathers result in, they simply dissipate on a horizon that portends ‘an eternal return of the Same in the Different’ (1973, p. 11). All endeavour is thus ‘Sisyphean rather than Promethean’ (1973, p. 233). It cannot end in accomplishment, but only drag on, through fleeting moments of reprieve that always turn out to mark the beginning of a new ordeal. Where the survival of the nation in its manufacturing mode was narrated as a comedy-like process of individual citizens becoming unified and uplifted through their collective journey to a more flourishing state of existence, survival in a technopreneurial mode can be said to replace that image with a satire-like vision of endless individual strife or of endlessly rising and falling fortunes in a world that can never become anything more than an arena of rivalrous contenders for capital.
The imagined community of Singapore is now imagined in a way that presupposes—and, arguably, thus works to foster—a different kind of self-understanding and form of relation among citizens. The new narrative of national survival asks citizens to regard one another less as fellow bearers of a single socio-economic endeavour than as so many disparate and even contending, business ventures. It does not ask citizens to subordinate their conduct to the needs of the collective that they constitute, so much as it asks them to conduct themselves as the individual bearers of their own, private risks and returns. It thus encourages citizens to relate to one another with less faith and good confidence that their individual well-being will be buoyed along with that of their fellowmen and more of an unremitting focus on the divergent livelihoods and fortunes, which each can individually pursue and on the differential socio-economic positions, which each may thus variously arrive at.
Conclusion
Attentive to the way that technological advances are reshaping the global economy, Singapore’s governments is, like many others, engaged in an array of efforts to nurture and boost business and industry-related innovation. One of the forms, which these efforts have taken, is that of a new national sociotechnical imaginary, centred in the figure of the technopreneur. The work of the technopreneur is rhetorically framed, in official discourses, as merely extending the collective effort that Singapore’s citizens have historically made to keep their country’s economy globally relevant and competitive into a more technologically advanced future era. This article has sought to show, however, that the particular outlook and disposition towards others, which the technopreneur is figured as having, lead to a shift in this earlier established narrative of Singapore’s nationhood. Whereas the established narrative of Singapore’s economic survival cast individual citizens as members of a single collective entity, whose well-being would both give meaning to and guarantee their own, the vision entailed by the new figure of the technopreneur is one in which citizens are not integrated into a unified socio-economic whole, but rather, each pursue their own private fortunes and fates.
The sociotechnical imaginary of the technopreneur can thus be seen to work not only to promote and encourage innovation, but also to reimagine the nation. It calls on citizens to understand Singapore as a different kind of socio-economic entity than the earlier narrative had suggested, which institutes a different kind of socio-economic relation among its citizens. Instead of seeing the nation as a community, whose members are bound together by their common investment in a single economic endeavour, the new imaginary asks citizens to adopt a more individualistic conception of their economic efforts and outcomes. It retracts the collectivist promise that the hard work of the individual citizen will be redeemed and rewarded by the improved well-being of the nation as a whole and replaces it with the vision of a nation of citizens who are continuously engaged in their own, disparate business ventures, and whose levels of wealth and well-being are thus continuously rising above and falling below one another’s.
The government-led promotion of this new imaginary may draw citizens to adopt an economic outlook, which focusses more on individual risks and returns than on collective ideals and achievements and which privileges the private bid to capture and recapture capital flows over the public or communal enjoyment of prosperity. As with all sociotechnical imaginaries, the push towards such an orientation is not only discursive, but also practical and material. National budget allocations, funding schemes, education programmes and other forms of state investment and disinvestment, all align in the promotion of a more individualist than collectivist form of economic rationality. Government efforts to promote innovation may, in this way, contribute to the shaping of a broader form of governmentality. They may encourage citizens to understand and conduct themselves less as individuals who look to the wealth of the nation for their own well-being and more as individuals who seek out opportunities to improve their own socio-economic standings, over and against one another. Such efforts may, in other words, contribute to the making of citizens who demand less collective security and bear more uncertainty and risk on their own.
Interviews that I have conducted with current and aspiring technopreneurs as part of my ongoing research on the subject suggest that many are indeed cultivating such a disposition. In response to my questions about how they handle the sense of uncertainty that their work entails, interviewees assert that uncertainty is an unavoidable condition of the future for everyone, regardless of what industry they are in. ‘You may have a job today, but who knows someone may come along with a new technology, and tomorrow you are unemployed’, one entrepreneur, whose startup used computer algorithms to trade shares, put it to me. Others tell me that people will need to ‘have grit’ to learn to see ‘not obstacles, but opportunities’ and to realise that, in the emerging milieu, ‘your network is your net worth’. Such statements suggest an understanding of the self and its relation to others, which sees Singapore more as a nation of individual risk takers than as a socially and economically unified collective.
Whether or not government measures turn out to be effective at increasing the level of innovation in Singapore, they are quite clearly working to modify established narratives and existing imaginaries of the nation in ways that are likely to have ramifications on the way that citizens are oriented towards one another, the kinds of demands that they make on the state and the kinds of demands that the state is able to make upon them. Exploring the case of Singapore thus offers one example of how studies, which seek to understand the effects of different national innovation policies and programmes, may be enhanced by attending to the sociotechnical imaginaries that are woven around them, the narratives of nationhood, which they deploy and the modes of emplotment by which these narratives are structured. It shows how different nations’ innovation policies do not simply equip their economies and workforces for the future, but also reshape the notions of individual and collective existence and endeavour that can be effectively invoked in the present—and as such, are already at play in the making and remaking of their citizens’ lives.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
This research was supported by NUS Start-up Grant WBS No.: R-111-000-136-133.