Long-time Bassetti Foundation collaborator Cristina Grasseni recently presented a paper at the European Association of Social Anthropology (EASA) conference in Barcelona, held between 18-26 July. The conference theme was ‘Doing and Undoing with Anthropology’, with Grasseni participating in a full-day panel entitled New directions in the anthropology of entrepreneurship: beyond social embeddedness convened by Joost Beuving, Juliette Koning and Michiel Verver.
The panel looked for ‘new, anthropological understandings of entrepreneurship, especially those foregrounding how the social embeddedness of entrepreneurial behaviour and homo economicus as a folk model point to interconnected realities, situated in the same movement of economic action’ (taken from the panel abstract).
The event consited in 10-minute presentations followed by questions from the audience. This format led to a broad and interesting discussion while maintaining audience participation. The panel had an ethnographic rather than theoretical focus, making the discussion easily accessible. Many topics overlapped the different speakers, the most prominent being the relationship between family members and choices made regarding different approaches to entrepreneurism. Many different parts of the world were represented, alongside different business models, forms and participants, in a varied and interestingly constructed panel.
In the following section readers will find an extract from each paper’s short abstract, a few take-aways from each and links both to the full abstract and author contact details. The full panel abstract is available both at the bottom of this article and through the panel link above.
Anne-Erita Berta (University of South-Eastern Norway)
Resisting growth: beyond profit-oriented entrepreneurship in a neoliberal market economy
Short Abstract:
This paper presents business owners who are not concerned with or motivated by profit maximation, high material wealth or accumulation of capital. The ethnography illustrates entrepreneurs who set out and make a point out of ensuring that their business does not grow beyond a certain size.
Focusing on case studies in Denmark and through a narrative around baking bread, the speaker described an approach to entrepreneurship that does not focus on profit maximization but on maintaining autonomy. The author noted the importance of the well provisioned welfare state in providing a social safety net for families, releasing parents from a feeling of responsibility towards their children’s futures and removing the aim of passing the business down to the following generation.
Elaheh Eslami (Central European University)
Short Abstract:
Using social media for running businesses is on rise among young women in Tehran, Iran. With an ethnography of online entrepreneurial activities, I show the embeddedness of online businesses in between women’s marginality as a structural condition, as well as material and nonmaterial value creation.
Eslami described how Iranian women live their experiences as online shop owners, explaining their position within frameworks of social expectations, governmental maneuvering and social framing and the resulting rules and regulations (for example in relation to obtaining loans) that impinge on their autonomy.
Christina Kefala (University of Amsterdam)
Whispers of innovation: white entrepreneurs crafting identity in China’s digital business landscape
Short Abstract:
This study examines white Western digital entrepreneurs shaping identity in China. Applying critical race theory, it explores daily interactions, branding, and the impact of gender, ethnicity, and media. Digital ethnography reveals insights into evolving dynamics in Chinese entrepreneurship.
Kefala narrated stories from her research that depicted how highly educated Western culture influencers sell their designs and products through selling themselves and their lives and lifestyle. The selling of good (US) education, high-level Chinese language skills and white skin result in the ability to sell their designs.
Cosmin Popan (Université Grenoble Alpes)
Migrant, Entrepreneur, Man: Platform food couriers’ navigation of precarity and vulnerability
Short Abstract:
Despite the mounting criticism of the gig economy, entrepreneurial discourses and practices are still celebrated by politicians, media and workers. This paper draws on ethnographic work with food couriers and explores how workers mobilise entrepreneurial aspirations to assess their masculinity.
The author described how the continuous deterioration of working conditions for those working on food delivery platforms has led to a recomposition of the workforce, from student part time workers to migrant full time workers. Popan described techniques at play when migrant workers want to obtain accounts but do not have the right to work, and analysed expressions of masculinity through their propensity for risk taking and for conspicuous consumption.
Julia Roberts (University of Cambridge)
Short Abstract:
This paper will explore the changing and contested social meanings of entrepreneurship at the northern periphery of Japan through an examination of the career choice event in which entrepreneurship is featured as an emerging alternative to the stable, rational, and proper life course.
Roberts explained how young adults frame the idea of running a business as a means to escape and alternative for what they see as a mundane and pre-formed life, but that this standpoint is viewed negatively by much of the population (who see it as foolishness and showing lack of common sense). This framing reflects how working life has historically been depicted as exclusive from enjoyment, although the author noted that the Japanese government are trying to rewrite this narrative by promoting entrepreneurship as bringing advantages to the society as a whole.
Session 2
Rich Thornton (SOAS, University of London)
Short Abstract:
This paper draws on ethnographic research with social entrepreneurs in India’s education development industry to argue for an anthropological theory of entrepreneurship that centres on affect and subjectivity.
Thornton presented his data from research in Delhi in which he discovered a host of spiritual reasons that lead young Indians to choose the path of social entrepreneurship. His fieldwork encompasses social entrepreneurship in education as well as broader social entrepreneurship circles, bringing forth lots of questions about personal insecurities and familial expectations and relationships, a topic that runs through many of the presentations heard today.
Elizabeth Cooper (Simon Fraser University)
Hikers in a hustler economy: exploring alternative values in Kenya’s mountains
Short Abstract:
New initiatives in Kenya’s mountain-focused recreational tourism sector, under Kenyan leadership and targeting Kenyan clientele, spur questions about how to live a good life while making a living. How are Kenyan mountain enthusiasts trying to set new moral norms for entrepreneurialism?
The speaker explained that hiking in Kenya has long been a sport for foreign tourists, but that Kenyans are now taking up this pastime. This development takes place within a state promoted hustler narrative pertaining to the economy. The guides see themselves as lifestyle entrepreneurs and their work as playing a part in the development of a new perspective on working life that is less hustler related, raising questions about the moderating effects of something that can be seen as a moral economy.
Daria Tereshina (Higher School of Economics, Centre for Historical Research, St Petersburg, Russia)
Undoing entrepreneurial families: risk, uncertainty and divorce in family firms in Russia
Short Abstract:
The paper investigates family businesses in Russia asking how the politics of exclusion are enacted within family firms and how this informs the processes of self-categorization among family businesses
The speaker described anxiety amongst business owners due to the commonplace breakdown of marital relations in Russia and the effects that such familial change can have on family businesses. She presented a series of strategies used by families such as the hiding of properties in other family members’ names and other forms of legal exclusion, all of which produces ambiguity within relationships. The danger that political involvement and change is ever present, leading many business owners to strengthen their circle of trusted insiders at the expense of spouses.
Cristina Grasseni (University of Leiden)
Short Abstract:
An intimate look into family entrepreneurship, based on longitudinal ethnography in and around dairy farming and cheese making in the Lombard mountains, shows how caring while competing informs ‘futuring’, for kin, rivals, migrant laborers, residents, researchers and tourists.
Drawing on almost 30 years of fieldwork experience in the Italian Pre-Alps, Grasseni reflects on her ongoing relationship with local dairy farmers and cheese refiners. These entrepreneurs by now export a significant part of their produce and relate to international audiences in multiple languages. Grasseni ponders on what it means for them and for herself as ethnographer to produce anthropological knowledge together with, and adjacent to, research interlocutors who are also competent experts on the topics she wishes to discuss, such as heritagization, development, sustainability and territorial economies.
Full Panel Abstract
This panel looks for new, anthropologically informed understandings of entrepreneurship. Such new understandings are urgently needed as the tide of global capitalism with its promise of sustainable growth and inclusive mass prosperity remains regrettably elusive. Outside of anthropology, the popular image of homo economicus prevails: the observant, opportunistic individual or firm exploiting business opportunity by weighing costs against benefits. Economic anthropology sought to deconstruct this image as an unwelcome colonisation of ethnographic realities by textbook economics. As an alternative interpretation it posits that entrepreneurial behaviour is embedded in socially instituted practices, relations and rituals. Whereas the embeddedness ontology enriches anthropological thinking, it also grapples with the fact that, as a folk model, homo economicus is far from dead: the image of entrepreneurship as rational action appears to inspire entrepreneurs across the globe. To relieve the resulting epistemic tension, the panel links up with a recent, productive turn in economic anthropology positing that rational action and social embeddedness point to interconnected realities, situated in the same movement of economic action. Within this realm, the panel is open to contributions on a variety of manifestations, locations, and interpretations of what is usefully included in the domain of entrepreneurship from an anthropological perspective.
Readers looking to dive deeper might be interested in convener Joost Beuving’s latest book Theorizing Entrepreneurship for the Future which addresses many of the questions raised during the panel (the prologue is available to download here), while Michiel Verver offers free access to his 2019 book “Old” and “New” Chinese Business in Cambodia’s Capital through this research portal.