Final published version
Licence: CC BY: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - 'Don't forget to like, share and subscribe'
T2 - Digital autopreneurs in a neoliberal world
AU - Ashman, Rachel
AU - Patterson, Anthony
AU - Brown, Stephen
PY - 2018/11/30
Y1 - 2018/11/30
N2 - We seek to move beyond the exalted figure of the heroic entrepreneur that predominates the study of entrepreneurship; to take a less agentic view of entrepreneurship; to tell stories rarely told, and to demonstrate how historical and technocultural forces are as instrumental in directing entrepreneurial activity as individual motivations. We enlist the work of Foucault and others, in conjunction with netnographic fieldwork that focuses on an assemblage of young YouTubers striving to become what we call autopreneurs. We reveal how they internalize a structure of feeling, divined from neoliberal ideology that shapes their everyday affairs. We find that three main wellsprings – the dynamics of competition, the creativity dispositif, and technologies of the self – detrimentally affect the quality of their lives and collectively institute a ‘cruel optimism’ which promises much but delivers little. We conclude with some thoughts on the ramifications of our work for the study of entrepreneurship.
AB - We seek to move beyond the exalted figure of the heroic entrepreneur that predominates the study of entrepreneurship; to take a less agentic view of entrepreneurship; to tell stories rarely told, and to demonstrate how historical and technocultural forces are as instrumental in directing entrepreneurial activity as individual motivations. We enlist the work of Foucault and others, in conjunction with netnographic fieldwork that focuses on an assemblage of young YouTubers striving to become what we call autopreneurs. We reveal how they internalize a structure of feeling, divined from neoliberal ideology that shapes their everyday affairs. We find that three main wellsprings – the dynamics of competition, the creativity dispositif, and technologies of the self – detrimentally affect the quality of their lives and collectively institute a ‘cruel optimism’ which promises much but delivers little. We conclude with some thoughts on the ramifications of our work for the study of entrepreneurship.
KW - Neoliberalism
KW - Entrepreneurship
KW - YouTube
KW - Subjectivity
KW - Critical
U2 - 10.1016/j.jbusres.2018.07.055
DO - 10.1016/j.jbusres.2018.07.055
M3 - Journal article
VL - 92
SP - 474
EP - 483
JO - Journal of Business Research
JF - Journal of Business Research
SN - 0148-2963
ER -