Emergenc(i)es of the crisis: Anti-heroic figures of youth entrepreneurship in Spain

Abstract

The aim of this article is to understand the key elements of the entrepreneurship as a governmental program reactivated during the last economic crisis and to tackle the effects that it is generating on Spanish youths. European and Spanish entrepreneurship policies have emerged as an emergency solution to the high unemployment and job insecurity experienced by young people. Our hypothesis is that they are having controversial and paradoxical effects on the subjectification processes of young people. From this departure point, the concept of “grammar of entrepreneurship” is proposed to account for how agents from different fields —political, educational, financial, media — summon a morality, a mood disposition and a type of entrepreneurial subjectivity that, given the present socio-economic situation, is paradoxical, if not unachievable. Based on a qualitative fieldwork centred on the experiences and narratives of young people involved in entrepreneurship, some analytical figures that point out to those limits and impossibilities are reviewed and contrasted. Among them, those which condense the discomforts and contradictions produced by the grammar of the entrepreneurship such as emperdedor, emprendeudor o emprecario (combination of words linking entrepreneurship with loss, debt and precariousness respectively).