A place in the sun: Utopia and suffering in popular entrepreneurship in Sao Paulo
Author: Henrique Costa, hen.costa@gmail.com
Department: Social Sciences
University: State University of Campinas, Brazil
Supervisor: Angela Araujo
Year of completion: 2022
Language of dissertation: Portuguese
Keywords:
Urban peripheries
, Entrepreneurship
, Popular culture
, Precarity
Areas of Research:
Regional and Urban development
, Political sociology
, Economy and society
Abstract
The several crises that have afflicted Brazil in recent years have revealed relations of insecurity in the labor market and brought to the fore the notion of “entrepreneurship”. Especially since the 2010s, this topic has polarized opinions that are not limited to the economy, in which both the defense of an autonomous way of life and the denunciation of forms of deregulation of work appear. Entrepreneurship, whether out of necessity or out of conviction, came to be perceived in different interconnected contexts, such as school, family and the cultural industry, as they represent an alternative to situations of unemployment and a renewed, sometimes unsubmissive, popular subjectivity. Thus, a popular culture historically moved by individualistic solutions to situations of survival or search for autonomy is joined by globalized precepts of entrepreneurship as rationalization. The objective of this thesis is to describe the ongoing process of formation of an entrepreneurship of popular character, in which elements of the experience of wageless life structure ways of life and establish ambiguous relationships with the impositions of modernization. In the clash between the social mobility of recent years and the awareness of the precariousness of the job market, under the umbrella of the contemporary yearning for self-realization, self-help techniques foster the individualization of suffering, thus forming a structure of feelings of global reach in which the advances in technology reinvigorate and enable sophisticated forms of self-management. As a consequence of this discourse, socio-educational training for the youngest encourages a rupture with the space of popular experience, based on practical knowledge, and gives new meaning to the notion of merit, which is no longer based on objective criteria but on abstract attributes. On the other hand, the discourse also reaches a previous generation of people exhausted by a life of subordinate work and fearful about the future; they see in entrepreneurship a new opportunity for self-realization, but whose adaptation to the new parameters often brings them frustration. Two vectors to encourage entrepreneurship especially highlighted here are social businesses and Prosperity Theology, which make specific discursive adaptations for their audiences. Popular entrepreneurship is thus positioned at the heart of the contradictions involving the conservation of family and customs and the renewal of the utopia of work through entrepreneurial rationality. The methodological approach to the research issue was based on an ethnography developed between 2017 and 2021 in the south periphery of Sao Paulo at events, religious services and shopping streets; in-depth interviews with self-employed workers, waged employees who also performed other activities to supplement their income and entrepreneurs; and monitoring of social networks and cultural commodities, bringing together extensive empirical research and the use of theory to identify ways of life and their conflicts, whose references are found in the works of Michael Burawoy, E. P. Thompson and Raymond Williams. As a conclusion, this thesis states that self-management points both to the refusal of suffering and to a renewed utopia of freedom at the expense of regulated citizenship, fostering a society of entrepreneurs.
