Becoming an entrepreneur: emergent subjectivities and the politics of development of micro-entrepreneurship in Chile

Abstract

Based on multi-situated ethnographic research in urban, Indigenous and rural contexts in Chile, this article examines the emergence of multiple subjectivities in populations involved in micro- entrepreneurship development policies. Given the significance of the notions of flexibility and uncertainty in the entrepreneurial training, we argue that small-scale entrepreneurs and public officers actively and critically appropriate dominant economic principles of micro- entrepreneurship, and in doing so, adopt uncertainty and precariousness as a constitutive element of contemporary life. The values of entrepreneurial training thus do not materialise in the formation of individualised entrepreneurial subjects detached from their social contexts, but are rather internalised in ways consistent with the relational practices and ideas which are meaningful in specific social contexts.