I. Entrepreneurialism

A. Entrepreneurship in contemporary global economy

1. Leshkowich: Vietnam's transition from socialism to market economy

a. Volatility
b. Questions about the self: Who should I be? How should I behave?
c. Gender and class
d. Bargaining, tinh cam, and social relationships: business strategy and personal meaning

2. Carla Freeman, Entrepreneurial Selves: Neoliberal Respectability and the Making of a Caribbean Middle Class (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).

a. Being an entrepreneur and being a person in Barbados
b. High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy, 2000: outsourcing of pink collar informatics labor
c. Recent rise of entrepreneurialism
d. "Entrepreneurialism, I will argue, is becoming not simply a mechanism for self-employment--a vehicle for income generation, an economic matter of business, that is, entrepreneurship in a narrow sense--but a subtler, generalized way of being and way of feeling in the world (1).
e. "The questions--who am I in the world? How do I wish to live and feel?--are being articulated in new ways that I see as subtly intertwined with a general entrepreneurial ethic and neoliberal esprit" (5).
f. Intimate relationships, marriage, parenting, leisure time, religious life, etc.

B. Entrepreneurialism connects "market practices" to "self-making" (1)

1. Boundaries between work and leisure, public and private become porous
2. Self as project, including feelings
3. Global trends take shape in locally specific ways, and then shape global trends

C. Today: self as "key signpost of neoliberalism": working, living, and feeling in family life
D. Research conducted with 107 entrepreneurs (2/3 women, 1/3 men), 86 self-identified as black (86), some identified as white, mixed, or Indian
E. Owners of registered businesses in a variety of fields
F. Monday: affect and entrepreneurial selves

 

II. Neoliberalism

A. Foucault: technologies of self "permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection or immortality" (Foucault 1988: 18, quoted in Freeman 2014: 2).
B. Neoliberalism: philosophy of politics and economics that claims to prize individual liberty and freedom

1. Autonomous, free individuals make choices: self-determination
2. Political and economic structure: private property rights, free markets, and free trade
3. State protects property rights and institutional structures of the market
4. BUT, state often dismantles labor protections, welfare state, regulations in name of "market"
5. Market as domain in which questions of life can best be settled: education, security, healthcare

C. Neoliberal personhood

1. Adam Smith revisited
2. Rational choicemakers, plus need for "responsibilization" (Nikolas Rose)
3. "the transfer of aspects of governance from the state to private, corporate, or transnational entities; the proliferation of market logics of efficiency, efficacy, and profitability as the yardsticks for assessing health, aesthetics, or government performance; and the conflation between market behaviors and appropriate forms of moral personhood" (Schwenkel and Leshkowich 2012: 382).

D. Self must be flexible, show self-mastery, self-examination

1. Skills and employability
2. Retraining: "Rather, new concepts of the self are vital to the broader workings--and power--of the political-economic and social order" (3).
3. Emotions: "growing emphasis on affects--the embodied expressions of emotions and feelings" (3) in "identifiable and commodifiable ways" (3)
4. Self-help industry: "therapeutic culture has come to play a significant role in bolstering and soothing the self" (19).
5. "'Entrepreneur of the self'" is "self-propelled, autonomous economic actor, ever responsive to a dynamic marketplace, and simultaneously encouraged to seek introspection, self-mastery, and personal fulfillment" (20).

E. Barbados = "a part of the world well trodden by many of the relevant tropes of contemporary neoliberalism (economy, enterprise, flexibility, and power) but less inclined toward thinking reflexively about selves, much less about feelings or affective life" (4).

 

III. Marriage and Intimacy

A. Family has become entrepreneurial: "intimate relationships, parenthood, and selfhood, like businesses, become projects that demand similar adaptability, innovations, sensitivity to external demands, creativity, and responsiveness" (58)
B. Global trends: rising divorce rates, companionate marriage
C. Barbados: matrifocality
D. Higher rates of marriage among Barbadian entrepreneurs: romantic and economic partnership

1. "new affective order" includes "a longing for deep empathy, the capacity to be oneself with another and feel supported and in synch with that person, sympatico, understood, and upheld as a person" (65)
2. Women entrepreneurs: respectability and reputation

a. Respectability (British colonial legacy, middle class, women) = Victorian values of Christianity, marriage, propriety, higher education
b. Reputation (African, male, and working class): street corners, politics, rum shop, market, and musical stage; "sexual prowess, verbal wit, musical flair, and guile" (21)
c. Qualities of reputation are now key to middle-class entrepreneurial respectability: 3/4 of Barbadian children are born out of wedlock, but entrepreneurial women desire emotional and financial partnership

E. Entrepreneurial women's views of marriage

1. Marriage had been means to secure respectability
2. Now: in synch, soul mate

a. Heather in Paris
b. Same sex partner: emotional support and laughter at the end of a stressful day

3. Date nights versus homosocial leisure
4. Emotionally present, not just a "provider"

G. Men's views

1. Marriage as supportive division of labor
2. Prior view: marriage as plot, "Obeah Wedding" by Mighty Sparrow (1966)

H. Entrepreneurship connection

1. "When women achieve economic independence, and especially an independence won in the wily domain of entrepreneurship, their marital desires turn toward romantic connection grounded in emotional synchrony and in the cultivation of new selves in large part supported by a new middle-class marketplace " (85).
2. Yoga, self-help fulfillment books = "new fields of experience, new realms of desire in which the self and the couple and family are envisioned as entities to be fashioned, soothed, entertained, and nourished" (84)
3. Women are not dependent on men financially and instead seek loving partnership
4. "What I am arguing is that marriage be understood as not only a structural resource (financial security, supportive labor, contacts, advice, etc.) but also as an affective goal, integral to the neoliberal project of self making so critical to these contemporary entrepreneurs." (94).

I. Barbadian women drive this trend: leverage matrifocality within the new milieu of middle-classness (95)