To Be “Entrepreneured”: An Ethnographic Study of Tech Entrepreneurship Competitions in China
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22439/jba.v13i1.7151Abstract
Technological incubators are commonly regarded as important infrastructures that nurture nascent business ventures, meant to create conditions for innovation and regional economic development. However, in China, such an incubator functions as a performative apparatus governed by the state. The Chinese state has purposefully fostered entrepreneurial hopes and expectations among certain privileged groups of talents through the indirect manipulation of competition winners by mentors and judges. These individuals are not necessarily the ideal entrepreneurial talents according to market standards. In this article, I employ the passive construction of entrepreneurship as a verb – “being entrepreneured” (bei chuangye) – to illustrate how entrepreneurs are not merely actors with agency, but are also acted upon by socialist mechanisms in China and the performative governance exercised by the Chinese state over individual entrepreneurs. Using an ethnographic case study of a state-sponsored entrepreneurship competition, which took place in Guangzhou in 2020, and 95 semi-structured interviews collected throughout seven months of multi-sited fieldwork, the article shows how transnational technological communities are in some ways “being entrepreneured” in China. I problematize this notion to show the discrepancies and contradictions between the public and the private criteria in selecting entrepreneurial talents in China.
References
Austin, J. L. (1962). How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Briody, E. K. and Stewart, A. (2019). “Entrepreneurship: A Challenging, Fruitful Domain for Ethnography.” Journal of Business Anthropology 8(2): 141-166. https://doi.org/10.22439/jba.v8i2.5846
Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
Butler, J. (2004). Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203499627
Butler, J. (2010). “Performative Agency.” Journal of Cultural Economy 3(2): 147-161. https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2010.494117
Carreyrou, J. (2018). Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Chong, K. (2018). Best Practice: Management Consulting and the Ethics of Financialization. Durham: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478002376
Ding, I. (2022). The Performative State: Public Scrutiny and Environmental Governance in China. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. https://doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501760372.001.0001
Dolan, C. and Rajak, D. (2016). “Remaking Africa’s Informal Economies: Youth, Entrepreneurship and the Promise of Inclusion at the Bottom of the Pyramid.” The Journal of Development Studies 52(4): 514-529. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220388.2015.1126249
Ellwood, A. (2012). “The Dream Team: Hipster, Hacker, and Hustler.” Forbes. Available from https://www.forbes.com/sites/andyellwood/2012/08/22/the–dream–team–hipster–hacker–and–hustler/?sh=5c331062c85e [Accessed 20 November 2022].
Foucault, M. (1982). “The Subject and Power.” Critical Inquiry 8(4): 777-795. https://doi.org/10.1086/448181
Foucault, M. (1988). “Technologies of the Self.” In H. M. Luther, G. Huck, and P. H. Hutton (eds.), Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (pp. 16-49). Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Garud, R., Gehman, J., and Giuliani, A. P. (2018). “Why Not Take a Performative Approach to Entrepreneurship?” Journal of Business Venturing Insights 9(June): 60-64. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbvi.2018.01.001
Garud, R., Gehman, J., and Tharchen, T. (2018). “Performativity as Ongoing Journeys: Implications for Strategy, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation.” Long Range Planning 51(3): 500-509. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lrp.2017.02.003
Ho, K. Z. (2009). Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. Durham: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822391371
Irani, L. (2015). “Hackathons and the Making of Entrepreneurial Citizenship.” Science, Technology, and Human Values 40(5): 799-824. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243915578486
Irani, L. (2019). Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India. Princeton: Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691175140.001.0001
Lemke, T. (2012). Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique. London: Routledge.
Liu, O. Y. (2024). Start-up Wolf: The Shenzhen Model of High-Tech Entrepreneurship. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003456339
Miller, P. and Rose, N. (2008). Governing the Present: Administrating Economic, Social and Personal Life. Cambridge: Polity.
Perng, S. Y. (2018). Shared Technology Making in Neoliberal Ruins: Rationalities, Practices and Possibilities of Hackathons. The Programmable City Working Paper 38: 1-34. Available from https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/k793w [Accessed 29 March 2022].
Pfeilstetter, R. (2021). The Anthropology of Entrepreneurship: Cultural History, Global Ethnographies, Theorizing Agency. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367824136
Pollio, A. (2020). “Incubators at the Frontiers of Capital: An Ethnographic Encounter with Startup Weekend in Khayelitsha, Cape Town.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 110(4): 1244-1259. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2019.1680232
Ries, E. (2011). The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. New York: Crown Business.
Rosa, P. and Caulkins, D. (2013). “Entrepreneurship Studies.” In: D. Caulkins and A. T. Jordan (eds.), A Companion to Organizational Anthropology (pp. 98-121). New York: Wiley–Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118325513.ch4
Saxenian, A. (1996). Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674418042
Saxenian, A. (2006). The New Argonauts: Regional Advantage in a Global Economy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1dp0ttd
Schoenhals, M. (1992). Doing Things with Words in Chinese Politics: Five Studies. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Stewart, A. (1991). “A Prospectus on the Anthropology of Entrepreneurship.” Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice 16(2): 71-92. https://doi.org/10.1177/104225879201600206
Steyaert, C. (1997). “A Qualitative Methodology for Process Studies of Entrepreneurship: Creating Local Knowledge through Stories.” International Studies of Management and Organization 27(3): 13-33. https://doi.org/10.1080/00208825.1997.11656711
Steyaert, C. (2007). “‘Entrepreneuring’ as a Conceptual Attractor? A Review of Process Theories in 20 Years of Entrepreneurship Studies.” Entrepreneurship and Regional Development 19(6): 453-477. https://doi.org/10.1080/08985620701671759
Tsing, A. L. (2005). Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton: Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400830596
Venkatraman, N. and Ramanujam, V. (1986). “Measurement of Business Performance in Strategy Research: A Comparison of Approaches.” Academy of Management Review 11(4): 801-814. https://doi.org/10.2307/258398
Williams, M. (2022). “Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos: A Play on More Than Just Ethical Failures.” Business Information Review 39(1): 23-31. https://doi.org/10.1177/02663821221088899
Yu, H. (2019). “Self as Enterprise: Disability and E‐entrepreneurship in China.” In: A. Athique and E. Baulch (eds.), Digital Transactions in Asia: Economic, Informational, and Social Exchanges (pp. 153-166). New York: Routledge.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2024 Olivia Yijian Liu
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
