Cultural Confusions of Enterprise and the Myth of the Bureaucratized Entrepreneur

Abstract

In this paper the rise of enterprise culture is interpreted as part of a more general historical shift in the balance between the two dominant cultural elements of society, those of the market and the hierarchy. It is suggested, however, that the entrepreneurial identity that was fashioned by the advocates of enterprise was always a bureaucratically sanitized fiction that differed in critical respects from the real thing. Since the 1980s, the cultural balance has continued to shift in favour of the market, and the internal practices of business reflect this. Government, however, is nothing if not hierarchical, and it has responded to the threat of market culture in the only way hierarchies know: by an ever increasing and ever more desperate profusion of regulation.