THE LEADERSHIP FUNCTION SYSTEMATIZING ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN THE UNIVERSITY Meritocracy is perhaps the most embedded of our various apologies for capitalism, and so its logic is familiar enough. With it, success in market society can be explained away as a natural occurrence. The titan of industry—the paradigmatic capitalist—embodies this fantasy of just desert: they followed the rules, and it paid off. If we understand this as the mythology of the meritocrat, the mythology of the entrepreneur offers a subtle, lawless variant. The entrepreneur is disruption embodied. Unlike the traditional capitalist, who’s in the business of producing what society already knows it needs, the archetypal entrepreneur trammels the old ways and revolutionizes the economy by force of will. This, at least, is the most glorified articulation of the entrepreneurial mythology, and we can note that in this particular formulation, the entrepreneur’s charisma derives precisely from their breaking the rules to which meritocrats subscribe, and then proceeding to succeed in even greater proportion. Bezos, Gates, Musk, Zuckerberg, Jobs: the mythology about these guys is that they dropped out of college, led heterodox upstarts, and delivered something society hadn’t known it needed. These details may not be true, exactly, in each of these cases, but in the world of myth, this is hardly important. What is unquestionably true is that when these men are celebrated, it is for their audacity, for impressing their will upon the fabric of society. The entrepreneur, then, offers an alternative to the meritocratic apology for capitalism. Alex Gourevitch, professor of Political Science at Brown University, prompts us to consider what these fantasies reflect about political economy today. If the entrepreneur's meteoric rise rivals the meritocrat’s measured advance as the preeminent fantasy of capitalist success, it might seem that the meritocratic path appears increasingly untenable—that the traditional structures of success are simply unpromising. But beyond offering a liberatory fantasy in the face of systemic disillusionment, the entrepreneur seems to give us something more fundamental. As Gourevitch remarked on leftist global politics podcast Aufebunga Bunga in 2019, “when entrepreneurs truly are entrepreneurial, they remind us of the human potential to exceed the normal and natural of everyday life. To reach beyond where you normally have to find yourself." This is to say that entrepreneurs, on the public stage that is the economy, serve as inspirational spectacle. But if we look to the entrepreneur as a model of human potential, we must ask for whom, and how, entrepreneurial feats are made possible. +++ In certain discourses, entrepreneurship serves as an ‘everything good’ catch-all. Entrepreneurship is dynamic, creative, nimble; its purview is not limited to the traditional ‘business world.’ Through the category of ‘social entrepreneurship,’ in particular, entrepreneurship is invoked as the silver bullet by which social ills might be transcended. These capacious definitions of the entrepreneur are conspicuously expressed in the university. In 2016, Jacobin reported that despite the decline in the absolute number of start-ups in the US over the past 30 years, entrepreneurship has ballooned in higher education—the number of entrepreneurship courses offered in colleges and universities has increased more than five-fold over this time period, with over 400,000 US college students taking courses in entrepreneurship in 2013. Brown University proclaims itself to be at the vanguard of institutionalized entrepreneurship. Prior to the 2019-2020 academic year, the University had offered an undergraduate concentration that included entrepreneurship since 2007. This year, the University subsumed the latest iteration—the concentration in Business, Entrepreneurship, and Organization (BEO)—into two existing academic departments. Brown now offers an undergraduate ‘certificate’ in entrepreneurship, to be administered by the Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship, established in 2016. The Nelson Center, like other university programs intended to cultivate entrepreneurship, rests on the
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premise that entrepreneurship can be taught. The very concept of entrepreneurship pedagogy is somewhat arresting in light of the conventional mythology of the entrepreneur: Is not the entrepreneur a charismatic, disruptive figure whose defining traits lie beyond the reach of pedagogy? The Nelson Center’s signature three-step “entrepreneurial process” seems diametrically and self-consciously opposed to these conceptions. This process, which has structured Nelson Center Director Danny Warshay’s private consultancy since before the Center’s opening, is schematized as follows: 1. Find & validate an unmet need 2. Develop a value proposition 3. Create a sustainability model In this methodology, entrepreneurship emerges as something entirely different from how we might know it from well-worn cultural myths—apparently requiring none of the entrepreneur’s ineffable characteristics. When asked by the Independent why he holds the view that entrepreneurship is now more socially necessary than ever before, Warshay stated simply that there are more global problems today than ever before. This view of entrepreneurship carries within it a long history of theorizing the entrepreneur, arguably founded on the theorizing of the market as the forum for the expression of elite will. At the same time, Warshay’s remark also captures a fundamental reality of capitalist society: that progression occurs through innovative acts of entrepreneurship. In this sense, the “entrepreneurship racket” (in the words of Jacobin’s Avery Wiscomb) that consumes universities today feels both old and new. On the one hand, it’s just the latest rendition of the old model of the entrepreneur—still a vessel to impose the will of the few on the lives of the many. Yet the new notion that entrepreneurship can, and should, be taught—especially at what Gourevitch calls “ruling class colleges and universities”—as well as the new ubiquity of the concept, gesture towards new forms of capitalist enclosure necessitating new fantastical strategies of ‘escape.’
The roots of the concept In his forthcoming article, “Capital Personified,” Gourevitch traces foundational theories of the entrepreneur’s role in political economy, beginning with early 18th-century theoretician Richard Cantillon and culminating with 20th-century Austrian political economist Joseph Schumpeter. This genealogy highlights the important divergence of Schumpeter’s notion of the entrepreneurial “leadership function” from previous theories in which the entrepreneur’s acts were crucial in the economic system, but held little cultural meaning. Because Schumpeter conceived of the economy as a forum for the production of culture, values, and civilization, he imbued entrepreneurial acts with moral significance. Schumpeter’s entrepreneur makes history; his interventions into the otherwise static state of the economy effect economic growth, but more significantly, they are acts of leadership which renovate civilization. Such acts of history-making are fundamentally coercive for Schumpeter because they divert some portion of the fixed amount of capital in the economy away from the pre-existing projects and towards the entrepreneur’s own innovative project. Gourevitch notes that Schumpeter’s language conveys the aggressive quality of these acts: capital confronts, the entrepreneur forces. But since the entrepreneur heralds civilizational advance, this coercive act is seen as a social good. Schumpeter’s entrepreneur is not a creative figure. He is exceptional not for his ability to invent, but his ability to innovate in a way that can catch on in the market. By recombining existing technologies or services, the entrepreneur offers something new. And insofar as society had not previously expressed its value for this new thing, which did not previously exist, the entrepreneur’s innovation transforms societal
BY Izzi Olive ILLUSTRATION Eliza Macneal DESIGN Amos Jackson
values. Schumpeter thus offers a working definition of actual economic entrepreneurship which is conceptually useful to distinguish it from the many colloquial uses of the term—for example, to refer to small business owners, or to a certain plucky resourcefulness. His definition is also useful as a historical referent because select concepts of Schumpeter’s are enthusiastically invoked in entrepreneurial discourse today, while others—namely his view of the economy as a space for the expression of elite will—have been left behind. Schumpeter’s acknowledgement of the force involved in entrepreneurship did not amount to a condemnation of the entrepreneur. The entrepreneur’s exercise of power within the economy was natural and necessary — a view predicated on Schumpeter’s vision of inexorable civilizational progress, with the forceful entrepreneur showing the way. By contrast, today’s notional entrepreneur represents anything but coercion, despite the fact that successful entrepreneurship still entails control over immense amounts of labor and capital.
Schumpeter to Drucker and back again With Schumpeter’s entrepreneur as our working definition, the idea that we can all be entrepreneurs is hardly intuitive. Yet this notion has taken root in popular discourse, largely due to the contributions of mid-20th century management theory, particularly that of consultant and author Peter Drucker. Historian Angus Burgin has argued that Drucker’s intellectual trajectory, from his early writings of the 1940s to his most influential work, The Principles of Management, first published in 1954, reveal an underlying shift in attitudes towards automation during that time. Taking stock of the mechanical nature of factory labor in the 1940s, and doubtful of the state’s capacity to intervene in industrial organization, Drucker initially proposed management and organization as a means to combat the alienation of worklife. By granting the worker leeway to integrate tasks with “executive function”—requiring thought and judgement—Drucker proposed to reimagine industrial worklife in the model of unalienated craftsmanship. But the contributions for which Drucker is best remembered today bear little trace of these early concerns regarding the “social pathologies of industrial civilization,” in Burgin’s words. This, Burgin argues, is the result of Drucker’s adoption of a euphoric attitude towards new technologies, reflected in his theorizing of a new type of worker altogether: the knowledge worker. Like many of his contemporaries, Drucker became seduced by the liberatory potential of automation. Drucker came to believe that machines would enable the industrial worker to act as an entrepreneur at every level of the corporation. Working in tandem with intelligently-designed machines, the knowledge worker would be able to exercise executive function. This embrace of automation all but supplanted Drucker’s earlier concerns. Corporations and business schools alike soon integrated management theorists’ cybernetic techno-futurism, which remains distinctly visible in contemporary philosophies of corporate organization and business school curricula. As new technologies made old concerns seem obsolete, Burgin writes, “Schumpeter's chiliastic vision thereby began to evolve into the relentlessly optimistic discourse of entrepreneurship that has pervaded business education ever since.” As Gourevitch notes, however, the experience of the vast majority of workers today is a far cry from entrepreneurial. At the Amazon fulfillment center, or the call center, or in any number of other occupations, the worker is more machine than ‘self-author,’ contrary to the entrepreneurial mandate of creative license to be borne from the liberatory force of automation. Automation no longer carries the techno-utopian sheen that swept up Peter Drucker half a century ago. Instead, automation is now often invoked as a threat to the worker. But the indelible mark of management theory is that corporate organization is now offered as a corrective to such ambivalence towards automation and other forms of industrial malaise. This equation of
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