Young adults and the tuning of the entrepreneurial mindset in neoliberal capitalism

ABSTRACT

Enhancing the entrepreneurial spirit of young people is a means by which their employability and future potential as well as economic growth, the core goal of national policies, are incubated. Consequently, individuals performing entrepreneurial mindset are seen to possess the most future potential. We sketch the contours of this mindset and develop the idea of ‘tuning’ the entrepreneurial mindset with other discursive elements, or ‘ingredients’, available in society in order to make the overarching idea of entrepreneurialism more manageable, bearable, and even enjoyable at the individual level. The ingredients with which the mindset is tuned are non-depressiveness, happiness, and gratefulness. This tuning of the mindset is itself necessary and difficult mental work, even though it is invisible. Our analysis is based on 40 interviews with 18–30-year-old women and men from Tampere, Finland.

KEYWORDS:

• Employability
• entrepreneurialism
• gender
• individualization
• neoliberalism
• young adults

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Subsidized employment means that the state or municipality pays a part of the wage to help a person who has trouble finding employment and thus ‘getting a grip’ at the labor market.

2 Depression can be a medical condition but the view this article takes is that in the context of neoliberal governance, depression is not only an illness but also a continuous, abstract threat which, however, can be worked away by mental labor.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Koneen Säätiö.