Entrepreneurial identities: reflections from two case studies

The central focus of this paper is an analysis of the enterprise discourse and how it is articulated by individuals working in small business environments, to construct and reconstruct material practices and psychological identities. The core argument is that, even if people do not take the enterprise culture seriously, even if they feel unaffected by its values and claims, they are inevitably reproducing it through their involvement with the daily practices which are imbued with the notion of enterprise (du Gay and Salaman, 1992). As such, the paper takes a social constructionist perspective which seeks to illustrate how individuals are constituted by the discourse of enterprise, and to provide some empirical evidence of the processes and practices which both reflect and construct that experience.