The year 2020 has passed and, amid a pandemic, a report on entrepreneurship is gaining prominence in the Brazilian media. Conducted by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (gem), in partnership with the Brazilian Micro and Small Business Support Service (sebrae) and the Brazilian Institute for Quality and Productivity (ibpq), it presents some striking figures: no less than 50 million Brazilians say they want to start a business in the next three years. This figure has increased by 75 per cent compared to the previous survey conducted by the same institute.1
One might think that such a huge result would be due to the acute economic crisis and shrinking opportunities, deepened by the covid-19 health catastrophe and related social isolation. Not so much. The survey conducted the following year by the same gem, when the Brazilian economy was getting back on track, estimated that no less than 43 million adults in Brazil already ran a business (formal or informal) or had taken some action in 2021 with a view to starting a business in the near future. What’s more, the expectation of having your own business – ranked third of the main ‘dreams’ (as the survey asked) of around half (46 per cent) of the Brazilians interviewed – would far outweigh the aspiration to have a successful career in a company – ranked as the eighth ‘dream’ imagined by no more than a third (32 per cent) of the people interviewed at the time.2
Another equally significant finding pointed to the considerable weight of those in the country who say they turn to business ‘out of necessity’, in other words, because of the lack of alternatives for earning an income. Almost half of the people who were entrepreneurs in 2021 were in this condition. Among the so-called ‘nascent entrepreneurs’, those who did business ‘out of necessity’ were 47.9 per cent in 2020 and, a year later, had increased to 49.3 per cent. In other words, even when companies were hiring again, people didn’t trust the opportunity to survive on salaried jobs. In the words of the President of sebrae, the study’s partner organisation, “we can infer that the initial entrepreneurs are very low-income and that a large number of them are potential
But the strength of ‘entrepreneurship’ as an alternative form of economic insertion that marks modern-day Brazil can also be seen in another way, namely in how much space the topic has occupied in the country’s print media. Maia (2024) set out to compute the frequency with which the word ‘entrepreneurship’ appeared over the last fifteen years in one of the main national print media outlets. He found that, from being almost imperceptible until 2009, the term has increased fivefold in the national news since 2012. The most elaborate form – and close to what the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (2021) calls ‘opportunity entrepreneurship’ (in distinction from ‘necessity entrepreneurship’) – is perhaps expressed by the figure of startups. Curiously, and still following the clues raised by Maia (2024), it was only in 2017 that the term began to gain prevalence in the news, and its presence in print media only exploded between 2018 and 2021.
Although sociological analyses have attended to the phenomenon since the mid-1990s (Martinelli, 1994 and Aldrich, 2005 make two exhaustive assessments of the subject), Swedberg (2000: 28) acidly notes that among sociologists, “the subject of entrepreneurship has never been particularly popular”.
Among us in Brazil, as a generation of new and creative Brazilian social scientists (Costa, 2022; Fontes, 2023; Maia 2024) have shrewdly observed, ‘setting up your own business’ and ‘working for yourself’ have long been expressions of the desired modes of engagement that make up the lexicon of viração (Gregori, 2000). These common terms allude to alternative livelihoods adopted by those who needed to survive outside the circuit of regular and protected jobs. Where, then, was the novelty in the face of what had previously been captured with all its ethnographic richness by authors of the calibre of Luiz Antonio Machado da Silva (1971, 2003)?
I would say that works like Henrique Costa’s challenge us, firstly, to reject arguments that dilute the current novelty in external determinants, such as the irresistible capacity to forge subjectivities that emanates from neoliberal capitalism. In its simplicity, it’s an attractive explanation that relieves those who assume it from the effort to explore and find the multiple mediations that give concrete form to this historical form in different realities.
By immersing himself in the daily lives of these individuals, Costa invites us to face up to the complexity of the determinants that shape the actions of
In this context, entrepreneurship, far from being singular, appears to be plural, ranging from glitzy and politically engaged ‘social entrepreneurship’ to successful entrepreneurship, which feeds new ways of life responsible for deepening this heterogeneity, expressing itself, for example, in the condominiums that house a local ‘new middle class’ to the varied forms of self-employed and small traders operating on the fringes of legality.
Not without reason, there are many discourses that shape and translate these unequal experiences. They can range from Teologia da Prosperidade (Theology of Prosperity), an important vector in this popular entrepreneurship, to advanced forms of self-management under new technological resources. A complex structure of feelings emerges, made possible over the course of five years of ethnographic observation. This, little by little, gives us a glimpse into the codes and markers of a moral economy that governs wageless life, which becomes increasingly clear over the course of the five chapters that make up the beautiful text of this book.
In short, Henrique Costa – and the new generation of interpreters of which he is a part – are offering us a renewed social science, which unashamedly incorporates advances in urban anthropology, the social history of labour, a sociology of emotions and feelings, and well-established Marxism, leaving us with a new vision of Brazilian society and the challenges we must face. These young researchers leave us with the certainty that Brazil, as has already been said, is not for beginners.
Nadya Araujo Guimarães
São Paulo, Brazil
References
Aldrich, H. (2005) Entrepreneurship. In: Swedberg, Richard; Smelser, Neil (orgs.) The Handbook of Economic Sociology .Second Edition. New York: Russell Sage Foundation; Princeton University Press.
Costa, H. (2022) Um lugar ao sol: Utopia e sofrimento no empreendedorismo popular paulistano. PhD Dissertation. Universidade Estadual de Campinas.
Fontes, L. (2023) Informality, precariousness, and entrepreneurialism: new and old issues of urban labor in Latin America over the last decade (2012–2021). bib– Revista Brasileira de Informação Bibliográfica em Ciências Sociais, 99.
Gregori, M. F. (2000) Viração: experiências de meninos de rua. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.
Machado da Silva, L.A. (1971) Mercados metropolitanos de trabalho manual e marginalidade. Master’s dissertation. Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro.
Machado da Silva, L.A. (2003) Mercado de trabalho, ontem e hoje: informalidade e empregabilidade como categorias de entendimento. In: Santana, M.A.; Ramalho, J.R. Além da Fábrica; Trabalhadores, Sindicatos e a Nova Questão Social. São Paulo: Boitempo.
Maia, M. (2024) Jovem firma procura investidor: como as aceleradoras promovem encontros e moldam startups. PhD Dissertation. Universidade de São Paulo.
Martinelli, A. (1994) Entrepreneurship and Management. In: Swedberg, R.; Smelser, N. (orgs.) The Handbook of Economic Sociology. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Swedberg, R. (ed.) (2000) Entrepreneurship. Oxford: Oxford Management Readers.
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