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The Entrepreneurial Self. Fabricating a New Type of Subject

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Bröckling

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 CONTENTS
About the Author vii
Foreword to the English Edition viii
Introduction xi

1 Genealogy of Subjectification 1
Paradoxes of the self 1
Interpellation of the subject and the subject of interpellation 6
Government of the self 8
Real fictions 10
Programmes, appropriations, resistance 12
The present as problem 14

2 Tracing the Contours of the Entrepreneurial Self 20

Entrepreneurial self or entreployee? 21
The triumph of the entrepreneur 22
Sociological analyses 25
Intrapreneuring 29
How to set up Me Inc. 31
After the new economy 36

PART 1: THE RATIONALITY OF THE

ENTREPRENEURIAL SELF 41

3 The Truth about the Market: Variants of Neo-Liberalism 43

A government of freedom 44
Economic imperialism 48
Competition as a method of discovery 54
Vanishing points of neoliberal governmentality 59

4 The Four Functions of the Entrepreneur 66

The enterpriser as user of profit chances 67
The entrepreneur as innovator 70
The entrepreneur as risk bearer 71
The entrepreneur as coordinator 73
The logic of entrepreneurial practice 75

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 vi The Entrepreneurial Self

5 The Contractual World 81

Expansion and multiplication of the contract 82
Transaction economics 85
An economic theory of the social contract 87
The anthropology of homo contractualis 90
Beyond contractual reason? 93

PART 2: STRATEGIES AND PROGRAMMES 99

6 Creativity 101
Governing creativity 102
Anthropology 103
Psychology 106
Economy 111
Technologies 114

7 Empowerment 121
Genealogy 123
Theory of power 127
Anthropology 129
Levels and processes 131
Psychology 133
Strategies 135
Paradoxes of empowerment 140

8 Quality 147
Total quality management 148
360-degree feedback: the democratic panopticon 159

9 Projects 170
From the projector to the alternative project 172
The ‘projective city’ and ‘the new spirit of capitalism’ 177
Project management 181
Project Me 189

10 Conclusion: Lines of Flight – the Art of Being

Different Differently 196

Bibliography 207
Index 227

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 ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ulrich Bröckling is professor for Cultural Sociology at the Albert-
Ludwigs-University of Freiburg/Germany. His main areas of research
include Studies of Governmentality, Theories of Subjectification, Political
Sociology and Critical Management Studies.

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 FOREWORD TO THE
ENGLISH EDITION
Being an entrepreneur is more than just a profession or even a vocation, nor is it
merely a variety of economic activity or the legal status of being self-employed.
An entrepreneur is something we are supposed to become.The call to act as an
entrepreneur of one’s own life produces a model for people to understand what
they are and what they ought to be, and it tells them how to work on the self
in order to become what they ought to be. In other words, the entrepreneurial
self is a form of subjectification. As such, entrepreneurial activity is less a fact than
a field of force. It is an aim individuals strive for, a gauge by which they judge
their own conduct, a daily exercise for working on the self, and finally a truth
generator by which they come to know themselves.This form of subjectification
is not restricted to independent businesspeople and shareholders.The call to see
ourselves as entrepreneurs of our own lives initiates and sustains this process of
constantly shaping the self.You are only ever an entrepreneur à venir, only ever in
a state of becoming one, never of being one.
People are addressed as entrepreneurs of their own selves in the most
diverse contexts, and they are susceptible to this interpellation because ori-
enting themselves on its field of force leads to basic social recognition. Indeed,
in a marketized world, acting entrepreneurially is the very condition of par-
ticipation in social life. Moved by the desire to stay in touch and the fear
of dropping out of the society of competition, people answer the call to be
entrepreneurial by helping to create the very reality it already presupposed.
The entrepreneurial field of force may indeed tap unknown potential but
it also leads to permanent over-challenging. It may strengthen self-confidence
and what psychologists call self-efficacy but it also exacerbates the feeling
of powerlessness. It may set free creativity but it also generates unbounded
anger. Competition is driven by the promise that the most capable will reap
the most success, but no amount of effort can remove the risk of failure.The
individual has no choice but to balance out in her own subjective self the
objective contradiction between the hope of rising and the fear of decline,
between empowerment and despair, euphoria and dejection.
That is a short summary of some of the basic theses of this book.The origi-
nal German edition was first published in 2007, one year before the greatest
financial crisis to shake the global economy since 1929. Are the book’s

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 Foreword to the English Edition ix

arguments now obsolete? Or has its diagnosis of the rise of the entrepre-
neurial self become instead even more pertinent?
There is a lot to indicate that neoliberal market radicalism has at least been
dampened by the events following the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. This
applies not only to government budgeting und financial markets but also to
the hegemony of entrepreneurial subjectification. Yet the call has not fallen
silent. On the contrary, the crisis has increased the pressure to develop indi-
vidual distinctions, ‘unique selling points’, in order to stay competitive. At the
same time, a new figure needs to be added to that of the entrepreneurial self:
the ‘indebted man’.1 While the entrepreneurial self is continually concerned
with sniffing out profit opportunities, the indebted self must perpetually
re-establish its credit rating.The entrepreneurial self is constantly required to
demonstrate creativity, customer orientation, innovation and the will to take
risks, while the indebted subject must, over and over again, make itself trans-
parent, open up its books and make a convincing show of being able to pay
back its credit.The entrepreneurial self is never finished with self-optimizing,
while the indebted self can never retire from self-revelation.
The current study delineates the entrepreneurial self as an imperative role
model from a Western, and more specifically from a German, perspective. Large
parts of this depiction will also apply to other contemporary societies. Calls to
become a certain type of subject are as susceptible to globalization as anything
else. Yet there are cultural colourations, path dependencies and nuances. The
‘New Spirit of Capitalism’2 has more than just one face. In informal economies
in African, Latin American and Asian countries, as well as in larger Western
cities, armies of ordinary virtuosos must expend all their energies on entre-
preneurial activity just to stay alive. They are propelled onward not by the old
dishwasher-to-millionaire dream but by hunger. If we want to find people
who closely approximate the image of the entrepreneurial self, we should look
not only at the slick adventurers of new economy start-ups but also at the plas-
tic bottle harvesters on the rubbish tips of Lagos and at the windscreen washers
on the intersections of Mexico City, or, for that matter, closer to home, at the
flower vendors in our bistros and bars.
I am indebted to Wolfgang Essbach, Ulrich Jaekel, Stefan Kaufmann,
Susanne Krasmann, Thomas Lemke, Axel. T. Paul, Matthias Schöning and
Manfred Weinberg for their encouragement, criticism and many suggestions.
I thank Steven Black for his careful translation, which has rendered the
academic German of the original in readable English. Warm thanks also go
to Leon Wolff who assisted in the search for English editions of the cited
literature and in proofing bibliographic details, and also to Barbara Handke,
who established contact with SAGE Publications.
Ulrich Bröckling
Freiburg, March 2015

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 x The Entrepreneurial Self

Notes
1. Maurizio Lazzarato (2012) The Making of the Indebted Man: Essay on the
Neoliberal Condition, Los Angeles.
2. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello (2005) The New Spirit of Capitalism,London/
New York.

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 INTRODUCTION
At first, the concierge was intending to write a genealogy of the economic
subject. But he has a fancy for anachronism. That is why he has become a
concierge. Or did the anachronism consist precisely in writing a genealogy of
the economic subject?1

As the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze plaintively remarked in the early

1990s, the notion that enterprises have a soul is ‘the most terrifying news
in the world’.2 The only message to top that is the injunction that every-
one should transform themselves, into the last corner of their souls, into
an entrepreneur on a mission of their own. This injunction is being deliv-
ered today by countless motivation gurus and self-management trainers,
as well as by economists, education experts, trend researchers and politi-
cians of almost all stripes. The present book examines this demand, the
social undertow it generates and the field of force that grows up around it.
The entrepreneurial self that gives the book its title involves a set of inter-
pretative schemes with which people today are supposed to understand
themselves and their lives. It involves normative demands and role models,
as well as institutional arrangements, social technologies and technologies
of self according to which people are expected to regulate their behaviour.
In other words, the entrepreneurial self is what is fashionably referred to in
the business world as a mission statement.
The figure of the entrepreneurial self is used in precisely this sense in a
key document for German discussion, the final report from the Kommission
für Zukunftsfragen Bayern–Sachsen (Bavarian-Saxonian Commission for
Future Concerns) from 1997. Anticipating in its tone much of the reform
agendas that have since been made reality, the report sets an explicit politi-
cal aim. It states that ‘the ideal model for the future is the individual as
self-provider and the entrepreneur of their own labour. This insight must
be awakened; self-initiative and self-responsibility, i.e. the entrepreneurial
in society, must be developed more strongly’.3 The ‘entrepreneurial knowl-
edge society’ of the 21st century is no longer calling for ‘the perfect copyists
of preset blueprints’ as the ‘wage earner oriented industrial society’ of the
20th century had required and produced. What the economy and society
really need are ‘creative, enterprising people with a much greater readiness
and capacity than hitherto to assume responsibility for themselves and others
in all matters’.The task of the state is to provide aid in this period of transition.

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 xii The Entrepreneurial Self

Politics must ‘provide an ordering framework and value orientation’. Those

measures intended to stimulate ‘more entrepreneurial activity and respon-
sibility’ would lead ‘directly to a reduction of the social welfare state’. This,
incidentally, would mean ‘in no way just a loss but also a win for the indi-
vidual and society’. This latter insight is however ignored by large sections
of the population. For which reason, in addition to politics, the economy
and the media were called on to reinforce the popular will to keep up with
progress. The imperative tone is coupled with the threat that Germany’s ‘by
international standards almost unique material prosperity, paired with social
equity, a higher degree of inner and outer security, high amount of leisure
time etc.’ could ‘collapse like a house of cards’ unless ‘individual views and
behaviour as well as collective ideals’ were reoriented on entrepreneurial
practice.4 This dire and urgent tone makes the report itself already part of
the field of force whose construction it is proposing.
The present study is focused on the way this field of force works, on
the energies it consolidates and sets free, on the way it pulls individuals in
contrary directions all at once, as well as on the methods those individuals
employ for adjusting their own movements to the pull. Like the commis-
sion report, this study understands the entrepreneurial self as a programme
for governing. The experts commissioned by the state were pushing to
have the programme carried out. The present work concentrates instead
on understanding it, on bringing into relief the programmes’ strategic ele-
ments, making palpable how the demand is constitutionally unfulfillable
and, finally, demonstrating the logic of exclusion and guilt it consequently
exposes people to. Following Michel Foucault’s lectures on the history of
governmentality5 and the subsequent ‘studies of governmentality’,6 the cur-
rent investigation extends the concept of government beyond the sphere
of state intervention to include other strategies for conditioning human
behaviour. The field of force of the entrepreneurial self draws on various
sources, not only on the decisions of political administration and the recom-
mendations of their expert advisers.
The materials consulted for the study are correspondingly heterogeneous.
Among others, I have analysed macroeconomic, psychological and sociologi-
cal theories as well as management programmes, creativity, communication
and cooperation guidebooks and popular advice books, all of which had in
common that they made explicit the rationale of entrepreneurial practice
and method, thus enabling readers to adapt their behaviour to it as an over-
all ideal model of how to live. The field of force of the entrepreneurial self
is a field of discourse, but it is more than just that. The investigation relies
on books, journal articles and other published writings, but a large part of
the literature consists of texts intended for immediate practical application:
trainings manuals, textbooks, success guides and similar aids are less concerned
with providing convincing arguments than with guiding practice – they are
rarely over-blessed with intellectual brilliance, written either in an exceedingly

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 Introduction xiii

technical or a charismatic, invocational tone.They define a zone of the utter-

able and the knowable, while directed, above all, at the doable. They not only
provide answers to the question ‘what am I supposed to do?’ but also supply
detailed instructions on exactly how to do what one ought to do.
Of course, the survey of the entrepreneurial field of force does not permit
us to state how people really move within it. Which rules and regularities
they follow (including when they diverge from these rules) is of interest to
the present work only insofar as their behaviour is influenced by the strate-
gies and technologies of the entrepreneurial self and to the extent these
make use of methods of quantitative and qualitative sociological research.
What is being investigated therefore is not what those who are subjected to
the regime and who constitute themselves as subjects via this subjugation in
reality say or do, but rather a regime of subjectification. The question is not
how much effective power is possessed by the imperative to be enterpris-
ing, but rather by which means the latter exercises this power. What we are
concerned with is not the reconstruction of meaningful subjective worlds,
behaviour orientation or shifts in the social structure, but with a grammar
of governing and self-governing. Put metaphorically, the book investigates
not how far people let themselves drift or how they use the current to move
forward more quickly, or whether they attempt to evade it or swim against it,
but rather the current itself and how it draws people in particular directions.
Concentrating on the rationale and the programmes of the entrepreneur-
ial self poses a danger of reinforcing the sense of inevitability they endeavour
to suggest. The study seeks to avert this danger by bringing into focus those
programmes’ inherent antinomies: autonomy and heteronomy, rational cal-
culation and action amidst uncertainty, cooperation and competition. This
approach holds open the gap between the unlimited demand and its limited
fulfilment. The issue in what follows is not only what individuals are called
on to do and how they are enabled to do it; the study is also about how their
efforts often go wrong and how they can never entirely satisfy the require-
ments placed upon them.
Such a project runs at diagonals to the current disciplinary divisions
within social research. More precisely, it can be attributed to a number of
different departments. The study is intended primarily as a contribution to
a political sociology that avoids reducing political activity to actions by the
state and other big players. It is also attentive to the micropolitics of the
everyday, to the structures of governance and to all the means by which
individuals, public and private institutions regulate their common concerns.
Entrepreneurial practice is without doubt a specific form of economic
activity and what has been referred to above as a field of force is a dynamics
of assimilating all practice to the model of economic practice. The
question to be further examined here is socio-economical in that it is
concerned with how this practice type is made credible and made to
permeate society. According to an old bon mot by the American economist

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 xiv The Entrepreneurial Self

James Duesenberry, ‘economics is all about how people make choices; soci-
ology is all about how people don’t have any choices to make’.7 In contrast,
the present study shows – and to this extent it is economic sociology –
how the current economization of the social leaves individuals no free
choice except to continuously choose between alternatives they have not
themselves chosen. In other words, people have freedom forced upon them.
As an overall model, the entrepreneurial self develops a particular dyna-
mism in the world of enterprise from which it stems. In the sociology of
work and industry, as well as in the sociology of organization, it has long been
discussed to what extent altered forms of organizing work and business have
rendered obsolete the worker of the Fordist age, that type which the above-
cited commission report cynically caricatures as ‘the perfect copyists of preset
blueprints’, replacing him with the new type of the ‘labour entrepreneur’.8
The present study follows up on this discussion by investigating the way cur-
rent management concepts commit employees to engage in entrepreneurial
practice, deploying strategies to increase employee autonomy, responsibility
and flexibility.
The entrepreneurial self is an offspring of homo economicus, that model of
what it is to be a human, on which the science of economics bases its mod-
els of human behaviour. The description of this figure thus also falls within
the anthropological branch of social science, which analyses implicit and
explicit images of the human and the way such images affect behaviour. Since
the study deals with at least informally sanctioned behavioural norms – the
entrepreneurial self is propagated by means of the promise of success and
the threat of failure – it can also be read within a sociology of norms. With
its concern for the methods by which the entrepreneurial self is generated,
it also contributes to a research domain that could be referred to as the soci-
ology of social technologies and technologies of the self, and that has been
to date little introduced into the discipline and at best systematically elabo-
rated on in studies of governmentality. Sociology must here demonstrate
its capacity for self-reflection, since the technologies for shaping human
behaviour on the entrepreneurial model are based on sociological knowl-
edge and methods.
Finally, mention should be made of cultural sociology. The focus is on
what has come to be termed enterprise culture. The term does not refer to
the ‘us-feeling’, evoked and continually stimulated by images, rituals, narra-
tives and codes of conduct to promote employee commitment to ‘their’ firm
and reinforce corporate identity. Nor does it refer to the inner worlds and
underworlds of businesses brought to light by ethnographers of the labour
world. The term ‘enterprise culture’ refers here to the symbolic order of that
field of force that makes ‘be enterprising!’ the overarching maxim by which
to govern the self and others, extending the model beyond the confines of
business to enter all aspects of life.

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 Introduction xv

The structure of the investigation

How can a research project be successfully carried out that is situated in
so many different contexts at once? The book abstains from reconstruct-
ing the field of force of the entrepreneurial self from a central perspective.
Instead, it gathers together a series of individual investigations that approach
the regime of subjectification from different angles, favouring exemplary
examinations over a systematic presentation. The coherence of the whole
consists not in an architectonics in which each element is assigned a fixed
place, but in the convergence of lines.
The study begins with a methodological section (Chapter 1) which out-
lines the research programme, responding to impulses in particular from
Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Nikolas Rose, Gunther Teubner and
Michael Hutter. This chapter contours a genealogy of subjectification to be
undertaken in the following chapters, contrasting it with other sociological
theories. Here, we will not yet be treating the entrepreneurial self specifi-
cally but rather elaborating on what is a subjectification regime in general
and how it can be studied.
Chapter 2 begins by gathering evidence, following the career of the
entrepreneurial self and related figures such as the ‘intrapreneur’ and the
‘Me Inc.’ in political journalism, in current sociological research, in manage-
ment discourse and finally in state measures for activating self-­entrepreneurship
as a means of raising employability (the so-called Hartz-Gesetze). This is
preceded by an evaluation of the theory from G. Günter Voß and Hans J.
Pongratz of the transition from employee to ‘entreployee’,9 which shows
clearly the divergent research vectors that proceed from a parallel set of basic
assumptions.
The subjectification regime of the entrepreneurial self is also a regime of
knowledge whose power consists in no small part in conveying to people a
truth about themselves, about the logic behind their actions and their social
relations. This aspect is explored in more depth in Chapter 3, which analy-
ses those economic theories and schools of thought that lend credibility to
the regime of generalized entrepreneurship and establish the rationale of
entrepreneurial practice.
Chapter 3 reconstructs how the precursors of German ordoliberalism, US
human capital theorists and Friedrich August von Hayek, a leading propo-
nent of the Austrian School of Economics, proposed the market as that agency
guaranteeing an optimal (self) regulation of social exchange. According to this
point of view, competition among market agents (also according to this view,
entrepreneurial individuals are nothing if not market agents) is the source not
only of economic but also of political reason and should therefore be kept
free of all restrictions and strengthened by favourable conditions.The compar-
ison of these three variants of neo-liberalism also illustrates their divergence.

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 xvi The Entrepreneurial Self

The ordoliberal discussion tends to push the political protection of competi-

tion, while human capital theory construes human behaviour generally as
action under the conditions of competition, thus construing homo economicus
as an entrepreneurial self. Meanwhile, von Hayek emphasizes the random-
ness of market events, interpreting competition as an evolutionary process
advancing independently of the will of individual protagonists.
Chapter 4 explores the question of what distinguishes entrepreneurial
practice from other forms of human activity. Instead of seeking person-
ality traits for entrepreneurs, as does economical psychology, we are here
concerned with the kind of economical definitions of the entrepreneur as
function worked out in particular by Ludwig von Mises, Israel M. Kirzner,
Joseph Schumpeter, Frank H. Knight and Mark Casson. On their account,
entrepreneurs are, first, alert discoverers of speculative profit opportunities;
second, innovative, creative destroyers of existing means of production and
distribution; third, risk takers; and fourth, coordinators of the production
process optimizing resource allocation. These four basic functions converge
where they transgress their own borders and struggle to outdo one another
under the dictate of comparison.
Chapter 5 addresses the contract, that fundamental social institution for
regulating exchange relations and by extension entrepreneurial activity.
It has been observed that the principle of the contract is currently being
extended to relations previously not subject to contractual regulation. At
the same time, the specifically economical contract is pushing back other
contractual traditions. From this perspective, it will be examined how trans-
action cost theory (Alchian, Demsetz and Williamson) defines questions of
social organization generally as contract problems, evaluating contractual
arrangements exclusively in terms of the transaction costs incurred. The
decision to adopt this or that form of contractual agreement is thereby
subject to calculation in entrepreneurial terms and to entrepreneurial risks.
James M. Buchanan’s constitutional economics provides an economic the-
ory of the social contract according to which the state is brought about by
individuals calculating utility maximization. Buchanan posits that people
agree on collective rules of play in order to best pursue their own indi-
vidual benefit, in particular to protect property. While these rules restrict
people’s freedom to act, they put them in a better position than they oth-
erwise would be without state-guaranteed rights. Institutional economics
and its theory of the contract are based on an anthropology that grasps
human beings fundamentally as the property owners of their own selves. In
order to accumulate human capital, they need to divide themselves up into
a number of distinct assets and an additional entity to administer these assets
by exchange and cooperation with a view to profit.
The entrepreneurial self is not merely a construct derived from theories
of economics. It is the telos written into current strategies of mobilizing and
optimizing people; strategies or technologies with the effect of imperatives

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 Introduction xvii

operating not only within the economic sphere but in society in general.
This is shown in Chapter 6. Four key concepts are examined here: creativity,
empowerment, quality management and the concept of the project.Together,
they illuminate various facets of entrepreneurial activity, at the same time
translating them into social technologies and technologies of the self.
Creativity (Chapter 6) is an element of innovation, the ability to recog-
nize and grasp chances for profit and the creative destruction that makes
space for new things. A chief concern in this chapter is the way the psy-
chology of creativity conceptualizes the capacity for innovation as a human
faculty, a social, normative aim as well as a learnable skill, at the same time
providing appropriate techniques for developing and increasing this skill.
The entrepreneurial self is supposed to be active and self-reliant. Its con-
fidence in its own power should be reinforced and constantly self-affirmed.
This purpose is served by strategies of empowerment. Chapter 7 traces the
origins of empowerment back to the emancipation struggles of grassroots
social movements, as well as to their disparate fields of application and appro-
priation. This illuminates the paradox of the empowerment programmes,
which work by attributing powerlessness to their prospective recipients and
then offering to eradicate said powerlessness.
The heading Quality (Chapter 8) points to the way the entrepreneurial
self must market its human capital in such a way as to find buyers for the
skills and products it has on offer. In other words, quality means customer
orientation. This will be demonstrated using the example of total quality
management – the continual safeguarding and improvement of standards
through elaborate techniques of quality control which systematically extend
the model of the market to include personal relations within firms.There will
also be an examination of 360-degree feedback, which integrates employees
and supervisors in a panoptical system of mutual observation and evaluation
intended to set in motion a dynamic of permanent self-optimization.
Chapter 9 subsequently deals with the phenomenon of the project. On
the one hand, this means the sequencing of work (and by extension of all
of life) in temporary enterprises demanding a maximum of flexibility from
the entrepreneurial self. On the other hand, the idea of the project implies
a specific mode of cooperation, for example ‘project teams’, both permit-
ting and at the same time imposing a high degree of self-organization. The
chapter reconstructs the genesis of ‘projection’, departing from Daniel
Defoe’s Essay upon Projects, through to alternative projects from the 1970s,
before employing Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello’s study The New Spirit of
Capitalism to sketch a profile of the requirements made of a project worker.
The following sections use standard manuals to investigate technologies
that ensure the smoothest possible project management and self-modelling
under the principle ‘Project Me’.
In the conclusion (Chapter 10), the study doubles back to the sense
of uneasiness it started with. As the contours of the entrepreneurial self

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 xviii The Entrepreneurial Self

emerged more distinctly, its shadow sides also imposed itself with increasing
force: the demand to optimize becomes interminable, selection by competi-
tion becomes increasingly relentless, the fear of failure becomes irresistible.
This should all be reason enough to get out of the way of the field of force
created by the entrepreneurial call. The sense of uneasiness grew in the
course of the study as it became apparent how market mechanisms either
absorb or marginalize opposing tendencies, recasting non-conformism
itself as a measure of successful conformity to the entrepreneurial self. The
closing chapter suggests exhaustion, irony and passive resistance as three ways
of disturbing the entrepreneurial field of force. It closes with consideration
of a question: How can the compulsion to be different be transformed into
the art of being different in a different way?
Several of the considerations presented here go back to lectures and
articles I have published elsewhere.10 They have been reworked and
supplemented here.

Notes
1. Ernst-Wilhelm Händler (2002) Wenn wir sterben, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
p. 470.
2. Gilles Deleuze (1992) ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, October, 59,
Winter, pp. 3–7, here: p. 7.
3. Kommission für Zukunftsfragen Bayern–Sachsen (ed.) (1997) Erwerbstätigkeit
und Arbeitslosigkeit in Deutschland. Entwicklung, Ursachen und Maßnahmen,Teil
III: Maßnahmen zur Verbesserung der Beschäftigungslage, Bonn, p. 36, www.
bayern.de/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Bericht-der-Kommission-für-
Zukunftsfragen-der-Freistaaten-Bayern-und-Sachsen-Teil-3.pdf
4. Kommission für Zukunftsfragen Bayern–Sachsen (ed.) (1997) pp. 35–44.
5. See Michel Foucault (2009) Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the
Collège de France 1977–1978, New York: Picador; Foucault (2010) The Birth
of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, New York: Picador.
In the German editions, the two lecture series are joined under the heading
Geschichte der Gouvernementalität, vols 1 and 2.
6. For an overview, see: Ulrich Bröckling, Susanne Krasmann and Thomas
Lemke (2012) ‘From Foucault’s Lectures at the Collège de France to Studies of
Governmentality: An Introduction’, in: Ulrich Bröckling, Susanne Krasmann
and Thomas Lemke (eds), Governmentality: Current Issues and Future Challenges
(2nd edition), Routledge, pp. 1–34. I adopt here, and in the following, the ter-
minology employed by Thomas Osborne who distinguishes between studies
of governmentality and governmentality studies: ‘The former proceed nominalisti-
cally and are basically an exercise in the history of thought.The latter resemble
rather a realistic political sociology in search of just that more or less regular
generalizations about our present from which the former are trying to lib-
erate us!’ The approach of the studies of governmentality is ‘admittedly not

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 Introduction xix

indifferent to those questions of most interest to the social sciences but it

has a different point of departure that must be taken into account as such.
Otherwise there would result presumably a kind of symmetrical split with
the sociologists complaining about the insufficient consideration of the social
in the studies of governmentality and those concerned with governmental-
ity would accuse sociology of lacking interest in questions of government.
And all that despite the fact that both lines of research – leaving the carefree
amalgam of governmentality studies out of the picture – do entirely different
things. Vive la difference’ (Thomas Osborne (2001) ‘Techniken und Subjekte:
Von den “Governmentality Studies” zu den “Studies of Governmentality”’,
in: Demokratie. Arbeit. Selbst: Analysen liberal-demokratischer Gesellschaften im
Anschluss an Michel Foucault, Mitteilungen des Instituts für Wissenschaft und Kunst
Wien, 56(2/3), pp. 12–16, here: p. 14).
7. James Duesenberry (1960) ‘Comment on “An Economic Analysis of
Fertility”’, in: The Universities National Bureau Committee for Economic
Research (ed.), Demographic and Economic Change in Developed Countries,
Princeton, p. 233.
8. See Chapter 2.
9. Pongratz, H. J. and Voß, G. G. (2003) ‘From Employee to “Entreployee”:
Towards a “Self-Entrepreneurial” Work Force?’, in: Concepts and Trans­
formation, 8(3), pp. 239–254.
10. (2000) ‘Totale Mobilmachung: Menschenführung im Qualitäts- und
Selbst­management’, in: Ulrich Bröckling, Susanne Krasmann and Thomas
Lemke (eds), Gouvernementalität der Gegenwart, Frankfurt, pp. 131–167;
(2002) ‘Das unternehmerische Selbst und seine Geschlechter: Gender-
Konstruktionen in Erfolgsratgebern’, in: Leviathan, 30, pp. 175–194; (2002)
‘Jeder könnte, aber nicht alle können: Konturen des unternehmerischen
Selbst’, in: Mittelweg 36, 11(4), Aug./Sept., pp. 6–26; (2002) ‘Diktat des
Komparativs: Zur Anthropologie des “unternehmerischen Selbst”’, in:
Ulrich Bröckling and Eva Horn (eds), Anthropologie der Arbeit, Tübingen,
pp. 157–173; (2003) ‘Das demokratisierte Panopticon: Subjektivierung
und Kontrolle im 360°-Feedback’, in: Axel Honneth and Martin
Saar (eds), Michel Foucault: Zwischenbilanz einer Rezeption. Frankfurter
Foucault-Konferenz 2001, Frankfurt, pp. 77–93; (2003) ‘You are not
Responsible for Being down, but you are responsible for getting up: Über
Empowerment’, in: Leviathan, 31, pp. 323–344; (2004) ‘Über Kreativität:
Ein Brainstorming’, in: Ulrich Bröckling, Axel T. Paul and Stefan Kaufmann
(eds), Vernunft – Entwicklung – Leben: Schlüsselbegriffe der Moderne, Munich,
pp. 235–243; (2004) ‘Empowerment’,‘Kontrakt’,‘Kreativität’,‘Unternehmer’,
in: Ulrich Bröckling, Susanne Krasmann and Thomas Lemke (eds), Glossar
der Gegenwart, Frankfurt, pp. 55–62, 132–138, 139–144, 271–276; (2005)
‘Projektwelten: Anatomie einer Vergesellschaftungsform’, in: Leviathan, 33,
pp. 364–383; (2005) ‘Gendering the Enterprising Self: Subjectification
Programs and Gender Differences in Guides to Success’, in: Distinktion:
Scandinavian Journal for Social Theory, 11, Oct., pp. 7–25; (2007) ‘Regime
des Selbst: Ein Forschungsprogramm’, in: Thorsten Bonacker and Andreas

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 xx The Entrepreneurial Self

Reckwitz (eds), Kulturen der Moderne. Soziologische Perspektiven der Gegenwart,

Frankfurt, pp. 119–139; (2010) ‘Human Economy, Human Capital: A
Critique of Biopolitical Economy’, in: Ulrich Bröckling, Susanne Krasmann
and Thomas Lemke (eds), Governmentality: Current Issues and Future Challenges,
New York, pp. 247–268.

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