Article

Time & Society

2020, Vol. 29(1) 103–123
Young entrepreneurs ! The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0961463X19873783
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and the UK

Clare Holdsworth
School of Geography, Geology and the
Environment, Keele University, Keele, UK

Marina Mendonça
Department of Psychology, University of Warwick,
University Road, Coventry, UK

Abstract
The promotion of young enterprise is central to European Union youth policy,
particularly since the financial crisis of 2007/2008. Expectations that young
people need to be enterprising and eschew dependency on formal structures
of salaried employment are a key narrative in European and national youth
policies. These policy initiatives correspond with recent theoretical develop-
ment of the entrepreneurial self as a managerial version of the governable
individual. Endorsements of entrepreneurship implicitly promote a normative
expectation that young people’s future orientations need to be innovative,
flexible and creative. There is, therefore, an implicit temporality to youth entre-
preneurship. This paper’s contribution to scholarship on how young lives are
promoted and produced as entrepreneurial selves is to document how young
people’s engagement with entrepreneurship fosters orientations to present and
future. Conventionally entrepreneurs are assumed to be goal-orientated. In our
qualitative study of young entrepreneurs in two European countries (n ¼ 28),
we find that this assumption of goal-orientation needs qualification. Young

Corresponding author:
Clare Holdsworth, School of Geography, Geology and the Environment, Keele University, Keele
ST5 5BG, UK.
Email: c.m.holdsworth@keele.ac.uk
104 Time & Society 29(1)

entrepreneurs in our study engage with the idea that being an entrepreneur is
about being creative rather than seeking to maximise financial profit. Their
focus on creativity, innovation and problem-solving is realised through a non-
teleological commitment to what they are doing in the here and now, rather
than calibrating their activities in relation to predetermined goals and worrying
about the possibility of future failure.

Keywords
Young people, entrepreneurship, present, future, non-teleology

Introduction
Young people’s entrepreneurship has received significant political endorse-
ment in recent years, particularly since the global financial crisis of 2007/
2008 (Council of European Union, 2014; European Commission, 2018).
The promotion of young entrepreneurship encourages new entrants to
the labour market to be responsible for their own economic trajectories
and not be dependent on conventional career pathways in order to create
new employment opportunities, products and services. Entrepreneurs are
simultaneously depicted as saviours, heroes, risk takers, creators and inno-
vators. Although the number of young people in Europe who set up their
own business remains relatively small (Green, 2013), the promotion of
entrepreneurial activity transcends the specific focus on business develop-
ment; for young people it applies to governing the self. Thus, while the
endorsement of young entrepreneurship has heightened since the 2007
crash, this revisioning of the labour market is part of a much wider
social and economic change that reorganises social relations around the
centrality of enterprise (Davies, 2014; Gane, 2012; Martilla, 2013;
Rose, 1999).
The technologies of the self that are inherent to entrepreneurship are
implicitly about time. The premise of youth entrepreneurship is that young
people need to innovate in the present moment to secure both their own
future and that of their generation. This promotion of the possibility of
youth entrepreneurship cuts across traditional preoccupations in youth
studies on the relevance, or otherwise, of future ‘plans’. Debates about
youth temporalities have pivoted around young people’s future orienta-
tions and their ability to realise these. Evoking entrepreneurship suggests
a subtle intervention as rather than separating the present from the future,
young people enact possible or imagined futures through innovation in the
present. The extent to which creative entrepreneurial activity is driven by
Holdsworth and Mendonça 105

goal-orientated behaviour is, however, contested. Creativity may be

approached as a solution to securing specific goals, or as non-teleological
practices that respond to particular assemblages of opportunities and net-
works and for which the future is unknown. In this paper, we examine the
temporal orientation of young entrepreneurs and how they relate their
entrepreneurial experiences to non-teleological temporality through priori-
tising meaningful, bearable and even hopeful everyday agency rather than
orientation to ‘in order to intentions’ (Reiter, 2003).
Our account of the temporalities of entrepreneurship develops recent
scholarship on the young people’s tuning to an entrepreneurial mind-set
(Holdsworth, 2018; Ikonen and Nikunen, 2019; Oininen, 2018) through
considering the temporalities of enterprise. We begin by outlining the rela-
tionship between the entrepreneurial self and scholarship on creativity and
enterprise and how this can be related to scholarship on youth and time.
We then present the analysis of 28 biographical narrative interviews with
young entrepreneurs in the UK and Portugal that explores their orienta-
tions to entrepreneurship and how these are resolved through a commit-
ment to making the everyday possible and investing themselves into their
enterprise. The contribution of the paper is to establish an empirical basis
for re-visioning the entrepreneurial self, not as the ubiquitous legitimising
of economic rationality, but as a form of selfhood tuned through creative
behaviours that are orientated to non-teleological agency, rather than cal-
ibrated by specific outcomes.

Enterprise and the entrepreneurial self

The appropriation of entrepreneurship as a political strategy for ‘fixing’ the
challenges of youth unemployment assumes that it a self-evident activity
and has relatively little to say about what entrepreneurship is. In contrast,
in academic scholarship it is possible to encounter a range of concepts
surrounding the notion of enterprise. At one end, it refers to business
entrepreneurialism measured by economic activity and the potential to
create jobs for others. At the other end, being enterprising is about the
ability to be creative, to exercise initiative in order to solve problems
(Cunningham and Lischeron, 1991; Gartner, 1988; Kirzner, 1997; Low,
2001; McKenzie et al., 2007; Obschonka and Silbereisen, 2012;
Sarasvathy and Venkataraman, 2011; Shane and Venkataraman, 2000;
Williams and Nadin, 2013). Entrepreneurship may, therefore, infer calcu-
lated economic behaviours orientated towards profit and business growth,
or, following Schumpeter (1942), it can be associated with the capacity to
be creative. As Schumpeter suggests this latter activity does not equate with
acting according to rational economic criteria. Bringing new products or
106 Time & Society 29(1)

services to market involves taking risks that cannot be calibrated by eco-

nomic rationality (Dahms, 1995). In response to debates in the literature on
how to define entrepreneurship, scholarship has shifted towards emphasis-
ing creativity and the contexts that stimulate innovative activities.
Creativity is not simply equated with individual inspiration but how it
unfolds through particular assemblages of opportunities which include
identification of new products or services and personal networks that facil-
itate bringing new ideas into actuality (Hjorth, 2004; Puhakka, 2012).
Rather than focussing on individual characteristics and behaviours, this
orientation towards creativity foregrounds a relational interpretation of
how entrepreneurs respond to business opportunities through facilitating
networks. Evoking entrepreneurship as a creative act can also reveal how it
‘plays the very role of creating disruptions and breaks with normalizing and
regulating forces’ (Hjorth, 2005: 396) to bring about social change.
It is towards the interpretation of enterprise that foregrounds innova-
tion, creativity and flexibility that the conceptualisation of the entrepre-
neurial self has been developed (Weiskopf, 2007). The capacity to be
entrepreneurial is not assumed to be inherent but rather can be developed
as a project of the self (Br€
ockling, 2015; Kelly, 2006, 2013). The conceptu-
alisation of the entrepreneurial self is aligned to Foucault’s (1977) central
claim of governmentality that the individual is not given but produced
through technologies of power. Foucault’s (2008) later writings on biopo-
litics interpret governmentality not just as institutional forms of surveil-
lance and discipline but as ‘broader analysis of what he calls the liberal “art
of government”’ (Gane, 2012: 612). The entrepreneurial self is a managerial
version of the governable person. It espouses the principle that self-
development should cultivate ‘a form of personhood that sees individuals
as being responsible for conducting themselves, in the business of life, as an
enterprise, a project, a work in progress’ (Kelly, 2006: 18 emphasis in orig-
inal). The entrepreneurial self can never be completed, as responsible indi-
viduals are called upon to be adaptable, flexible and open to change and to
‘enhance and capitalise on existence itself through calculated acts and
investments’ (Rose, 1999: 164). Being entrepreneurial is not therefore cal-
ibrated by the rationality of profit-maximisation assumed in classical eco-
nomics, but instead promotes the continual development of the working
subject who is ‘portrayed (and prescribed) as being enthusiastic, and even
passionate’ (Weiskopf, 2007: 142). The requirement to engage in the con-
tinual production of the entrepreneurial self through emotional commit-
ment to enterprise equates with Foucault’s claim that the creation of
oneself is a ‘work of art’ that evolves in a non-linear form (Weiskopf,
2007: 149).
Holdsworth and Mendonça 107

This mode of existence is necessarily hypothetical as there are no clearly

defined set of criteria through which the project of entrepreneurial self can be
achieved (Br€ ockling, 2015; Martilla, 2013). Foucault’s claim for governmen-
tality does not propose defined criteria of how life should develop as a work
of art, but that this incitement is intended as a way of regulating the self.
Empirical studies of young people reveal how they judge their own lives
against the assumed aesthetics of entrepreneurial practice (Ikonen and
Nikunen, 2019; Oininen, 2018). The governing of the self is not proscriptive
and young people’s tuning into entrepreneurial aesthetics and practice embra-
ces strategies for resistance as well as compliance. In particular, the hustle of
entrepreneurship is calibrated by commitment to self-care to make the project
of entrepreneurship manageable and bearable (Ikonen and Nikunen, 2019).

The entrepreneurial self and youth temporalities

One of the enduring challenges for youth researchers’ conceptualisation of
time is that youth, as a time of liminality, simultaneously embraces both
present and future. As Reiter argues the presence of the future in young
people’s lives has stimulated teleological interpretations in which actions in
the present are understood as ‘in order to intentions’ (Reiter, 2003). Studies
of youth temporality have therefore focussed on if and how young people
make future plans and how these are conditioned by prevailing social,
economic and political contexts. In particular, the study of time and
youth has developed through the lens of individualisation and risk and
the extent to which it is possible for young people to make future plans
and realise these (Brannen and Nilsen, 2005). As Cook (2015) describes,
there are two main interpretations of how the precarity of youth transitions
impacts on young people’s temporality. According to theories of individu-
alisation (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002), the demise of structural tradi-
tions requires young people to take responsibility for their own futures and
carve out their own transitions. In contrast, writing from the perspective of
social acceleration, Rosa (2013) suggests that uncertainty generated by
acceleration (both social change and the pace of life moves quickly)
means that it becomes impossible for people to plan. From either perspec-
tive, young people experience the intensity of uncertainty brought about by
the collapse of structured transitions (Woodman, 2009) and the accelera-
tion of social life (Leccardi, 2012). As Cook (2015) finds for Australian
youth, it is not possible to discern a singular youth temporality. The empir-
ical evidence suggests a range of options between those who developed
clearly articulated plans of the future and others for whom future planning
remained unbearable. Differential future-orientations are also related to
experiences of waiting. For example, Jeffrey (2010) examines the
108 Time & Society 29(1)

experiences of extreme waiting for young Indian men through the concept
of ‘Timepass’ and Cuzzocrea (2019) investigates procrastinations of tran-
sitions to adulthood among Italian youth as experiences of ‘moratorium’.
Quantitative and qualitative interpretations of ‘waiting’ are politically and
culturally contingent and deeply embedded in institutional and social con-
texts (Baraister, 2017). The corpus of youth research that has developed
around accounts of postponed, extended or yo-yo transitions to adulthood
interjects a further dimension to temporality in which the future is dislo-
cated from the present.
The particular interest of this study is to develop understanding of youth
temporality through the lens of the entrepreneurial self to examine if and
how young people’s tuning into this mindset further unsettles the assump-
tion of teleological rationality. The expectation that the entrepreneur should
create herself as a ‘work of art’ and to be open to a non-linear process of
personal development and innovation evokes a lived present which signifies
the future. Entrepreneurs innovate in response to opportunities around
them. This emphasis on creativity foregrounds the fusion of present and
future, though there remain competing interpretations of how this is realised
(Korsgaard, 2013). On the one hand, creativity can be approached as a tel-
eological process that emphasises how the creative process is orientated
towards a particular outcome (Alvarez and Barney, 2007; Buenstorf,
2007). This interpretation aligns with quantitative analysis of entrepreneur-
ial activities which finds that entrepreneurs are more goal-orientated
(Przepiorka, 2016). In contrast to this goal-orientated approach, creativity
can be theorised as innovating new products, services or behaviours, which
emphasises the transformative nature of enterprise (Buchanan and Vanberg,
1991). The development of non-teleological economics advances a radical
subjectivist paradigm in which the future is indeterminate and entrepreneur-
ial activity unfolds over time rather than being oriented to a definable future
goal (Lachmann, 1976; Zivdar and Imanipour, 2017). In contrast to a tele-
ological approach for which the future is anticipated and knowable, from a
non-teleological perspective, entrepreneurial activity is stimulated by uncer-
tainty, rather than the certainty of achieving predetermined goals. If out-
comes are accepted as unknown, orientation towards creativity is realised
through activities in the present time, such as piloting ideas, developing
networks of investors and clients, and bringing prototypes to market.
Developing a non-teleological approach to entrepreneurship does not
infer that outcomes are insignificant, but suggests a rethink about how
activities are related to outcomes. One way in which this can be reconcep-
tualised is in relation to failure. Research on entrepreneurship identifies
failure as a psychological factor that both inhibits and motivates
Holdsworth and Mendonça 109

entrepreneurial activity and this causal approach is essentially teleological

(Cacciotti and Hayton, 2015). Yet failure does not have to be considered as a
final outcome to be avoided, but rather as an essential and experiential learn-
ing experience (Cope, 2011; Politis and Gabrielsson, 2009). This mantra of
‘fail first’, that an entrepreneur can learn from her mistakes, softens the neo-
liberal requirement of the necessity of failure as an inevitable outcome of
competition. Through turning failure into a potential future success, failure
is not considered to be a definitive final outcome. Early setbacks are celebrat-
ed as endorsement of the unique vision of the entrepreneur and how these
individuals have succeeded because they learnt from early failures. Embracing
failure and overcoming its fear has spawned a publishing frenzy of books on
the challenges and opportunities of failure (see for example Hartford, 2011,
Harvard Business Review Staff, 2011). The doctrine of ‘fail first’ also reveals
the limitations of teleological rationality. In particular, a substantive critique
of teleology is goal-failure, which is that actions do not necessarily result in
their intended goal (Wright, 1968). Failure is not an intended outcome, and
through turning it into a ‘success’, or at least a springboard for something
new, it negates its status as an outcome.
While the notion of learning through failure unsettles the application of
teleological rationality to the study of entrepreneurship, it does implicitly
suggest that achieving future success is the main temporal orientation for
entrepreneurs. Against this preoccupation with avoiding failure that dom-
inates studies of enterprise from a business/management perspective, socio-
logical studies of creativity and enterprise have explored how these are
hopeful, rather than necessarily fearful, endeavours. In particular,
Alacovska’s (2019) study of creative workers develops an account of
hope as ‘an active moral practice oriented towards the present’ as well as
an existential position. Her empirical study of creative workers draws atten-
tion to hope as a quality of mundane, everyday practices. But more than
this she suggests that hope is not just a blunt manifestation of resilience, but
an expression of ‘generating more generous and politicized alternatives to
adaptability’ (p. 1133). Her study underlies the necessity of documenting
the everyday experiences of entrepreneurship not just because these confirm
the brutal force of governmentality but can equally reveal the hopeful
potency of agency that resists the mantra of adaptability and the necessity
of learning through failure. This resonates with empirical studies of young
people’s orientations to an entrepreneurial mind-set, and how they attune
to the necessity of maintaining everyday practices of self-care to mollify
requirements of adaptability. Our empirical study probes the significance of
everyday practices that foreground what is happening in the present among
young entrepreneurs in Portugal and the UK.
110 Time & Society 29(1)

Methodology
The data for this paper are taken from a project on youth entrepreneurship
in Portugal and the UK funded by the European Union, through a Marie
Curie Actions individual fellowship. The research was carried out from
November 2014 to November 2016. The rationale for the research was to
compare young people in different labour market contexts. The UK has
lower youth unemployment (13.0% in 2016, OECD, 2016) but more devel-
oped formal support networks for young entrepreneurs. In comparison to
other European youth, British young people are more likely to perceive
that entrepreneurs generate beneficial products for all and create jobs
(Eurofound, 2015). Portugal is characteristic of other Southern European
countries in recording higher rates of youth unemployment (27.9% in 2016,
OECD, 2016) and young self-employment compared to Northern Europe
(e.g. Eurofound, 2015; Kelley et al., 2016).
The recruitment of participants followed a similar procedure in both
countries. First, we explored and established contact with organisations
that provided support to young entrepreneurs (e.g. entrepreneurship train-
ing programmes, business nests, incubators). Recruitment was carried out
in the Metropolitan area of Porto in Portugal and in the North West and
West Midlands regions of UK. Stakeholders who agreed to collaborate
with the study were asked to participate in an interview and facilitate
access to young entrepreneurs whom they supported. Following these
stakeholder interviews, potential young participants were sent an invitation
email with an information sheet about the study. Young entrepreneurs
were reimbursed with a voucher worth £20 or 20e (depending on the coun-
try). Additional young participants were also recruited directly via entre-
preneurial events and activities. The definition of ‘young’ for this sample
was 18 to 35. The ‘older’ upper age of 35 for recruiting the young partic-
ipants was appropriate for this study as definitions of youth incorporate
older ages in Southern Europe. In terms of entrepreneurial activity, we
defined this as having established their own venture, this was not necessar-
ily their only source of income and no criteria of economic profitability was
used in this definition. The interviews with young people used a biograph-
ical approach, during which they were asked to tell their story about how
and why they became entrepreneurs, and the interviews lasted between
45 minutes and 2 hours (Wengraf, 2001). This interview approach was
used as it foregrounds participants’ own experiences and uses these to
frame the subsequent interview, rather than relying on pre-determined
questions or themes.
In total, we carried out 10 interviews with stakeholders and 28 biograph-
ical interviews with youth entrepreneurs in each country. Of the 28
Holdsworth and Mendonça 111

interviews with young people, the sample consisted of 16 Portuguese young

entrepreneurs and 12 British entrepreneurs. There is a gender bias in the
sample with more men than women; 3 of the 16 Portuguese participants
were women and 4 of the 12 British interviewees. The young people self-
identified as entrepreneurs and were involved in a range of activities includ-
ing social enterprise. Five and two members of the Portuguese and UK
young people, respectively, were involved in social enterprises. Moreover,
some respondents were working as employees and their entrepreneurial
activities were not their only source of income.
For this paper, as we are interested in entrepreneurial experiences, we
use the interviews with young people only. These interviews were analysed
by repeated readings and identification of major themes and was carried
out in the original language of each interview. In this paper, we present the
analysis of how young people articulate the development of everyday entre-
preneurial activities and how these are calibrated by three leitmotifs: com-
mitment, freedom and failure. For this paper, we do not specifically
compare the UK and Portuguese experiences, though this was the rationale
for the original project. The justification for this approach is that our anal-
ysis of the temporalities of entrepreneurship did not reveal differences
between young people in the two countries, rather we found similarities
in the narratives, even accounting for the fact that the interviews were
carried out in two different languages.

Analysis
Commitment
Although the interviews were carried out using a biographical approach
and were not directed to pre-determined themes and questions, there are
some topics that almost all respondents talked about, demonstrating how
entrepreneurship is a shared and normative experience. One unifying theme
that young people talked about is the expectation that they had to commit
time to their ventures. References to ‘keep on going’ and working ‘24
hours’ were ubiquitous and we present short extracts from four interviews
to illustrate the similarity in which the concept of ‘keep on going’ is evoked
among British and Portuguese young people:

You have to build something. You have to do things. You have to go out
there. You have to keep going, keep going, and keep going. Aidan UK –Tech
start up
112 Time & Society 29(1)
You’ve just literally got to keep going. It’s your positivity that keeps you
going . . . for me it was sort of, like, you know, I’m going to keep going, I’m
going to find more work and just get on with it. Lisa UK – Organic foodstore

It’s like, this is 24-hours, I can’t get out of here and stop thinking about it,
right? I can’t wake up and not think about it. Gonçalo, Portugal – Online
bikini store

because being an entrepreneur, as a rule, is working 24 hours, you may not be

working physically in the company but you’re always thinking Tiago,
Portugal –multiple enterprises.

This temporal commitment is developed in two ways. First is the commit-

ment not to stop and calculate the effectiveness of entrepreneurial activities.
As both Aidan and Lisa describe their commitment to ‘keep on going’
reveals the non-teleological orientation of starting a new venture, as what
matters is to retain focus on developing the business, to keep on working
and not be preoccupied about future goals but to focus on the task at hand.
This form of commitment confirms a central claim of governmentality that
the project of self-development is a continual process that never comes to
an end (Weiskopf, 2007).
The second aspect of this temporal commitment is that it is all consum-
ing. The claims for 24-hour working should not be taken literally; these
young entrepreneurs were not spending all of their time at work, but felt as
if they could not get away. Echoing Br€ ockling’s (2015) suggestion that the
entrepreneurial self is a hypothetical force that is impossible to achieve in
reality, our respondents endorsed the idea that the commitment to enter-
prise should be all encompassing. Even if not actually at work, as Tiago
suggests they are thinking about enterprise. Tiago associates 24-hour com-
mitment with preoccupation about problems that need to be resolved, as
only he could respond to these. His continual focus on problem-solving is
simultaneously draining and rewarding. Through identifying entrepreneur-
ship as a continual commitment, respondents endorsed the heroic qualities
of enterprise (Sørensen, 2008). One young British entrepreneur, Anna who
is establishing a social enterprise, suggests the commitment to ‘keep on
going’ demonstrates self-commitment, as the ‘only thing holding it back
is your own mind’.
Temporal commitment is also associated with facilitating creativity.
Rather than equating creativity with a time-limited definition of inspira-
tion, commitment to enterprise enables the development of new products,
Holdsworth and Mendonça 113

as Natasha describes:

I’m lucky in that my business is so creative and I’ve got full control over what
happens and what I do. I dream about something, I get up the next day and I
make it. Natasha, UK – Online cosmetics store.

Commitment is not therefore equated with drudgery but is essential to realise

young entrepreneurs’ creative aspirations. The capacity to be always working
contributes to the opportunity nexus that facilities entrepreneurial innova-
tion. What matters is being able to act on new ideas or solve problems and
these challenges need to be addressed in the present and not procrastinated.
Young entrepreneurs’ commitment to invest in themselves through ded-
icating time to business projects contrasts with their attitude to investing
money. For the most part, young people were more reluctant to invest
financially in new ventures or risk getting into debt. Lack of financial
investment was a reality for most young entrepreneurs who did not have
any capital to invest. Not being home owners they have no equity to put
against a loan nor have they been able to save up significant savings. The
main sources of financial aid include parents as well as the small amount of
money that can be leveraged through start-up grants. The lack of financial
investment also endorses the necessity of investing time, as Jonas describes:

Yes, in terms of we’ll start with financial. It doesn’t take a huge financial gain
to set up a business. It may be useful, but there are ways of doing it without
having that financial push, and it’s just about finding a solution to do that.
And I think in modern day life, time becomes a factor setting up a business
Jonas, UK – Multiple enterprises.

Young entrepreneurs were reluctant to invest money without a sense of what

this would achieve. One British respondent, Ben who at the age of 19 has set
up a business recycling mobile phones, referred to the behaviour of throwing
money at a business as ‘clinging onto barbed wire’. The absence of capital to
invest in a new venture is not a limitation for young entrepreneurs, as finan-
cial capital could be replaced with personal commitment. The trade-off
between time and money reinforces the need for young entrepreneurs to
dedicate themselves to a non-teleological endorsement to ‘keep on going’.

Freedom
A second generic theme related to time in the interviews is freedom, which
corresponds with the celebrated quality of entrepreneurial activity to engender
114 Time & Society 29(1)

autonomy. The well-rehearsed mantra of neoliberalism is that the calibration

of social and economic activities by the market allows for more personal and
business freedom (Davies, 2014). Not surprisingly we find the mantra of indi-
vidual freedom to have the time to do what they want to do repeated through-
out the young entrepreneurs’ accounts, as Francisco and Josh describe:

Because for me to have freedom, it’s not every day, but for me to have the
freedom to, today I come home and say: I’m tired, I really feel like going out
for dinner . . . it doesn’t matter, with what my income is, it’s critical for my
quality of life. I think one of the things I value the most is my freedom.
Francisco, Portugal – Tech start up.

It’s more fun, I’m in control of everything, which means that, like, I don’t
need to worry about other people’s. . . like, I’m not following what other
people think is best, I get to do what I think is best, which I guess is, kind
of, the same thing, of choosing my own hours and, yes, it’s, kind of, fun to be
in charge of stuff, because I can do things that other people wouldn’t ordi-
narily do. Josh, UK – Tech start up.

Freedom is equated with creativity and having the time to develop new
ideas. But it is also associated with the ideal of resisting the tedium of
everyday routines. Josh for example contrasts the freedom of thinking
for himself as an entrepreneur with being an employee where he had to
follow what other people thought and did. This included arriving at work
at nine in the morning.
There are though important limitations to this endorsement of personal
freedom. The freedom that young entrepreneurs buy into is having control
over their everyday life. Being able to do what you want and when is easier
to achieve if you do not have to take other people’s interests and commit-
ments into account. However, running a business venture depends on other
people. An important dimension of entrepreneurial freedom is that it is not
just about doing your own thing, but also about maintaining business
networks. As Tiago discusses setting up your own enterprise might in
theory make you the boss, but it also requires that you have to respond
to many more bosses who are your clients:

Another factor that we naturally take into account but that sometimes back-
fires, is the issue of freedom. I think there is too much freedom of decision,
meaning, to be an entrepreneur. . . So it’s a bit of a fallacy the issue of free-
dom, because you actually no longer have a boss and you have 50, 100 or 200
that are clients. Tiago Portugal - multiple enterprises.
Holdsworth and Mendonça 115

If we add to this list the other co-dependents that are involved in a business,
from those who lend money or facilities to those who give support, partic-
ularly family members, the reality is that establishing a new venture
requires assembling, maintaining and responding to complex networks
(Puhakka, 2012). Entrepreneurs might evade the drudgery of the nine-to-
five, but their everyday practices revolve around continually developing
and maintaining these relationships. In the absence of the hierarchical
structure of an organisation, individual entrepreneurs have to simulta-
neously respond to multiple bosses and as such their sense of personal
freedom is calibrated by how they work with others (Boltanski and
Chiapello, 2005). Developing entrepreneurial orientations is essentially
about being responsible and this is achieved not just through self-control
but through relationships with others.
There is a second way in which commitment to ongoing entrepreneurial
activity curtails individual freedom. While young entrepreneurs were eager
to describe their temporal commitment to their ventures, they recognised
that this was achieved by putting other aspects of their lives on hold. There
is therefore a duality between engaged activity and moratorium among
these youth entrepreneurs (Cuzzocrea, 2019). Among our respondents,
becoming an entrepreneur is facilitated by delaying, or even reversing,
other key stages in the transition to adulthood, such as leaving home to
establish an independent household and/or start a family. In the UK, this is
more closely identified with living at home; in Portugal, it is associated with
abstaining from leisure activities associated with young adulthood, as
Aidan and Vasco describe:

I kept going and stayed at home rather than move out, even though I was
desperate to move out. So I stayed at home, saved money, used that to get the
coders in, and things like that. You’ve got to struggle quite a bit. It’s not the
easiest thing, moving back to my house. Aidan, UK –Tech start up.

And the part about having to give up a lot in our lives. In my case, at 19, I
shouldn’t be doing any of this. I should be studying, going out at night with
friends. Having that sort of life, and not this life of always being everywhere.
Travelling everywhere. I can’t study. I don’t have enough sleep. I can’t go out
at night. I can’t be with my friends. So this is part of the life that we leave
aside. Vasco, Portugal – social entrepreneur.

We can reflect on what this means for the entrepreneurial self. There are
trade-offs between investing oneself into a business that necessitates taking
fewer risks in other ways, for example living at home or not spending time
116 Time & Society 29(1)

and money going out with friends. This messy, complex relationship
between autonomy and enterprise is more than simply balancing the
assumed freedom to become one’s own boss against having to put some
aspects of life on hold. The sleight of hand of the entrepreneurial self is that
it decentres the individual, being responsible for innovation limits the
capacity for young entrepreneurs to enrich their existence beyond the con-
fines of the enterprise. It is simply not possible for young people to be
entrepreneurial in all aspects of their lives.

Failure
A third generic temporal theme that all respondents talked about in rela-
tion to their enterprise was the risk of future failure. Participants engaged
with the belief that they should be prepared to learn from their failure
rather than be fearful (Hill and Hlavacek, 1977), as both Gonçalo and
Emma describe:

Now, I’m not afraid of failure, ok, my perspective is the more I fail, the closer
to success I will be, right? That’s math, it’s statistics Gonçalo, Portugal –
Social entrepreneur.

I think sometimes you need to learn from mistakes, learn from failures and
then let that, kind of, shape your next step. Emma, UK – Developing skin-
care products.

While on face value these young people appear to endorse the myth of
success through failure, their orientation towards future failure is more
nuanced. While recognising the possibility that their current investment
might fail and they might have to walk away and stop ‘keep on going’,
the possibility that this might happen was negated through focussing on
what they were doing in the present. If young people focus on what they are
doing now and do this well rather than worrying about the future, this
orientates them towards success in the future, as George suggests:

I think if you worried about failure you just stop thinking about how you do
things well, whereas if you just concentrate on how you do things well and
how you want to do them better in the future, then your failure avoids itself.
George UK - Gin Distillery.

Hence, rather than simply accepting the rhythm of moving on from one
investment or project to another, some young entrepreneurs endorsed the
Holdsworth and Mendonça 117

non-teleological orientation that through focussing on doing well in the

present, failure becomes a non-outcome.

Discussion
The experiences of and attitudes towards commitment, freedom and failure
of young entrepreneurs in Portugal and the UK are broadly similar. The two
countries have different labour market structures, which are less favourable
for young people in Portugal, and as a consequence Portuguese participants
were more likely to acknowledge the necessity of setting up their own busi-
ness due to limited employment options. The repetition of key themes
throughout the sample of young entrepreneurs in both countries illustrates
the normative force of the entrepreneurial self that creates a credible fiction
of how young people should engage with the project of entrepreneurship and
self-responsibility (Br€
ockling, 2015).
Young entrepreneurs in this sample associated entrepreneurship with
creativity and problem-solving (Puhakka, 2012) rather than risk-taking.
Their experiences correspond with the development of entrepreneurship
scholarship that focuses on activities and the opportunity nexus that facil-
itates the initiation of new ventures, rather than equating entrepreneurship
with the unique characteristics of the entrepreneur (Gartner, 1988; Shane
and Venkataraman, 2000; Venkataraman, 1997). For the most part, they
endorsed the expectation that anyone could become an entrepreneur.
Participants reject the view that entrepreneurship is an inherent quality
but associate it with dedication and commitment. This is not to say that
they completely disavowed the unique experiences of being an entrepreneur
as they did compare themselves with peers in salaried positions. The focus
of this comparison was mostly related to practical issues about the working
day, opportunities to engage in non-work related activities and housing
choices. Young people articulated this commitment of time through the
metaphor of sacrifice, and this appeal to the heroic qualities of entrepre-
neurship justifies their commitment (Sørensen, 2008).
One of the most consistent themes in the narratives of entrepreneurship
was the necessity of commitment and reluctance to take financial risks, and
these two were often articulated together: invest time rather than money.
This commitment of time also evades the possibility that young entrepre-
neurs might stop to make a judgement about whether their investment is
worthwhile. The mantra of ‘keep on going’ was not calibrated with refer-
ence to defined goals, and in the interviews participants did not discuss how
they could use economic criteria to assess the success or otherwise of their
enterprise. Their engagement was focussed through a non-teleological ethos
that what matters is what they are doing in the present moment rather than
118 Time & Society 29(1)

be concerned about an unknown future (Buchanan and Vanberg, 1991).

This commitment to ‘keep on going’ emphasised the significance of the
everyday not as mundane but as vitalist, emergent and energetic.
Committing oneself to a venture is simultaneously associated with free-
dom. While young entrepreneurs bought into the heroic ideal of 24-hour
commitment, they also endorsed the mantra that they have more flexibility
over when they worked. This celebrated everyday, temporal autonomy was
calibrated by restrictions in other aspects of their personal lives and the
metaphor of ‘sacrifice’. Their commitment to non-teleological experiences
is facilitated through delaying or reversing other dimensions of the transi-
tion to adulthood (Settersten and Ray, 2010). For example, living in the
parental home and not pursuing more personal aspects of youth transi-
tions. The expectation that young people need to be entrepreneurial and
constantly develop the self as a project may limit young people’s ability to
invest in other aspects of the transition to adulthood, particularly around
housing. This suggests a further interpretation to the concept of ‘waithood’
for young people (Cuzzocrea, 2019). Young entrepreneurs are not putting
off the responsibility of adulthood through focussing their everyday agency
on entrepreneurial practices. They do though feel unable to engage in other
structural dimensions of youth transition (e.g. housing) or the freedom of
leisure and spending time with friends. Their experience of waithood can be
equated with resilience as young people are limiting the personal and finan-
cial fallout if their ventures fail.
This non-teleological pledge to focus on the present also influences
young entrepreneurs’ orientation towards failure. While they acknowl-
edged the potential experiential learning opportunities of failure, the
young entrepreneurs in this study rejected the future-orientated overtones
of learning through failure (Cope, 2011). They did not endorse the belief
that they have to fail to prove themselves, but that they could avoid failure
through getting their activities right in the present. Rather than fearing
failure or buying into the machismo celebration of ‘fail first’, they remained
hopeful that their commitment to focussing on the present would nullify
future failure.

Conclusion
The conceptualisation of the entrepreneurial self is essentially abstract. It is
not a practice that can be easily realised but rather represents an ideal of
how the self can be calibrated in late modernity. Research with young
entrepreneurs provides an opportunity to empirically contextualise how
young people respond to the promotion of entrepreneurship, not just
in its strict economic form, but also as a way of contouring the self.
Holdsworth and Mendonça 119

This research illustrates that as entrepreneurship becomes more widely

enfranchised, it inevitably takes on new forms. Among the young entrepre-
neurs who we spoke to, some were more motivated by the need to secure
financial success, but achieving economic goals was not a unifying theme.
What was common is the realisation that setting up a business is a project
of the self, which is realised through the hustle of intensive, everyday com-
mitment. Theirs is not an everyday of mundane routine but one of contin-
ual activity to realise the potential of creativity in the present. This focus on
getting it right in the here and now and channelling energy into keeping the
venture going encompasses hopeful aspirations that their ventures will
eventually flourish. Intensive commitment can, therefore, subtly resist the
requirement for the entrepreneur to be continually open, adaptable and
flexible to the possibility of new ventures.
By its very nature, young entrepreneurship is nascent and as such cannot
be easily measured against measures of economic success, and it does read-
ily correspond to a non-teleological rationality, emphasising the creative
potential of developing enterprise against an unknowable future. The
extent to which this is applicable to entrepreneurship across the life
course needs further consideration. It is though reasonable to assume
that the future does not become more knowable over the life course. As
Lachmann writes, ‘all economic action is of course concerned with the
future, the more or less distant future. But the future is to all of us unknow-
able, though not unimaginable’ (1976: 55). This certainly corresponds to
the experiences of youth entrepreneurship encountered here. Young people
articulate what they would like to achieve out of their enterprise, which is
their imagined future. How they measure their progress in moving them-
selves towards this imagined future is related to how they are achieving in
the present, not to specific outcomes tied to an unknowable future. Their
futures are not fantasies but are imagined in relation to current activities.
Thus, while orientations towards time always shape economic action, the
assumption that entrepreneurship develops through defined goal-
orientations does not correspond to the experiences revealed through this
research. The development of non-teleological interpretations of entrepre-
neurship will be particularly pertinent as enterprise becomes more widely
enfranchised, particularly among young people.

Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the young entrepreneurs in the UK and Portugal who took
the time to take part in this research project. We would also like to thank Simon
Pemberton and the three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and help-
ful comments.
120 Time & Society 29(1)

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article: This paper was supported by the
European Commission under Grant Number PIEF-GA-2013-625889 as part of
the Marie Curie Actions—Intra-European Fellowships (IEF) Scheme.

ORCID iD
Clare Holdsworth https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9064-3493

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