Do fervor à febre: empreendedorismo, suas origens e representações

Abstract

This thesis aims to demonstrate why and how entrepreneurship became a normative support that orientates the engagement in neoliberalism, by means of the individual virtues that it proclaims (the “good thing”) as well as its more general justifications (the “common good”). To this end, we draw a distinction between entrepreneurship as an analytical category and a native category in order to differentiate the concept (per se) from the multiple empirical identifications and social representations it assumes. By reference to the notions of entrepreneurial fervor and entrepreneurial fever, we then observe the overflow of the concept from the scientific-university locus to its subsequent spreading in the social fabric. Altogether, both notions intend to answer how the concept informed a broader universe of policies and conducts, especially during the radical pro-market political-economic reorientation in the 1980s, until it reached a remarkable media repercussion, which consolidated the general perception of entrepreneurship as a "good thing" and a representation of a "common good". However, on the basis of the analysis of Estevão’s and Tereza’s life trajectories, we can infer that the discursive strength of entrepreneurship is unquestionable but not irresistible, since it acquires its own contours and meanings as a native category, not necessarily associated to the neoliberal rationality.