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Presenting a new interpretation of entrepreneurial behaviour, this book focuses on how entrepreneurs consider the future, looking at their social practices, language and rituals through which they neutralize or smoothen future unknowns. The study theorizes entrepreneurial behaviour as ‘future-work’: the social practices, language and rituals through which entrepreneurs neutralize or smoothen future unknowns. The study is grounded in ethnographic case material from global frontiers: second-hand car dealers in West Africa; exporters of fresh fish from Lake Victoria, East Africa; farmed fish entrepreneurs in Greece; and investment bankers in Financial America. It targets students and scholars from the social sciences and economics, and it has theoretical and practical implications.
“I think this is an excellent accomplishment. It makes an important theoretical contribution to the understanding of entrepreneurship, on the basis of comparing and contrasting grounded case studies, taken from the author’s own decades-long ethnographic research trajectory and, in one case, from an intelligent reading of a prominent stockbroker’s life. Readers will relish the clarity, the accessible writing style and the stimulating diversity of case studies.” • Christoph Brumann, Max Planck Institute in Halle
Joost Beuving is a lecturer and senior researcher in economic anthropology, Department of Cultural Anthropology and Development Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen. He is the co-author of Doing Qualitative Research: The Craft of Naturalistic Inquiry with Geert de Vries (Amsterdam University Press, 2015).
List of Illustrations
Prologue
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Problem of the Future in Studying Entrepreneurship
Chapter 1. Time and Entrepreneurship in Social Theory: Barth, Schumpeter and Keynes
Chapter 2. The Social Construction of Individualism: Fish Entrepreneurs on Lake Victoria, Uganda
Chapter 3. Profitmaking and Dreaming of Fortunes: Second-hand Car Dealers in Cotonou, Benin
Chapter 4. Telling Stories with Numbers: The Social Life of Investment Bankers
Chapter 5. The Relevance of the Policy Context: Aquaculture Entrepreneurs in Greece
Conclusion
Epilogue
References
Index