Abstract

FARIA, Louise Scoz Pasteur de. Make it happen: the politics of self-actualisation in start-up companies in Brazil and in the United Kingdom. Etnográfica [online]. 2020, vol.24, n.3, pp.555-576. ISSN 0873-6561.  https://doi.org/10.4000/etnografica.7854.

Start-up companies represent the elite of global entrepreneurship. The search for self-actualisation is what prompts entrepreneurs to start new ventures, an imagining deeply embedded in a specific set of practices related to the expression and dramatization of feeling. In this article, I focus on the category “make it happen” prevalent in start-up companies. I seek to understand this “making it happen” from an ethnographic standpoint and encompass situated and contextual meanings and practices in order to produce a more textured account of the contemporary experience of living under changing socioeconomic structures. My fieldwork was conducted in Brazil and the United Kingdom between 2014 and 2017 among young entrepreneurs and networks of investors, consultants, and experts in the making of their own start-up companies.

Keywords : start-up companies; entrepreneurship; ethnography; economic anthropology; anthropology of self and emotion.

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