The Ideology of Entrepreneurship

Title: The Ideology of Entrepreneurship (w/ Wesley Sine)

Abstract: This study explains how entrepreneurial ideology has become a durable interpretive framework for contemporary social life. As collective institutions have weakened, burdens once buffered by firms, unions, and public programs have been displaced onto individuals. This study argues that this reorganization has produced organized precarity: a condition in which participation remains institutionally structured while risk, uncertainty, and responsibility are redistributed downward. Entrepreneurial ideology stabilizes this order by rendering individualized burden morally intelligible and legitimate across unequal positions. It does so through four linked mechanisms: the individualization of responsibility, the reframing of evaluation, the temporal normalization of persistence and failure, and cross-positional legitimation. These mechanisms justify extraordinary reward for the advantaged while encouraging endurance, deferred possibility, and selfmanagement among those facing precarity. This study further shows how this ideology diffuses across work, education, public goods, and collective problem-solving, thereby sustaining inequality and weakening expectations of collective repair in contemporary institutional life today.