Entrepreneurialism is valorized as a driving force for innovation, creativity, progress, success. It is cited to foreground the willingness to take risks, the ability to think and act outside the box, to the crossing, that is, of all kinds of boundaries, leading to new solutions and technologies, discoveries, medical breakthroughs, ultimately human well-being. Entrepreneurialism is of course ideologically loaded. In immigrant/ethnic discourses, where it is celebrated, it has provided ahistorical explanations of mobility, justification for intra-ethnic (as well as interethnic) hierarchies (successful vs unsuccessful migrant) and the arrogance that comes with them, national mythologies (bootstrap mobility), attacks on labor movements (the entrepreneurial middle class seeking to discipline immigrants involved in the labor movement, fearing the tarnishing of the ethnic reputation and the capitalist status quo). Entrepreneurialism creates but also destroys (social relations, the environment, values). Not rarely it connects with shady dealings behind sealed doors.
This is to say that the media, journalists, scholars, citizens ought to move beyond the ideology of entrepreneurialism as unbounded optimism––the sky is the limit––and explore the various facets of its social implications.
