Abstract
Established professional occupations can become the preserve of elites when fitting in is driven by class-based criteria. In contrast, digital entrepreneurship has been proposed as a means by which people may emancipate themselves from societal constraints. We interrogate digital entrepreneurship’s meritocratic foundations by way of a 36-month ethnography of a start-up incubator. Attending to the dispositions of digital entrepreneurs, we reveal they use cultural tastes and manners to create the incubator as a place where members of the privileged class can reinvent themselves at their leisure, all the while adopting the meritocratic mythologies of digital entrepreneurship to disavow their own privilege. This opens up a two-fold contribution to the study of professions and occupations. Firstly, we demonstrate how professional and occupational roles are epiphenomenal to class positioning. Secondly, the parallels between the legitimating discourses of entrepreneurs and more established professional jurisdictions attest to a community that is in the process of professionalization.
Original language | English |
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Article number | joae001 |
Pages (from-to) | 1-15 |
Number of pages | 15 |
Journal | Journal of Professions and Organization |
Volume | 11 |
Issue number | 1 |
Early online date | 2 Feb 2024 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Feb 2024 |
Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)
- entrepreneurship
- digital entrepreneurship
- social class
- class
- dispositions
- ethnography