Cruel optimism: the stories of entrepreneurial attachments

Abstract

Drawing on Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism, the chapter explores entrepreneurial attachment to success ethics (a system of legitimation that prioritizes norms and actions consistent with institutionalized notions of success) generated by a cluster of promises afforded by the enterprise culture. Based on 12 life stories of entrepreneurs who had first-hand experience of bankruptcy, this chapter aims at gaining a more nuanced understanding of why the uniformity and orthodoxy of identities around an entrepreneurial ideal persist and grow in the context of entrepreneurial failure. The chapter is motivated by an interest in the human consequences of bankruptcies and focuses on exploring how the appropriation and internalization of social norms propounded by the enterprise culture might fix life narratives. To understand participants’ attachment to extremely stressful and, often traumatic, entrepreneurial lives and their propensity to promulgate and reproduce the entrepreneurial ideal not only do we need to think about social norms related to the entrepreneurial ideal as aspirational but also as redeeming and reassuring about the present and future experience of social belonging that can be lived in affective transactions that take place alongside the more instrumental ones.