Introduction

INNOVATORS AND THEIR OTHERS

BEFORE THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, the entrepreneur was someone who managed an enterprise, undertaking projects financed by others and seeing them through (see Sarkar 1917). This once managerial figure has in the early twenty-first century become mythic, symbolically bound to social progress through invention, production, and experiment. Globally circulating digital media — TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) videos and Harvard Business Review articles, for instance — popularize the entrepreneur as a normative model of social life. The ethos of innovation and entrepreneurship, honed in high-technology firms, has colonized philanthropy, development projects, government policies, and even thinking about international diplomacy. Innovation competitions, hackathons, and corporate mythologies around figures such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs proliferate optimism that passionate dreamers can change the world. Austerity is no barrier; in myth, entrepreneurs are fueled by nothing more than perseverance, empathy, and resourcefulness in the face of adversity or injustice.

The entrepreneur, no longer just a manager, has become an "agent of change," an ideal worker, an instrument of development, and an optimistic and speculative citizen. This citizen cultivates and draws what resources they can — their community ties, their capacity to labor, even their political hope — into the pursuit of entrepreneurial experiments in development, understood as economic growth and uplift of the poor. Most important, entrepreneurial citizens promise value with social surplus; as they pursue their passions, they produce benefits for an amorphous but putatively extensive social body. The entrepreneurial citizen belongs to an imagined community of consumers, beneficiaries, and fellow entrepreneurs. If this imaginary of the entrepreneurial citizen sounds grandiose and vague, this is no coincidence; vagueness has been core to the global promise and portability of the entrepreneurial ethos. State and corporate elites point to entrepreneurs as those who can make opportunity out of the innumerable shortcomings of development.

I call this economic and political regime entrepreneurial citizenship. Entrepreneurial citizenship promises that citizens can construct markets, produce value, and do nation building all at the same time. This book shows how people adopt and champion this ethos in India in the early twenty-first century, articulating entrepreneurship with longstanding hierarchies and systems of meaning. Entrepreneurial citizenship attempts to hail people's diverse visions for development in India — desires citizens could channel toward oppositional politics — and directs them toward the production of enterprise. Elites, political and industrial, produce this ideology. It makes the most sense for India's middle classes — those with access to institutional, capitalist, and philanthropic patronage and investment. Entrepreneurial citizenship's language and social forms discipline political hope. As people — privately or through nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) — pitch to funders, to innovation competitions, or to corporate partners, they have to articulate dissatisfaction and demands as "opportunities" in patrons' interests. They monitor themselves, their relations, and their environments as terrains of potential. On these terrains, they look for opportunities to take on projects and redirect their lives to add value. These practices bend away from the slow, threatening work of building social movements; rather, people articulate desires to work for change as demos and deliverables. Calls to entrepreneurial citizenship promise national belonging for those who subsume their hopes, ideals, particular knowledges, and relationships into experiments in projects that promise value.

Proponents of this form — often technocrats and capital investors — promise that everyone is potentially an entrepreneur, from the least to the most privileged. Prominent business school faculty Anil Gupta (2006) and C. K. Prahalad (2004), for example, have celebrated the entrepreneurial capacities of rural inventors and informal producers. A report by the Planning Commission of the Government of India (2012d) featured a woman selling colored powder dyes on its cover, but its pages were filled with policy recommendations targeted at developing high-tech ventures. In casting street hawkers and elite technologists alike as entrepreneurs in potentia, proponents collapse the vast gaps in money, formal knowledge, and authority that separate these two. Entrepreneurial citizenship becomes one attempt at hegemony, a common sense that casts the interests of ruling classes as everyone's interests.

But this entrepreneurialism is not only a project of the self but also a project that posits relations between selves and those they govern, guide, and employ: leaders and led, benefactors and beneficiaries, the avant-garde and the laggards, innovators and their others. Champions of innovation and entrepreneurship often leave this hierarchy implicit or deny its existence, leaving the problems it raises unaddressed. So who becomes an innovator and who becomes the innovator's other? Who conceptualizes and valorizes, and who does the work? Who modernizes whom, and toward what horizon?

Advocates of entrepreneurial citizenship argue that society must invest in innovators, as innovators promise a better future for all. This book depicts the practices by which institutions, organizations, and individuals selectively invest only in some people, some aspirations, and some projects in the name of development. As powerful institutions actively cultivate "the capacity to aspire" (Appadurai 2004) through entrepreneurial citizenship, this book illustrates the seductions, limits, and contradictions of entrepreneurial citizenship's promise of inclusion through the generation of economic and social possibility.

The politics of entrepreneurial citizenship play out diffusely, in sometimes hazy, sometimes passionate, and sometimes convenient decisions people make about who to work with, who to work for, who to invest in, and what spaces to inhabit. Schools, training programs, venture capitalists, NGOs, and entrepreneurial individuals cultivate and cull futures as they invest in some projects and people and not others. As these actors decide whom to fund, whom to have coffee with, and whose feedback to take, they select and cultivate relationships that produce emergent forms of hierarchy. These decisions play out moment to moment in studios, NGOs, and social innovation spaces, shaped by assumptions about caste, class, region, and cosmopolitanism. These judgments are often...