Barbadian Neoliberalism and the Rise of a New Middle-Class Entrepreneurialism

Homo economicus is an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur of himself ... being for himself his own capital ... his own producer ... the source of [his] earnings. —FOUCAULT, THE BIRTH OF BIOPOLITICS, 266

The contemporary entrepreneur represents neoliberalism's heroic actor: supple, flexible, and keenly responsive to market fluctuations, always prepared to retool and retrain to advance in uncharted directions (Bourdieu 1998; Harvey 2005). Entrepreneurship and entrepreneurialism, however, carry neither generic shape nor historical tradition. Likewise, in its traffic between popular and academic settings, the concept of neoliberalism is fraught with conflicting, albeit mostly threatening, associations. From the perspective of political economy, the neoliberal era of capitalism signifies the seemingly limitless advance of a global marketplace, a fully integrated apparatus serving the interests of a global corporate elite via new strategies of capital accumulation, while the protective arm of the state shrinks back from its commitments to regulation and social welfare. Under this agenda, the world market is envisioned as both engine and compass directing human action and new regimes of accumulation: privatization, deregulation, and "the commodification of everything" (Harvey 2005). Neoliberalism, in this sense, operates both as ideology and economic policy, producing unexpected and ironic effects (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000). Bourdieu refers to neoliberalism as "a mode of production that entails a mode of domination based on the institution of insecurity, domination through precariousness" (2003, 29; see also Clarke 2004).

For others, in particular those influenced by Foucault, neoliberalism marks the intensifying techniques of "governmentality" by which the logics of capitalism and the weight of economic rationality become so fully globalized (Hardt and Negri 2000) and so deeply engrained that people are compelled to become self-governing (Rose 1990, 1992). The concept of neoliberalism is most fruitfully conceived not as a specific set of structures or as Ong (2007, 5) aptly put it, an "economic tsunami ... of market-driven forces" decimating all in its wake, or a single abstract "thing that acts in the world" (Kingfisher and Maskovsky 2008), but rather as a logic that can be adapted and melded within specific conditions, through specific cultural forms, in time and space.

I retain the concept of neoliberalism not as a generic gloss for contemporary capitalism but with the hopes of adding greater cultural particularity and precision to its dynamic and multifaceted forms. As a concept, neoliberalism also signals a confounding "slippage" in my fieldwork where the term assumed both popular and analytical usage. In short, describing certain conditions and practices as "neoliberal" or as evidence of neoliberalism was not something confined to academic conference rooms or published papers. A critical discourse about neoliberalism also emanated from my informants in a way that seems to be an ever more common dimension of contemporary fieldwork. This is especially the case when studying the middle classes, whose life styles, modes of consumption, media worlds, and so on may resemble and overlap with those of the ethnographer. Every day I noticed not only convergences between the language and lives of my entrepreneurial informants and my own life and milieu in the United States, but the echoes of "official" neoliberal discourse were also unmistakable. Neoliberalism and its signature elements of flexibility, entrepreneurship and entrepreneurialism have entered the common parlance of state-level officials as well as many of my interlocutors, often with positive value attached. Among academics the concept has become an almost trite gloss for the ills of today's precarious global economy and cultural condition. Discursive blendings such as this one beg for conceptual excavation and close ethnographic exploration. For, familiar as these themes of flexibility and rationality sounded to my American ear, I was equally aware that they were steeped in a different set of cultural understandings and could not be interpreted through a single framework.

THE NEOLIBERAL LOGIC OF FLEXIBILITY

The clarion call for flexibility became a constant refrain resounding from all corners of society, from entrepreneurs' own testimonies and the programmatic charges of the Barbadian state, to the private sector, and NGO establishment. "The essence of neo-liberalism," as Bourdieu summed it up, is an "absolute reign of flexibility" (1998). From one vantage point, these bedfellows—neoliberalism and flexibility—connote the instability of labor and financial markets; ruptures, radical escalations, and the collapse of time and space; an erosion of state-sanctioned social welfare; and according to Lash and Urry (1987), "the end of organized (bureaucratic) capitalism." Across popular and academic discourses, neoliberal flexibility is variously portrayed as "slogan ... ideology ... dream and nightmare" (Marquand 1992, 61). In the terms of some of my Barbadian interviewees, flexibility is fundamentally about "insecurity and risk," while for others "flexibility is the name of the game," a de facto reality they not only embraced but also eagerly sought. Whether a source of anxiety, an external command, a badge of honor, a chimera of promise, or a deeply internalized desire, if a single concept could capture the complex essence of the entrepreneurialism I will try to describe, it would be flexibility.

Few if any spheres of life are exempt from contemporary neoliberal demands for flexibility—from the structures of economic markets to the nuances of individuals' subjectivities as citizens, producers, consumers, migrants, tourists, members of families, and so on. Aihwa Ong (2006) has demonstrated the supple and sometimes unexpected maneuvers made by Asian states as they attempt to position themselves competitively under neoliberalism. She has also highlighted the degree to which flexibility and movement stand in direct challenge to the stability and solidity that were prized under earlier capitalist expansions. Emily Martin (1994) has described how the contemporary emphasis on flexible accumulation extends across domains of life from the immune system to the laboring and managing body within corporate enterprise. The tentacles of neoliberalism reach from on high—whether the corporation, the state, or agglomerations thereof, into the individual, the body, psyche, and cell.

The mandate for flexibility requires not only that individuals retrain for an ever-changing set of job requirements in the new economy but also that they foster a heightened sense of...