Let entrepreneurs be eternal: disputes in historical narratives about the legitimation process of the entrepreneurial paradigm in Argentina (1980-2020).

BÁRBARA BURTON; MAGDALENA GARMENDIA

online

Conferencia; Business History: Building for the Future; 2021

Business History Conference

This proposal aims to study the legitimation of the entrepreneurial paradigm in Argentina from 1980 to the present. To achieve this aim, we turn to the analysis of historical narratives. We consider that the concept of entrepreneurial paradigm encompasses and at the same time enables the approach to a set of specific practices and discourses linked to the creation of start-ups or ventures (Etzkowitz 2000, Lam 2009). Furthermore, using the approach to the historical narrative (Carr, 1991), we can understand the interpretations that the actors make of the past (Brow 1990). Also their ideals and visions of the future (Lazar 2014) about entrepreneurship, and how these guide the projection to the action. In this sense, by the analysis of strategies and devices, we will demonstrate how the actors mobilize different senses about the processes of creation, management, and innovation of companies.Also, the senses that they make to the link to the State and their conceptions of work. Based on a case study, this work pretends to debate the hagiographic interpretations of the entrepreneurial process. In a dialogue with the ?new entrepreneurial history? (Wadhwani and Lubinski, 2017), we intend to show how the development of the entrepreneurial paradigm is not explained by the exceptionality of some people but by a cumulative process that involves multiple actors mobilizing particular visions of the future and the past. The perspective of this work is interdisciplinary and encompasses, on the one hand, the field of anthropology of science, technology and innovation and, on the other, the political history field. The methodological approach is composed of different qualitative techniques such as ethnographic fieldwork, open and semi-open interviews and the analysis of documentary sources.