The self-entrepreneur
Sociology of a Form of Subjectivation

The fact that companies have a soul is “one of the most terrible pieces of news in the world,” exclaimed the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze in the early nineties. This is only surpassed by the demand that everyone must manage to become, down to the last corner of their soul, an entrepreneur of themselves; just as countless motivational gurus and self-management coaches preach, but also economists, education experts, trend researchers, and politicians of (almost) all stripes. This book is precisely about this demand, the social pressure it generates, and the force field that structures itself around it. The self-entrepreneur, its title, is synonymous with a range of interpretive schemes with which human beings today understand themselves and their modes of existence, the normative requirements and role offerings with which they orient their actions and omissions, as well as the institutional arrangements and social and self-technologies that should regulate their conduct. In other words, and borrowing a fashionable term from the business world: the self-entrepreneur is an ideal.

The self-entrepreneur was awarded in 2013 by the German Booksellers Association and by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and has been translated into English and Korean.