As I discussed in Chapter 2, entrepreneurialism is one of the features of new media work that frequently surface in the literature (Christopherson, 2004; Gill, 2007, 2010;
Neff et al, 2005, Neff, 2012; Oakley, 2014). It is also one of the features which I have classified as extrinsic to new media work, based on its dependence on the context where such work is carried out. In this section, I examine how entrepreneurialism has been treated in the literature, drawing on two specific conceptualizations (‗venture labour‘ and ‗forced entrepreneurship‘) which emerge from its manifestations in Western countries. In the discussion, I trace the general outlines of the discourse on entrepreneurialism before engaging with these concepts.
Neff et al (2005) argued that greater employment insecurity in many industries emerged as a result of changes in the norms of the workplace firms as a response to the growing trend in the post-industrial economy toward nonstandard employment in the 1970s. According to them, these changes led to policies that encouraged the hiring of independent contractors and ‗perma-temps‘ as a replacement to regular employees.
The outcome was a gradual shift of economic risk from institutions and organizations onto individual workers. Neff et al. (2005) further argued that in the media industries, workers began to bear these risks with the hope that they would be able to navigate uncertainty while remaining associated with the industry. According to them, these policies affected workers' attachment to work as well as their sense of self and led them toward ‗entrepreneurial labour‘ by setting up their own firms as a way of bearing the risks. They further highlighted how this entrepreneurial inclination was experienced strongly in the new media sector because of the peculiar kind of innovative and pioneering work carried out there which was well suited to the spirit of enterprise. In her study of new media workers, Gill (2010) also observed that entrepreneurialism arose from ‗their aspirations to innovate, create and to be pioneers‘
(p.7).
However, some writers noted that spirit of enterprise was not a feature of new media work in all countries (Christopherson, 2004; Mayer and Ahuja, 2007). For example, in her comparative study of new media in the US, Sweden and Germany, Christopherson (2004) found that while Sweden and Germany follow ‗an employment-based professional model‘, the United States is characterized by a ‗free-agent, entrepreneurial model‘ (p.549). Thus, according to Christopherson (2004), while in countries like Sweden and Germany, the new media workforce ‗tend to be full-time employees and to work under longer-term employment contracts even when they are working on projects.‘ (p.555). This is because in these countries, ‗a greater portion of the burden of sustaining a skilled workforce is the responsibility of the firm rather than the individual worker‘ and therefore ‗policy is directly engaged in constructing these differences through legislation and regulation governing inter-firm competition, employment, and collective bargaining‘ (p.551). The case is different in countries like the United States ‗where an entrepreneurial model prevails‘ and ‗the costs of sustaining a project-based industry are primarily absorbed by the workforce‘ (p.556).
I would now like to draw attention to two conceptualizations of entrepreneurialism in the literature on new media work and creative labour in the West. These are ‗venture labour‘ (Neff, 2012) and ‗forced entrepreneurialism‘ (Oakley, 2014). While these do not exhaust what has been written about entrepreneurialism, I highlight them only to provide contrast to my own findings about entrepreneurialism among workers in Nigeria
Neff (2012) used the term ‗venture labour‗ to describe ‗a way of managing the risk of contemporary work‘ (Neff, 2012, p.16). According to her, this form of entrepreneurial behaviour exhibited particularly by new media workers was the result of particular social and historical factors which began in the US in the 1970s and reached a peak in the early 2000s. These factors involved a growing trend towards employment insecurity and nonstandard work arrangements outside of full-time, permanent employment (Neff et al., 2005) and led workers to practice known as ‗venture labour‘
which she describes as the ‗explicit expression of entrepreneurial values by non-entrepreneurs‘ (p.16). This means that people who did not set out to become entrepreneurs exhibited entrepreneurial patterns of behaviour through their personal
investments in time, energy and human capital in the companies where they worked.
Thus, they acted like entrepreneurs by bearing some of the risks of the companies as if they had ownership of them, even when they were not actual owners. According to Neff,
The social context for this frenzy and the rush to boldly take risks occurred in the midst of major structural changes from an economy in which 30 percent of the workforce was unionized to the wide acceptance of at-will employment.
The attitudes toward risk [...] happened in the context of the shift from a workplace where regular, full-time employment was the norm to a growing percentage of the American workforce in nonstandard jobs, many lacking health insurance, pensions and training. (p.21)
Neff notes that under these circumstances, risk became a desirable choice since jobs were increasingly acquired through flexible hiring in order to meet demand ‗only when times were good.‘ As Neff (2012) suggests, ‗venture labour‘ serves as the conceptual frame within which the entrepreneurial mindset of new media workers at a particular time (late 1990s to early 2000s) in a particular place (the US) can be understood. In her view, this brand of entrepreneurialism is one of the ways by which employees adapted to bearing the economic and financial risks that were prevalent in their time.
Another conceptualization of entrepreneurialism among cultural workers is offered by Oakley (2014) who describes it as ‗forced‗ entrepreneurship‘. According to Oakley, what lies behind the apparent growth of entrepreneurship in the cultural sectors is
‗forced entrepreneurship‘ which is the need people feel ‗to adopt worsening working arrangements in rapidly changing industries.‘ Oakley argues that this is more so because the term entrepreneur ‗ill-fits those who have never expressed any desire to be self-employed but have simply had to adapt‘ (p.149). In her view, this brand of entrepreneurialism is experienced by those who
set up businesses because that is the easiest way to carry out their practice.
They get premises because they need to get away from the kitchen table. They take on projects to pay the rent, and other projects on the back of that, because they now have new expertise (p.145).
In other words, they are ‗forced‘ to be entrepreneurial ‗not as they please and not under self-selected circumstances‘ (p.145). As Oakley explains, these circumstances are those of increasing precariousness and constraint which are mostly the result of wide structural changes in the UK and other European countries such as the consolidation and disintegration of media and internet companies. According to her, these made the conditions of cultural workers (such as those involved in new media) difficult, with many of them turning to self-employment. While the outcome of these circumstances for workers has been understood as a shift towards ‗entrepreneurship,‘
Oakley suggests that it is better described as a movement towards ‗casualisation of formally secure employment‘ (p.148). Like others (Neff, 2012; Sennett, 2006), she highlights the transfer of the task of shouldering the burden of risk from employers to employees as a key feature of these conditions which, as a result, is leading workers to
‗move from one short-term contract to another in situations of increasing insecurity‘
(p.148).
According to Oakley, another important cause of ‗forced‘ entrepreneurship among cultural workers was the growth and availability of digital technology especially in advanced economies. Crucial to this development was the dot-com boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s and the frantic activity among small scale entrepreneurs that characterized it. Despite the collapse of many of the firms that characterized that period, the dot-com era has been identified as a key moment in the expansion of digital technology. Indeed, as Heilemann (2005) argues, the dot-com bust became known as the ‗price made for progress‘ because it was during that period that the foundations for the wide-scale development of internet infrastructure were set up in the US and in many developed countries.
Clearly, ‗venture labour‘ and ‗forced entrepreneurship‘ are useful notions with which to understand the nature of entrepreneurial practices adopted and experienced by workers in new media and the broader cultural industries in Western countries.
However, if they provide some explanation for the rise of self-employment and entrepreneurial behaviours in developed contexts, they are potentially limited as conceptual tools for understanding what is taking place in less-developed contexts. To a large extent, this limitation is due to the fact that notions like ‗venture labour‘ and
‗forced entrepreneurship‘ have arisen from and apply specifically to the conditions of work in the particular context of advanced countries like the US and UK. As I argued in the previous chapter, since these notions of entrepreneurial behaviour emphasize a departure from ‗formally secure employment‘ which had previously characterized much of labour in the West, they necessarily exclude conditions in other regions of the world which have been historically driven by informal processes. For this reason, they do not account for the innovative (or entrepreneurial) ways by which people in developing contexts overcome basic everyday challenges such as the infrastructural difficulties that critically hamper new media work in Nigeria. In this chapter, I attempt to address this limitation by proposing a different conception of entrepreneurialism which more closely aligns with the Nigerian context. I begin in the next section with a discussion of the roots of entrepreneurialism in Nigeria.