Making sense of high-tech entrepreneurial careers: The meaning(s) and materialities of work for young adults
Abstract
This project's broad goal is to articulate the dominant discourses and materialities of entrepreneurial work in order to understand how these intersections of these work processes enable and constrain young adults' career choices. Using a theoretical framework that included the communicative constitution of organizing (CCO), the meaningfulness of work, sensemaking, and D/discourse theories, this project explicates discourse-materiality interrelationships by asking three research questions: (RQ1): How are entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial work communicatively constituted by young adults?; (RQ1a): What are the D/discourses of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial work for young adults?; and (RQ1b): What are the material-symbolic intersections of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial work? To respond to these questions, multiple methods were used in this study, including a discourse analysis of mainstream media, thematic analyses of interviews with young entrepreneurs and focus groups with members of the Millennial Generation, and a secondary data analysis of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) data set. There were two discourses of entrepreneurial work articulated by the young adults in this project: entrepreneurship as resistance to corporate work; and entrepreneurship as exclusively high-tech and white-collar. Additionally, the materiality of entrepreneurial work in terms of objects (i.e., the desk), sites (i.e., the garage), bodies (i.e., age), and time (i.e., typical daily schedules) are explicated and described. These themes lead to seven key theoretical contributions; specifically, this project: (a) illustrates the material-symbolic intersections of entrepreneurial work and introduces time as a fourth research thread through which CCO scholars could study the material aspects of work; (b) highlights how the Discourses of entrepreneurship have been constructed for and by a young generation; (c) offers collective sensemaking as an complement to the individual traits-based model of understanding entrepreneurial work; (d) illustrates the unique benefits of the Draw-an-Entrepreneur (DAENT) test to portray the materialities of work; (e) details the advantages of multi-methodological approaches for explicating entrepreneurial careers; (f) suggests that the perceived meaningfulness of one's work may lessen the negative impacts of the enterprising self and ideal worker ideologies; (g) concludes that the meaningfulness of entrepreneurial work was centered on the development of imaginative and social capital, which offers a new definition of career; and (h) illuminates issues of class in entrepreneurial research and in everyday conversation.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Buzzanell, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Entrepreneurship|Communication|Organization Theory
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