As the labor market has changed over recent decades, a distinctive culture has evolved in tandem, epitomized by the innovation and dynamism of Silicon Valley. This culture of entrepreneurship celebrates autonomy and risk-taking, legitimizes a shift toward f lexible, contingent, and precarious work, and compels workers to continuously network, self-improve, and self-promote. This culture has helped to disseminate entrepreneurial practices to sectors of the economy traditionally characterized by stability and job security. We shed light on these changes by putting forward a new typology distinguishing between four ideal types of entrepreneurial activity: Silicon Valley entrepreneurship, Main Street entrepreneurship, corporate entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurial self-employment. Each adopts the language and normative behaviors of the culture of entrepreneurship, but the 'entrepreneurs' working within these domains enjoy starkly different levels of creative and financial autonomy. Integrating scholarship on economic sociology, work and labor, cultural sociology, and critical theory, we explore the underlying dynamics of entrepreneurship that cut across institutional contexts in unexpected and sometimes contradictory ways. The conceptual understanding of entrepreneurship we put forward recognizes both entrepreneurship's relationship to past forms of business creation and its contemporary cultural inf luence, while also underscoring the various constraints and inequalities intrinsic to these forms of market activity.

How do colleges teach students to be entrepreneurial? For three years, we observed young entrepreneurs, most of them students at Virginia Commonwealth University. Drawing from interviews with 57 students and recent graduates and observations of entrepreneurship-related events, we argue that entrepreneurial training encourages students to embrace a future-oriented and relational form of human capital. This speculative self (1) requires a performed authenticity that conveys the individual’s passion and relatability; (2) emphasizes potential for scalability and growth; and (3) is oriented toward the expectations of investors. Much of this work happens through the performance of the startup pitch, a well-crafted narrative of personal and commercial awakening. This study highlights three aspects of entrepreneurship training. First, students are encouraged to pitch continuously, the pitch serving as a means of affirming one’s entrepreneurial identity. Second, students are trained to convey their devotion to their venture through a relatable narrative. Third, students learn to pitch for investors interested in their potential to become an investment with rapid market growth. This performance is not limited to university entrepreneurship programs, but speaks to a broader transformation of the ways that workers are asked to demonstrate their value to a world unsure about whether they are a worthwhile investment.

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