The entrepreneur as a hypermodern subject: his media (self-)representation

Abstract

The 21st century has begun with the consolidation of a structural and systemic crisis that began with the Great Recession of 2008 and has been revalidated with the recent pandemic crisis. The neoliberal rhetoric, based on the “culture of austerity”, presents a narrative in which the only possible way out of the crisis is the need for citizens to be more flexible, entrepreneurial and to accept more precarious and risky positions, a model that is intended to be introduced and consolidated in the education system. This study uses framing theory and critical discourse analysis (CDA) to analyse the discourses of and about entrepreneurs in the media with the aim of observing how and through what rhetorical devices the narrative of the entrepreneur is constructed as a heroic symbolic subject of the neoliberal order and hypermodernity. The results expose the narratives with which otherness is expressed in the representation of entrepreneurs and emphasise the invisibilisation of social, cultural and patrimonial capital in the presentation of their success, where entrepreneurship is presented as an attitude and as a learnable element, but is materialised as an essence or an element of natural distinction