PhD De­fence - Nic­olai C. Jepsen

 In order to obtain the PhD degree, Nicolai C. Jepsen has submitted his thesis entitled:  

Good Work and the Ideology of Entrepreneurship   

Entrepreneurship has evolved from the activity of starting a business into a societal ideal that shapes how work ought to be. Recent scholarship refers to this elevation of entrepreneurial logic into all spheres of social life as entrepreneurialism, the ideology of entrepreneurship, which decides what counts as good work and which forms get marginalized or written off. I argue that entrepreneurialism rests on three core beliefs: self-determination through enterprise, individual agency, and perpetual becoming. Yet despite decades of critique and disappointment, and the ideology failing to deliver for all but the successful few, entrepreneurialism maintains an iron grip on the cultural imagination. This dissertation therefore asks: How does entrepreneurialism shape the construction, legitimization, and experience of good work, and what makes the ideology so durable? To trace the architecture of entrepreneurialism as a belief system across four research articles, I draw on the historiography of entrepreneurship research, a corpus of dictionaries, press coverage, song lyrics, and marketing material spanning the seventeenth century to the present, forty semi-structured interviews with Brazilian freelancers on the Upwork platform, and research on stress appraisal and allostatic load. Taken together, the articles show that what persists across them is a mechanism of exchange between supporting belief pairs that insulate the ideology’s core beliefs. When one half of a pair disappoints, it thus becomes an argument for its other half, so the worker for whom hustling fails to deliver turns to optimization instead. These findings shift the emphasis from what entrepreneurialism means to how it endures despite the evidence stacked against it, and reopen the question of what good work might mean in an entrepreneurial age.  

The thesis will be available from research.cbs.dk

The CBS PhD School will host a reception, which will take place immediately after the defence.