On the Prescriptions, Paradoxes, and Props of Entrepreneurial Passion

This text was originally written for a somewhat slapdash edited volume on entrepreneurial passion, and as is at times my way I procrastinated with my chapter. When I finally submitted it, I made a cheeky little comment along the lines of “well, small-minded people might think I’m late, when I’m really just being quite fashionable”, mainly as I submitted it to a dear friend who was one of the editors. The other editors, having rather limited capabilities when it comes to colloquial English, took umbrage at this and I was summarily kicked out of the book. So here it is, for a more general public, slightly rewritten so as not to make too many strange cross-references. If any errors or odd references to the book this did not go into remain, I apologize. Anyway, know that this was written as a somewhat critical piece for an edited volume built on the rather insipid insight that sometimes entrepreneurs are passionate, and trying to make this into a remarkable discovery of great importance. The sarcasm at play here is thus not just a question of style, but rather a core epistemological positioning…

Introduction

There was unquestionably once a time when phenomena such as emotions, passion, embodiment and the likes were relegated to the very margins of entrepreneurship studies, seen as somewhat dirty and disreputable, and ignored overall. This was a time when mainstream studies and popular pundits still emphasized methods and analyses designed to emulate the hard sciences, calculations and quantifications adopted to mollify physics envy, a time where emotions seemed mostly like unfortunate errors that needed to be accounted for. Whilst there might have been some anecdotes regarding passionate entrepreneurs in more popular texts written by entrepreneurship researchers, these were often cleaned away in any more academic setting beyond teaching. The situation and the emotional maturity of the field has shifted radically over the last decades. In fact, it has shifted to the point where one could make the argument that attention to e.g. passion and affect in entrepreneurship represents the majority position, and that the attempts at clinical, quantitative and pseudo-objective analysis of entrepreneurship that is sometimes referred to as “the mainstream” is in fact the new margin. To this comes the fact that passion in entrepreneurship has, through the ideological praxis operating in the field, become enshrined as not so much a possibility than as a demand and an exhortation. Whereas there might still be the occasional professor of entrepreneurship somewhere who stubbornly insists that it is all about objective opportunity recognition and the cold calculation of probabilities, such characters are now outliers, and both ministers, professors, and heads of NGOs are singing from the same hymnal regarding the importance of following your dreams and discovering your passion. Looking e.g. to the field of startup entrepreneurship, with it’s cheerful insistence that one should “do insanely great things” and “find your Why”, we might speak of how the ignoring of passion has given way to the establishment of a specific kind of ideology, one where passion isn’t so much accepted as it is expected.

This essay will discuss passion in entrepreneurship, but more as a puzzle than a phenomenon. It will address the paradox of prescribed passion hinted at above, by way of a popular culture analysis of how passion in entrepreneurship gets inscribed, disseminated, and reproduced. In addition, the essay will address how entrepreneurial passion becomes commodified, in a manner that makes it consumable and easy to communicate to the world. As notions about passion in entrepreneurship become inscribed as simple exhortations, these can then be turned into guidebooks, posters, and various ephemera, which in turn become semiotic markers regarding the need for passion for those wishing to belong to the community, and through this cultural fetishes and icons. This also points to how passion in entrepreneurship is at least to a degree a performance, a prescribed set of linguistic and behavioral markers that are to be reproduced in order to communicate to others that one has taken onboard the culturally prescribed tenets of “proper” entrepreneurial behavior.

Rather than seeing entrepreneurial passion as an individual engagement, I will here thus discuss this as a socially constituted and prescribed feeling, i.e. something of an affect (cf. Gregg & Seigworth 2010) or even an affectation. Consequently I will also engage with the problematics of passion in entrepreneurship, inquiring into what happens when it becomes part of an ideology, a system of norms, and a set of semiotic imperatives that can be transformed into material forms. Looking to e.g. conferences for and popular literature about entrepreneurship, this essay will argue that passion rather than being the establishment of personal identity vis-a-vis an entrepreneurial project or a deeply held conviction with regards to the same, should rather be studied as part of how group cohesion is formed, how ideological purity is measured and performed, and how specific socio-moral mores are reified. Not unlike the manner in which military units use shared rituals, oft-repeated slogans, or provocative linguistic displays to create a sense of unified purpose (consider, for instance, shouts of “Semper fi!” and “No one left behind!”, not to mention more loaded and morally questionable discursive practices), the contemporary world of entrepreneurship (particularly of the startup variety) uses references to and semiotic markers of passion, living your dream and the likes not so much as objective statements about the world, but rather as ways to align people to an ideological position. In such a reading, the very notion of passion becomes problematic, and can instead be seen as having the potential of being made into a (material) resource for ideological praxis.

I will end with a somewhat provocative suggestion, namely that (research) attention to passion in the practice of entrepreneurship may in fact bring about negative consequences, and that there is an argument to be made for both more dispassionate entrepreneurship and a more dispassionate entrepreneurship studies. Whilst these critiques work on somewhat different levels, both point to the difficulty of dogmatism inherent in praising passion for the sake of passion, and reproducing Cartesian notions regarding emotion and passion versus analytics and reason. Rather than pandering to notions of pseudo-post-rationalism, what is attempted here might be described as a less affected analysis of affect, and a more dispassionate analysis of passion.

The Passion Imperative

“This is your day, This is your life, Now it is your time to Rock Your Day!”
Motivational entrepreneur Janne Immonen from janneimmonen.com (idiosyncratic capitalization preserved as presented)

The scene is an entrepreneurship event, directed primarily to university students. The event space is adorned with bunting, but is also quite dark. There is an abundance of energy drinks on offer. On stage is a moderately successful female entrepreneur who has become a rather more successful professional speaker. So far in her speech she has talked about her own journey, but has now segued into a series of encouraging comments for the audience on their entrepreneurial journey. Interestingly, these say very little about business models, cash-flow analysis, or funding strategies, and instead lean heavily on positive psychology and motivational slogans and anecdotes. She states that we need to learn to dream bigger dreams, and to believe in ourselves. We need to find the thing that we’re truly passionate about, and to let others see our passion. Love is frequently mentioned, as when one of her slides presents the quote “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life!”, misattributing this to Confucius. As she ends, she is greeted with rapturous applause.

Scenes such as these are today far from uncommon, and illustrate a marked shift in how entrepreneurship is perceived in society — a shift that is also mirrored in the academic study of entrepreneurship. Early contemporary discussions regarding the field tended to focus on analytical skill and risk-taking, seeing the entrepreneur as a curious mix of a calculating business man and something of a gambler. Schumpeter’s famous view of the entrepreneur (see e.g. Schumpeter 1942/2010) was passionately argued, but focused on the manner in which such an agent recognized and acted upon an opportunity. Kirzner’s (1973/2015) entrepreneur went even further, and was portrayed primarily as an agent who dispassionately leveraged opportunities for arbitrage. Granted, in the public discourse entrepreneurs were at times presented as victims of their passions (consider, for instance, the tale of Ivar Kreuger — see Partnoy 2010), but the passions presented were normally limited to avarice and greed, and rarely discussed with any greater complexity. An entrepreneur might have had passion — and in the various Horatio Alger-stories told about entrepreneurs such themes did come up — but this wasn’t presented as a necessity.

The theoretical study of entrepreneurship for a long time tended to marginalize notions of emotions, passions, and affect. This has led many researchers to argue that such themes should be integrated into our theorization of entrepreneurship, but such arguments have tended to ignore the manner in which affect and affective logics are always already present in the mode popular discourse on entrepreneurship, and thus cannot necessarily be divorced from the very notion of the entrepreneur — making claims to understand “true” passions or “real” affects in entrepreneurship problematic. When looking to the aforementioned popular and public discourse, we will instead discover that references to passion (explicitly, implicitly, or through alternative formulations) are not rare, but omnipresent. This takes many shapes.

In popular articles on entrepreneurship, passion is presented as a self-evident necessity for entrepreneurs — “Passion may be one of the most important characteristics of entrepreneurs. Most entrepreneurs will tell you that it’s this, rather than the promise of money or fame, that drives them on.” (https://www.monster.ca/career-advice/article/successful-entrepreneurs-characteristics, accessed 12.12. 2019). Popular books about entrepreneurship present passion as a key element in an entrepreneurial journey, and often works this in to the very title, such as in The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future by Chris Guillebeau (2012), Live Big: The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Passion, Practicality, and Purpose by Ajit Nawalkha (2018), or Clone Yourself: Build a Team that Understands Your Vision, Shares Your Passion, and Runs Your Business For You by Jeff Hilderman (2019). Conferences targeting entrepreneurs frequently employ similar rhetorical devices, with titles such as “Lead To Passion” or referencing “a passion for business” (World Business Forum London 2020). Entrepreneurship educations likewise tend to make continuous reference to passion, such as when Bournemouth University answers their own question of who should study their MSc in innovation management and entrepreneurship by stating the suitability of it for applicants who “Demonstrate a passion for entrepreneurship and innovation” (https://www.bournemouth.ac.uk/study/courses/msc-innovation-management-entrepreneurship-0, accessed 12.12. 2019). In this latter instance, passion isn’t just something good for an entrepreneur to have, it is presented as a pre-requisite! I could list many more examples of this sort, but will spare the reader who can go on to find their own, and merely state that anyone who has spent any time looking into how entrepreneurship is discussed will have come across countless such.

What I wish to argue by this is that the passionate entrepreneur isn’t just an agent, recognizing opportunities with a passion, but also a person who has learnt to act in a way that corresponds with how the surrounding environment views entrepreneurs and expects these to behave. Our hypothetical entrepreneur has almost certainly read about other entrepreneurs, met people with specific ideas about what entrepreneurship means, and even been able to gauge how different ways of narrating his or her entrepreneurial journey are received in different ways. To be passionate is not just to enter a specific emotional state, it is also to communicate the same — and to communicate we need a shared language and a community. If said community further expects passion from entrepreneurs, the likelihood is great that passion is something that a person wishing to be seen and accepted as an entrepreneur will project. If it is seen as “one of the most important characteristics” of entrepreneurship, entrepreneurs starting out may well feel it is not so much something one can choose to have or not, but part and parcel of what it means to be a “proper” entrepreneur. In this way, passion can in the social nexus turn into an imperative, and thus go from internal emotion to externally mandated performance.

Passion as Performance and Social Praxis

Wittgenstein famously stated “An ‘inner process’ stands in need of outward criteria” (Wittgenstein, 1958, #580). Here he wasn’t doubting the existence of inner experiences, merely pointing out that in order for e.g. affects or emotional workings to be understandable in context, they also need to connect to broader interpretive schemes. If someone states that they are deliriously happy, but do so in the flattest of voices and with literally no animation, we will be confused as to what they mean. They may of course still be deliriously happy, yet if we lack the faculties to communicate this in an understandable manner, those around us may struggle to understand whether we know what happiness is. For an emotion to make sense in a social setting, it needs to be adequately performed — expressions of joy are qualitatively different from expressions of sadness, and both have their audiences. Another way to state this is that emotions and affects are not only inner states, but also performances, something with a relational aspect. Passion is particularly interesting here. Happiness and sadness can at least in some cases be something that doesn’t necessarily involve an outside party. Passion, however, is always a relation to something, and stating one is passionately aroused by a partner yet unable to command any physical signal thereof puts into doubt whether the passion is true or not. For passion to be meaningful, it needs to involve something to be passionate about — stating one is passionate about oneself is rather odd. Further, passion is relational even as an emotion. If you are passionate about every kind of foodstuff, you might as well just say you like all kinds of food. To be passionate about ice-cream indicates that there are other desserts and sweet things you are less keen about, and to be passionate about a particular entrepreneurial venture at least implies that other possible ventures wouldn’t be quite as exhilarating.

So passion requires what Wittgenstein called “outward criteria”, signs that passion is indeed in play. At times, this is less than complicated. We can see passion for music in the animated faces of an audience and passion for a partner in physical arousal. However, in the case of entrepreneurship and passion, other matters come into play. Imagine a person who is setting up a startup that aims to automate search engine optimization (SEO). This person might state that they are “passionate about SEO”. How should we understand this statement? It seems to indicate that they have a deep emotional link to the process of making the content of a website align well with the way search engines such as Google rank websites, with the intent to get the website listed as highly as possible in the results of specific searches people might make. It isn’t entirely clear, however, just what the object or subject of this passion is. Is it the results of SEO? The algorithmic work itself? The terms? Or the business the person is building up around this work? All of these?

Most of the time, we ignore questions such as these as sophistry, and instead assume that the passion is in fact for the entrepreneurial process and figuration itself, in a more general manner. This is of course also in line how we understand passion more generally. When somebody says they are passionate about music, wine, or (wo)men, we do not immediately assume that they have a deep emotional relation with all kinds of music, that they are thrilled about drinking any kind of wine, or that they are prepared to engage in romance and/or copulation with any member of the opposite (or same) sex. To state one is passionate about e.g. music is to signal that one has a general emotional bond with the same, but there is also an expectation that this plays out as a discernment and a complex and full engagement with the object of passion. An oenophile will go to some lengths to acquire the right accessories for enjoying wine, and is likely to (in the right settings) show off his or her passion for wine though both rituals such as careful decanting and narrations about different kinds of nose and bouquet. Stating a passion for wine but only ever buying the cheapest or most readily available kind would make us doubt whether the claim of a passion wasn’t in reality a clumsy cover for alcoholism. Similarly, it is not enough simply to state that one is passionate about the entrepreneurial venture one pursues, one also needs to be able to show this passion, in varied ways.

What all this points to is that emotions and passion, in entrepreneurship and elsewhere, often requires an audience. Audiences, in their turn, tend to have specific expectations about behaviors and “outward criteria”, affecting the shows of affect that e.g. an entrepreneur needs to do in order to prove that they are, in fact, passionate. In this manner, audiences have an effect on entrepreneurial affect. Entrepreneurship studies has rarely discussed audiences (see, however, Frith & McElwee 2008). In cultural, media, and communication studies however, the role played by the audience has long been acknowledged, as has the active role audiences can have in changing e.g. a performance, a cultural artifact, or a text. Here, the creation of e.g. a piece of art or literature is not seen as wholly separate from audience influence, either assumed or explicit (cf. Ruddock 2001, Gillespie 2005). Authors often have an audience in mind when writing, and an engaged audience can even put active pressure on creators to change their output. Creators can also feel that there are specific modes of expression or tropes that need to be adhered to if one wants to be accepted by an audience. A romance novel where the handsome man never meets anyone to adore, but ends up being passionate about stamp-collecting, will not find great favor with the audience for romance novels.

Some might wonder what this has to do with entrepreneurship. For an entrepreneur, the audience effect is of course neither as direct nor as clear-cut. The cultural products that entrepreneurs create are not necessarily as material and well delineated as those of an author or an artists, but it would be an error to assume that this means that entrepreneurs do not have audiences. In fact, entrepreneurs have a great deal of such, all with their own demands regarding entrepreneurial performances. The most obvious audience, particularly in the early stage of the entrepreneurial process, is of course that of financiers and funders. For e.g. a startup entrepreneur to get financing, it is often necessary to do very stylized performances, known as ‘pitches’, for either business angels or venture capitalists. Sometimes this even happens in a very staged manner, with things such as pitching events and various competitions being a common theme at entrepreneurship educations, as well as at entrepreneurship events and conferences. Consider for instance an event such as Slush, which is one of the biggest entrepreneurship events in Northern Europe. It had 25,000 attendees in 2019, and a key part of the program was the Slush 100 Pitching Competition. In the finals of this, three entrepreneurs pitch at the main stage, in front of a panel of VCs and angel investors, with up to a 1000 additional viewers in the audience — not counting those following the video stream. During such a performance, an entrepreneur is of course expected to display presentation skills, their business model and its suitability, as well as a grasp of underlying data. In addition to this, entrepreneurs in such situations needs to show passion for their own idea, so as not to seem bored or unenthusiastic. The manner in which this passion is shown can be greatly affected by how the audience responds — with applause, encouragement, or icy silence. Here, the audience most obviously has an impact of entrepreneurial passion, or at the very least on how it is performed. In fact, some research suggests that the manner in which one can show passion has a measurable effect on whether one receives funding or not, and even that the time during the pitch at which one shows heightened positive emotional states matters (Jiang, L., et al. 2019). Performances matter.

Lest someone protests by stating that pitch events may be important for some entrepreneurs, but even then only momentarily, let us next consider media. In a medialized society (cf. Curran & Hesmondhalgh 2019), the capacity for an entrepreneur to gain attention through things such as magazine articles, TV appearances, or social media placements can be the difference between a successful launch/venture and a failed one. Here as well the audience comes into play. Media outlets are well aware that contemporary audiences react to heightened emotional states, leading to a situation where an entrepreneur with a shy demeanor and a flat affect can have difficulties to engage and drive ‘clicks and eyeballs’. Thus e.g. magazine articles or podcasts make sure to emphasize things such as drive, grit, and passion in the narrations they weave together with entrepreneurs, once again communicating to the entrepreneur the need to showcase passion in very specific ways, the kinds of ways that the audience is assumed to desire. There are today even specialized consultant who help entrepreneurs to craft their ‘personal brands’ in a way which makes their venture seem more like a passion project, with the requisite social media postings to support this.

Or, if this seems all too marginal for the reader, consider the very real difficulty for many entrepreneurs to both build a strong team and then retain the same. As entrepreneurs aren’t always in the position to offer the greatest salaries — there is a reason why we sometimes talk about ‘sweat equity’ when it comes to early hires in a startup — there is a great need to instill in the entrepreneurial organization a sense of a shared vision and of better times to come, and a key component of this is the passion shown by the founder. An entrepreneur who doesn’t seem to care about the company they started will struggle to attract talent, leading e.g. many founders of startups to feel that they need to ‘cheerlead’ in order to keep their teams happy and, yes, passionate. Thus performances of entrepreneurial passion needn’t be just limited to external audiences, but are also observed by internal such. There are in addition to this many other potential audiences to consider — customers, suppliers, stakeholders and so on. The capacity to perform passion in the right way can thus be an important praxis for entrepreneurs, one with clear material outcomes.

What I wish to argue by all this is that it is not enough to observe passion or the lack thereof in entrepreneurs to understand the role of passion in entrepreneurship. Instead, passion must be understood both as a performance on the part of the entrepreneur and as a social praxis where passion is in a sense the product of a complex negotiation. If said performances of passion are interpreted as being over the top, this can make an entrepreneur seem immature or irrational. If they aren’t seen as genuine enough or overt enough, this can make the entrepreneur seem unprofessional or… not a real entrepreneur. In this manner, the praxis of passion may well represent a key skill in entrepreneurship, something to master so as to not be mis-interpreted or having ones venture scuppered. Yet what is a performance without the props?

The Props of Passion — Commodifying Affect

What the notion of passion as a socio-cultural performance gives us is not merely another way of conceptualizing a complex emotional and affective state, but also a way to delve into the various ways in which passion can be exhibited. This, again, allows for us to inquire into the ways in which such performances become possible, where they are primarily played out, and what symbolic elements may be attached to the same. In other words, when we’re inquiring into passion and entrepreneurship, we need to ask ourselves how this is exhibited and performed, where such performances take place, to whom such performances are directed, and with what such performances are achieved. This obviously does not mean that only performances of entrepreneurial passion that manages to fulfill all these are real performances, but such a scheme still enables us to inquire into the multitude of ways in and through which entrepreneurial passion can be performed.

In the following, I will exemplify this with a number of cases developed from a longer ethnographic study of startup entrepreneurship. I do wish to note, however, that my interest here has chiefly been to understand overt representational practices and the commodification of certain aspects of the startup entrepreneurship nexus, so there remains many venues for the aforementioned performances I will not touch upon here, even if I have observed them. Whilst the way in which entrepreneurial passion is performed for smaller audiences — such as investors, peers, or internal teams — is highly interesting, my core interest lies in cases where passion is extended through material means and through this commodified. I am here somewhat inspired by the late, great media theorist Marshall McLuhan, an early influence, and in particular his often misunderstood dictum “the medium is the message” (McLuhan 1964). This was a call to pay attention to media themselves, rather than the messages they carried, and emphasized the notion that we cannot fully isolate the message from the medium. In a similar manner, I would hold that the way in which entrepreneurial passion is communicated shouldn’t be ignored, particularly as this can show us something about how the assumed surface effects of passion can in fact be the very core thereof, or at the very least Eliasian figurations of the same (Elias 1974). In the following I will visit two cases that I hope can highlight this.

Case 1: Social media
Social media such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram (or, for that matter, Medium, TikTok, or SnapChat) are key areas to communicate passion and thus perform the role of the passionate entrepreneur. On social media one can communicate both great successes and the everyday occurrences of a new entrepreneurial venture, and to do so in a way that can be viewed by a wide range of potential stakeholders and other audiences. The choice of where this is done varies greatly between entrepreneurs, but in the contexts I’ve studied it would seem that Facebook and LinkedIn are the key arenas, with Instagram being a quickly growing channel to communicate this specific brand of passion. One might wonder why it would be important to post e.g. Instagram-posts about just how much fun one has working in an office, but such posts and commentaries are rife if one follows particularly startup entrepreneurs. The timbre and tone of said posts can vary greatly. They can be earnest or exuberant, and at times rather sentimental. Occasionally one can find more downbeat posts, reflecting on hardships and challenges, but the overall tone tends to be very positive indeed, with no lack of posts expressing joy over just how lucky said entrepreneur is to have been given the opportunity to work with their passion. A superficial reading of such posts might even lead one to believe that these are objective and true expressions, signifying just how happy the entrepreneurs are about their chosen life.

A more careful and contextual analysis muddies this picture somewhat. Whilst there certainly are entrepreneurs that simply use social media to spread images of their energetic workplaces, much like a parent might of their energetic offspring, there is another, parallel pattern as well. A number of entrepreneurs have realized that communicating entrepreneurial passion can be something more than merely telling the world about your emotional states. Smartly deployed, it can also be a way to generate additional income, by becoming conduits and examples of a lifestyle that some want to emulate and be inspired by. A classical example of this is Gary Vaynerchuk (today often stylized as GaryVee), who started his career as an entrepreneur in the wine business (having taken over his father’s liquor store). By deftly utilizing social media, particularly YouTube, he rapidly grew this business — but also his personal brand. By way of hyper-energetic videos, and later communicating the same energy across most media channels, Gary became something of an internet darling, and later left the wine business to focus on his online persona, public speaking engagements, and a digital ad agency. Today, he still communicates entrepreneurial passion through a bevy of highly popular social media channels (YouTube: 2,5M subscribers, Instagram: 7,4M followers, Twitter: 11,6M followers, all current January 4th 2020, which should go some way towards showing that there is a good market for well-packaged narrations of entrepreneurial passion), and one could describe this — sharing motivational content and performing passion on social media — as his key business. It is here important to note that this journey from entrepreneur to influencer isn’t unique, although Gary’s success just might be. There are in fact quite a few entrepreneurs that follow a similar stratagem, in more or less explicit ways. Narrating entrepreneurial passion can in this manner be a way to commodify the same — at first as content for social media, and later possibly books and keynote speeches.

Sticking to social media for now, we can in the production of social media content that Gary Vaynerchuk and a small army of other entrepreneurs are engaged in see one form of commodification. By creating various clips, texts, images with motivational quotes, mostly addressing issues of entrepreneurship, work, and the emotional dimensions of this, they are in effect supplying other entrepreneurs and fellow travelers with a semiotic form of “passion capital” that is legitimized in the community and which can be used to signal that one holds the right attitudes of e.g. a startup entrepreneur. A GaryVee-video can in this case be a semiotic marker for entrepreneurial passion that can be used in ones own performance of the same. By first consuming/viewing it, and later sharing it in ones own social media channels, entrepreneurs can signal that they too are suitably passionate and prepared to partake in the social praxis around the same. The impact can further be bolstered by adding on your own pithy comments or even emulating other social media content. Whether their passion is ‘true’ or not matter little here. With the right social media content, passion can be communicated quite independently of any internal state (and even outsourced to an intern or an algorithm).

Case 2: Accessories
Social media is of course highly ephemeral, and showing the right outward signals of entrepreneurial passion can be something of a chore, particularly if one also has to devote energies to an actual entrepreneurial venture. In such instances, entrepreneurs may need to find more permanent semiotic markers of passion. Thankfully, startups are by now so entrenched in our societies that the broader entrepreneurship ecosystem contains companies devoted to providing the same. What I am referring to here is the plethora of material things through which entrepreneurs can communicate their legitimacy as specifically entrepreneurs, and more specifically such that serve to communicate passion without requiring the entrepreneur to do much more than purchase the props.

There are of course a set of things that have become so entrenched in our cultural subconscious as part and parcel of the startup entrepreneurs habitus that they can have an air of parody around them. Products such as Apple laptops, hoodies with tech company or conference insignia coupled with chinos and Allbirds shoes, as well as wearables such as the Oura ring have become something of shorthand for a particular kind of entrepreneur. These, however, do little to communicate passion, for entrepreneurship or anything else (except, in the case of wearables, collecting data about yourself). There is however in this realm a set of products that serve exactly that purpose, and which have become exceptionally popular in the startup community. I am here referencing things such as the posters, coffee cups, and t-shirts with pithy statements about the life entrepreneurial that are used either ironically or un-ironically to signal that a specific office or similar is, in fact, one for startup entrepreneurship. Whilst seen as ridiculous by some, they still represent a very specific kind of marker for entrepreneurial legitimacy and belonging to a community, and whilst one might see them as ephemera and marginalia when trying to theorize passion in said community, I maintain they also show the tendency for displays of passion to be commodified and standardized.

There are many outlets for such materials, but one of the most defining such is a site called Startup Vitamins (www.startupvitamins.com, last visited January 4th 2020). They supply a wide range of office products and clothing, all of them adorned with a supposedly motivational or insightful slogan, quip, or quote, and their website proudly state that these can be found in revered companies with an entrepreneurial pedigree such as Google, Nike, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Products sold on the side include obvious things such as posters, t-shirts, and coffee mugs, but also some more surprising things such as pillows and leggings. Exactly why anyone would want a pillow emblazoned with the text “A user interface is like a joke. If you have to explain it, it’s not that good.” is not explained anywhere on the site. Most of their products have less wordy statements on them, and a few typical ones are quoted here (all from the site above):

“Passion never fails.”

“Think bigger.”

“Life is short. Do stuff that matters.”

“Fuck mediocrity.”

“Find your one thing and do that one thing better than anyone else.”

“Wake up. Kick ass. Repeat.”

“Be obsessed or be average.”

All of these can be bought as a poster, and most can be bought as a coffee mug or a baseball cap. Only a few can be bought as leggings, but you will be reassured that “Passion never fails” is one of them. Products such as these of course have a long history, and link back to signs at places such as churches and offices that try to communicate moral or motivational imperatives. At the same time, I maintain that they also say something about entrepreneurial passion, as these are not just products bought by overbearing office managers, but often by entrepreneurs themselves. How are we to interpret it when one such buys and prominently displays a “Get shit done” coffee-mug? What is the entrepreneur donning a pair of “Passion never fails”-leggings trying to communicate?

Such products, and the slogans on them, can in the context we’re inquiring into be seen as the end-point of semiotical marking with regards to entrepreneurial passion. By creating commodities that fully embrace the externalization of the aforementioned, Startup Vitamins is in a sense short-circuiting the discussion about passion, making it into merely a poster (sic) to be displayed. Entrepreneurs are through them no longer to actively take part in the affect, but can in effect transfer their performances of passion to inanimate objects and get on with the actual work. We could of course say that this is a false form of passion, rooted as it is in slogans and commodities, but we might also ask whether it is any worse than the forced smile of the entrepreneur presenting an idea to a bank or an investor. Further, the very existence of such objects shows that passion in entrepreneurship isn’t just a simple internal emotion, but a phenomenon that needs to be understood in a socio-cultural context where it can be appropriated and turned into a pillow.

What I have aimed to show through these two mini-cases is that passion in entrepreneurship isn’t a neutral thing or a mere background dynamic in capitalism. On the contrary, it is also an affect that can be captured, re-packaged, commodified, and turned into a soft fleece hoodie, available in sizes from XS to XXL (45 USD, does not include shipping). Whilst such a commodification (or the hoodie that goes with it) of course doesn’t capture the full gamut of entrepreneurial passion, it still remains as an object, a semiotic marker, and a signifier that a study of said passion needs to understand and come to grips with. It also stands as a marker for the curious paradox that sometimes an attention to passion can go on to create things that would seem to work directly against the same, as when an entrepreneur tries to communicate passion by dispassionately sharing the same sloganeering social media content everyone else in the community is primed to consume and re-share.

The Ideological Passion Apparatus — Against Passion in Entrepreneurship?

“(H)oc opus, hic labor est.”
Virgil, Aeneid, book 6

In his works on ideology, the philosopher Louis Althusser introduced the concept of the ideological state apparatuses (Althusser 1971). This was shorthand for sets of ostensibly apolitical institutions and formations that still restrained thinking and reiterated and replicated ideology in a society or community. Such psychosocial structures exist to train people to see the system in which they are operating as normal and necessary, and serve to support hegemony. Whilst not openly repressive, they still communicate that there are norms et cetera that one needs to follow so as to remain within the acceptable bounds of a society — police are to be obeyed, laws are to be followed, and exploitation to be expected. This notion, which follows and develops upon Marx’s notion of the superstructure in dialectical materialism and Gramsci’s notion of ideology as praxis, served to highlight that what might superficially appear to be an objective good, such as e.g. education, could also contain distinct if obscured ideological components.

Whilst entrepreneurship in and of itself transcends such a categorization, one could argue that much of entrepreneurship research does fall under it. By naturalizing and normalizing participation in a capitalist system, and not questioning the assumptions and underpinnings of said system, the field can quite easily become a model through which ideology is disseminated. I do not here have the space to fully expound upon this assertion, nor is it necessary in this context. I will instead restrict myself to noting how a preoccupation with passion in entrepreneurship can do something similar. By way of prescriptive notions of said passion, one creates a figuration of entrepreneurship where only those who are prepared to fully commit to the same, and thus are less likely to question it and its assumption, will engage. By creating a passion imperative, one is in fact limiting the number of ways in which people can engage with entrepreneurship, and rather than making it more inclusive one is using subtle ideological moves to exclude those who might be more critical or questioning towards the same. As books, keynotes, and even posters about entrepreneurship keep outlining passion as a necessity, the ways in which budding entrepreneurs feel they can behave is diminished, and an ideological streamlining is achieved.

If we are indeed interested in entrepreneurship and passion, we thus also need to ask ourselves whether promoting passion might not be a way to limit the same? As passion becomes ostensibly defined by the cases we use and the behavioral patterns we prescribe, other ways of being and engaging with the field are in effect marginalized. Further, by prescribing, reifying, and celebrating passion, one runs the distinct risk of continuing a process that is already quite far gone in the entrepreneurship community — as evidenced by countless motivational YouTube-clips and cheerful slogans on clothing-swag distributed at conferences. Thus, without a critical look on how passion is communicated and commodified (such as in the book this was to go into, which was in itself a commodity to be sold to those with an interest in passion in entrepreneurship), we risk becoming part of an ideological passion apparatus — a structure promoting specific notions of passion and insisting on the same.

Interestingly, one can currently note a certain backlash against notions of passion in entrepreneurship. As the startup boom wanes, it has become clear that despite what cheerful leggings or coffee-mugs might claim, sometimes passion does fail. Numerous wannabe entrepreneurs have found that despite their passion, and sometimes due to it, entrepreneurial ventures can end up doing little else than burning through the savings of themselves, their parents, and/or their partners. For every passionate motivational speaker touting the benefits of passion in entrepreneurship, for every researcher fond of heightened emotional states in entrepreneurial ventures, there are hundreds if not thousands of entrepreneurs who had the passion but not the skills, the fire but not the resources, the ardor but not the application to succeed.

So do we need a more dispassionate entrepreneurship studies? Yes and no. We need research into entrepreneurship that doesn’t blindly praise passion as a constitutive part of entrepreneurship, for doing so would be to work with a most limited and restricted notion of the same. We also need research into entrepreneurship that can turn a critical lens on the oddities of passion in the field, such as the praxis of social imperatives and the commodification that I’ve attempted to sketch here. That said, we also need research into entrepreneurship that takes the full gamut of passion into consideration, not as a panacea but as a phenomenon with sides good and bad, positive and negative, and as a phenomenon which can be reduced and perverted as well as elevated and analyzed. No matter what your pillow tells you.

REFERENCES

Althusser, L. (1968/1971). Lenin and philosophy, and other essays. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Curran, J., & Hesmondhalgh, D. (Eds.) (2019). Media and Society. Bloomsbury Academic.

Elias, N. (1978). The Civilizing Process (Vol. 1). Oxford: Blackwell.

Frith, K., & McElwee, G. (2008). “The entrepreneurial wide boy. A modern morality tale.” International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business, 6(1), 80.

Gillespie, M. (Ed.) (2005). Media audiences. Maidenhead: Open University Press.

Gregg, M., & Seigworth, G. J. (Eds.) (2010). The Affect Theory Reader. Duke University Press.

Jiang, L., et al. (2019). “Can Joy Buy You Money? The Impact of the Strength, Duration, and Phases of an Entrepreneur’s Peak Displayed Joy on Funding Performance.” Academy of Management Journal 62(6): 1848–1871.

Kirzner, I. (1973/2015). Competition and Entrepreneurship. University of Chicago press.

Partnoy, F. (2010). The Match King: Ivar Kreuger and the Financial Scandal of the Century. London: Profile Books.

Ruddock, A. (2001), Understanding Audiences: Theory and Method. London: Sage.

Schumpeter, J. (2010). Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. London: Routledge.