The production of entrepreneurial youth in business media: discourse, entrepreneurial culture and inspiration¹

Abstract

The magazine Pequenas Empresas, Grandes Negócios (PEGN), published by Globo, is a business media, which defines itself as “the largest and most important community of entrepreneurs in Brazil”. This work aims to investigate the conceptions of entrepreneurial youth present in texts published on the vehicle’s website, in 2018 and 2019. Through Discourse Analysis, we identified three major semantic axes, which structure the narratives. They show the youth as an entrepreneur who inspires society; as the one in which we should invest, so that the country can develop through its entrepreneurial actions; and the one who transforms youth into an enterprise. Such representations are presented most of the time as cases of success, or, when errors appear, they serve to the entrepreneurial pedagogy. The goal, in all of them, is to unify Brazilian youth by the entrepreneurial ethos.

Keywords
Youth; Inspiration Culture; Entrepreneurship; Discourse; PEGN

Resumo

A revista Pequenas Empresas, Grandes Negócios (PEGN), da editora Globo, é uma mídia de negócios, que se define como a “a maior e mais importante comunidade de empreendedores do Brasil”. Este trabalho tem o objetivo de investigar as concepções de juventude empreendedora presentes em reportagens publicadas no site do veículo, em 2018 e 2019. Por meio da Análise do Discurso, encontramos três grandes eixos semânticos, que estruturam as narrativas. Eles mostram o jovem como um empreendedor que inspira a sociedade; como aquele em que devemos investir, para que o país possa se desenvolver por meio de suas ações empreendedoras; e aquele que transforma a própria juventude em empreendimento. Tais representações são apresentadas na maior parte das vezes como casos de sucesso, ou, quando os erros aparecem, eles surgem para que sirvam à pedagogia empreendedora. O objetivo, em todos eles, é que a juventude brasileira seja unificada pelo ethos empreendedor.

Palavras-chave
Juventude; Cultura da inspiração; Empreendedorismo; Discurso; PEGN

Resumen

La revista “Pequenas Empresas, Grandes Negócios (PEGN)”, de la editora Globo, es una prensa de negocios, que se define como “la mayor y más importante comunidad de emprendedores de Brasil”. Este trabajo tiene el objetivo de investigar las concepciones de juventud emprendedora presentes en reportajes publicadas en el sitio web de vehículo, en 2018 y 2019. A través del Análisis del Discurso, identificamos tres grandes ejes semánticos, que estructuran las narrativas. Ellos muestran el joven como un emprendedor que inspira la sociedad; como aquel que debemos hacer la inversión, para que el país pueda desarrollarse por medio de sus acciones emprendedoras; y aquel que trasforma la propia juventud en emprendimiento. Esas representaciones son presentadas en la gran mayoría de las veces como casos de éxito, o cuando aparecen los errores, ellos surgen para que sirvan a la pedagogía emprendedora. El objetivo, en todos ellos, es que la juventud brasileña sea unificada por el espíritu emprendedor.

Palabras clave
Juventud; Cultura de la inspiración; Emprendimiento; Discurso; PEGN

Introduction

News story of the news portal G1, published in June 23rd, 2021 has the following title: “study shows that 60% of young adults with up to 30 years want to be entrepreneurs” ². The research, made by Globo, a company in which G1 is located, heard 1,500 people, and indicates the young people’s desire to be someone in business, motivated by the willing to have financial independence (67% of those who want to be entrepreneurs); having autonomy and being their own boss (39%); having a more flexible work schedule (33%); and offering an innovative service/product to the market (31%). Another article, published by the magazine Pequenas Empresas, Grandes Negócios (which also belongs to Globo), in November 09^th, 2021, based on a study performed by Sebrae (important organization that promotes and encourages Brazilian entrepreneurship) has the title “Young adults are less than 7% of the entrepreneurs in Brazil and are, also,struggling the most against unemployment”³. Two texts published in 2021 – second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, which killed hundreds of thousands of Brazilian citizens and dismantled the already staggering economy of the country in the far-right administration of Jair Bolsonaro and his “Superminister”⁴ Paulo Guedes, triggering a huge number of layoffs, companies and business closing in the most diverse sectors.

Both articles present contrasting faces of the same phenomenon related to work for young adults: the uplifting, imaginary, almost utopian idea of entrepreneurship in our day and age, and the rough reality of unemployment, abandonment and the impossibility of creating a business. These are different views on the world, composing the midiapanorama (APPADURAI, 1999) which shapes Brazilian youth in order to articulate it to the economic scenario, and, at the same time, to the zeitgeist, in which the entrepreneur becomes a paradigmatic figure.

In this article, the object of our study is one of the news outlets mentioned above, the magazine Pequenas Empresas, Grandes Negócios – PEGN, which belongs to the so-called Brazilian “business media” (COSTA; BARROS; MARTINS, 2012). According to the website of the publishing company, the magazine “gathers the biggest and most important community of entrepreneurs in Brazil”⁵, and “has the mission of encouraging and training them, in addition to inspiring new generations who dream to create a company”. Beyond the printed publication, PEGN has a website, social media profiles, an app and a TV show. It is, as we can see, a media object that is built in the junction of the economic activity with the formation of an imagined community, which has the goal of promoting “inspiration” – a strategy aligned to the project of entrepreneurial society (DARDOT; LAVAL, 2016).

Through Discourse Analysis, we have the main goal of understanding how the magazine, through the articles published in its website, seeks to “inspire new generations”, based on the representations of entrepreneurial youth. We begin using the concept about inspiration coined by Trash and Elliot (2003), who describe as one of the aspects of this phenomenon, the “call to action” derived from “environmental factors”, such as outstanding stories and successful life path, which work as a role model to the “inspired” subjects. This type of discourse is linked to the culture related to entrepreneurship, established as a paradigmatic spirit of our day and age, according to Boltanski e Chiapello (2009): the entrepreneur becomes a role model to be replicated in all spheres of life: life, itself, becomes an enterprise.

To do so, we shall analyze how the idea of entrepreneurship is associated to a notion of youth built by the magazine, and how recipes for success and guidelines for the existence are prescribed by this discursive production. We work with the notion of social discourse by Angenot (2010): according to the author, what is thinkable and utterable in a certain historic moment is, to a certain degree, delimited by the zeitgeist. Therefore, the idea of entrepreneurial youth emerges as a model signified and valued by a certain historic framing, associated to a culture ruled by the principles of a neoliberal society (DARDOT; LAVAL, 2016). The project of neoliberal society is related to the formation of minds and with the models of conduct, in the Foucauldian sense (FOUCAULT, 2008); inspiration is, in fact, the intentionality of building someone’s identity – in our case, the young adult – through a position in the capitalist system and the incorporation of certain values.

The contemporary ideal of adolescence and young adulthood, on the other hand, emerges in the turn of the 19^th to the 20^th century, through the conception of this phase as a preparation for adulthood and, at the same time, as a potential tool for change and transformation, because of all of their physical stamina (PAIS, 2009). González and Feixa (2014, p. 70-71) quote Benjamin as one of the first authors to reproduce this discursive construction, in a 1905 text, when talking about university students as a “miniature reproduction of a more elevated historic state, metaphysical”. Fonseca (2003), in turn, says that the professional choice, which happens during this stage, is detrimental for the construction of these young adults’ identity, which will obviously interfere in processes of future socialization.

We have adopted as research methodology the Discourse Analysis, which, according to Maingueneau (1997), aims to bring to light the opaque meanings present in the text. These meanings, as we previously said, in our perspective, are widely connected to the economic and social scenarios of our day and age: “Every difficulty consists of, as we have seen, in admitting that meaning and language are not superimposed to economic and social relations, but consist in a constitutive dimension of these relations.” (MAINGUENEAU, 1997, p. 188).

Business media and neoliberal discourse: the case of PEGN

As Guilbert (2020, p. 24) points out, “the words used to found the doctrine form the ideologic context: their knowledge is essential to dismantle the “economic and discursive evidences” of the DNL [neoliberal discourse]”. Thus, the work of discourse analysis about the youth, in the context of a media product that specifically deals with business, is based on the observation of words, in the discursive formations, for the idea of neoliberalism: “youth begin by being a socially manipulated and manipulable category and, as referred by Bourdieu, the fact that we talk about youth as a ‘social unit’, a group with ‘common interests’ […] constitutes, in itself, as an evident manipulation” (PAIS, 1990, p. 140). This type of discourse, according to our approach, is a complex construction, which comprises economic principles, subjectivity representation, description of behaviors, prescriptions and biopolitical convocations (PRADO, 2017) directed towards an imagined reader (CHARAUDEAU, 2007), to the audience projected by the magazine PEGN.

In the “Advertisement” tab of the digital magazine, we find this self-description (in the part quoted above), which reveals the ideological position of the news outlet, gives hints of this imagined reader, and, most of all, points towards its communicational intentionality of “inspiring” – which explicitly links this publication to inspiration culture (CASAQUI, 2017):

Pequenas Empresas & Grandes Negócios gathers the biggest, most important community of Brazilian entrepreneurs.

Our mission is to help innovative people to transform their ideas into great accomplishments.

PEGN is a love brand, with inspirational stories and an educational content, which teaches HOW TO MAKE IT.

The stories in the magazine present business opportunities to micro, small and medium businesses and have the commitment of informing what is the most cutting-edge in concepts of management, marketing, strategy, finances and technology⁶.

A few bullet points deserve our highlight in this description of PEGN: as we’ve previously said, the magazine takes on to itself the objective of “inspiring”, “helping”, and “teaching HOW TO MAKE IT” – elements that characterize the presence of an entrepreneurial pedagogy in its discursive production. This pedagogy is directed towards an imagined community: “the biggest, most important community of Brazilian entrepreneurs”. A community coined by the market mentality (POLANYI, 2012), highly engaged in the ideology shared by the magazine – which is tied to the use of a term derived from the field of Marketing: “love brand”. In other words, PEGN presents itself in two distinct and simultaneous senses: as a producer of emotional, long-lasting bonds with its readers (or consumers, as we get a glimpse of the use of a concept of the branding universe, of the market approach on brands) and as a mediator, organizer of an imagined community of Brazilian entrepreneurs. Among their objectives, there is also the emphasis on the gathering of “tools”, techniques, knowledges and practical experiences for the so-called maker culture – one of the names that populate the symbolic universe that emerge from the Silicon Valley, in California (United States of America), cradle of the contemporary culture of startups, projects and businesses associated to the New Economy.

Other information about the consumers of this publication give hints to delimitate the profile which the magazine is preferably talking to: still according to the page destined to possible advertisers, the gender predomination is male among the readers of the digital magazine (56% male; 44% female), regarding the printed magazine with an even bigger emphasis on men (73% men; 27% women). There is no data about race, but the numbers related to social status (77% to the class AB in the digital magazine; 68% of the same class in the printed copy) allow us to infer that most readers are also white, the predominant ethnicity of the Brazilian economical elite. Lastly, the age group indicator shows us that the magazine is preferentially read by young audiences: both in the digital issue (52% are in the age group of up to 34 years old, half of it being up to 24 years old) and in the printed issue (27% up to 24 years old and 30% between 25 and 34 years old), this age profile is noticeable.

White, male, with a privileged social status. This profile of the reading audience of PEGN is visually represented by the two following images (Figures 1 and 2), which correspond to the first and third pages of their media kit – their marketing material with data about readers, formats and prices of the advertisement spaces.

Figure 1
First page of the media kit of PEGN magazine

Figure 2
Third page of PEGN magazine’s media kit.

Some features are noticeable in the images: they are white, young men, with a trendy personal style (clothing and details such as facial hair, tattoos, etc.) in sync with the places where the pictures are located, which are similar to places of work and gatherings populated by the “community” of young entrepreneurs – such as vintage-inspired barbershops and restaurants and cafes with the same influence (that cater to networking events).

The use of English words in the lines above evidence one of the features of the entrepreneurial discourse: the loan of English words is frequent, as a type of esperanto that is shared and identifies this imagined community of the maker culture (another constant term in this scenario). One last bullet point to be observed in this material: the cheerful, light, confident face expression of the two characters describes a visual representation of happiness (FREIRE FILHO, 2010) associated to the imaginary of the entrepreneurial activity. This imaginary imperatively reinforces the ideal of gathering work and leisure, which characterizes the engagement (BOLTANSKI; CHIAPELLO, 2009) of the new generations of capitalism of our time.

In the path of these evidences of the self-referential discourse of the publication, we delineate as study corpus the articles published on the website of PEGN magazine⁷, during the years of 2018 and 2019, resulting from a research in their own page looking for the expressions “young entrepreneur” and “young entrepreneurs” – which gave us 40 pages of response, with the total of 385 articles, from 2013 (date of the first occurrences) to 2020 (until mid-September). Out of the total, 144 items correspond to the years 2018 and 2019 - the cut-off delimited for this research – because they were the most recent andwith at least two years in the history of production of the magazine when this research was carried out, and also because they comprised alone a significant amount in relation to the global sample. In a previous observation of the articles of all the years, we still identified that the period defined for sampling represents a saturation of recurring themes, not presenting other significantly deviant results from the standard seen in these two years. It is important to highlight an exception to this saturation, that is the recent presence of the theme of the COVID-19 pandemic and the scenario associated to it, since 2020 – however, since this production of the magazine is still under development, and the pandemic is still present in the planet, with its immediate impacts on healthcare and economy, we will analyze this material in a later study with some distancing to better conclude about the event and its repercussion in the entrepreneurial scene from the PEGN magazine.

The construction of an entrepreneurial youth in PEGN

Our analysis of the business media PEGN comes from a process of observation of a set of articles, and the categorization as a way of identifying different semantic fields, of universes of meanings produced by smaller sets of corpus, in relation to certain youth profiles associated to discourses about the entrepreneurial society in texts.

When we analyze the articles published in the magazine’s website in 2018 and 2019, in which we see the expression “young entrepreneur” or “young entrepreneurs”, we perceive that the approaches developed may be divided into three big categories, which we call inspiring young entrepreneur; invested young entrepreneur, and youth as a business venture. Soon we will go into detail with this typology. It is important to point out that, in one text, we find elements of many categories; hence, our concern in not classifying the texts in a quantitative way, but rather presenting a few clearer examples of the semantic axis through which the articles are organized. It isn’t about linking the types of representation into numeric hierarchies, but reinforcing their main nuances, that often appear to be overlapped.

Part of the texts brings approaches that reinforce the inspiring character, as we have exposed above, of certain representatives of the Brazilian youth that invest in their own businesses. And that source of inspiration is given both for the success of their businesses and due to the positive way they deal with their failures, making those experiences sources of knowledge for new business strategies. Many organizations structured by these young adults involve actions related to a “purpose”, hence, their inspiring character, although the ways of managing that allow the activity to be profitable are also valued. The following articles belong in this category: “Seven inspiring stories of Latin American people that thrived on e-commerce” (10/02/2018); “Young man turns bottles into cups and makes over 350 thousand reais” (10/19/2018); “Young entrepreneurs are better with dealing with mistakes in the business” (11/05/2018); “This young man created a bank that helps inner city entrepreneurs in São Paulo” (02/01/2019); “Young adults create an app to charge for service via message” (08/22/2019); “This young man took the condo administration to his phone” (05/03/2019); “With the sale of his watches, entrepreneur gives uniforms and shoes to kids in Africa” (08/20/2019); “Entrepreneur that helps small businesses is selected for international prize of youth against poverty” (about a 29 year old young woman, who created her company at 24; from 11/20/2019); “This young Spaniard wants to be the “king of the laundry service” in Brazil” (01/10/2019); “Entrepreneurs open Japanese restaurant and made R$ 40 million” (12/05/2019). In this last case, one of the business founders is portrayed in the following picture (Figure 3):

Figure 3
Picture of Gabriel Abrão, one of the founders of the Japanese restaurant approached by PEGN

Young, white, higher-class men, like the one in the picture, are the most popularly represented in these articles that bring inspiring narratives reinforcing the stereotype of the young entrepreneur we talked about before, and also reflecting the predominant target audience of the magazine. The darker skin color appears in the case of the characters (as the journalistic jargon calls its interviewees) coming from the inner city of big metropolis, but even in these cases, the male figure continues to be highlighted. It is the case of the article “This young man created a bank that helps inner city businesspeople in São Paulo (12/01/2019)⁸, which presents Thiago Vinicius, “creator of the Community Bank União Sampaio, who created a wave of entrepreneurship in Campo Limpo”, neighborhood of the south area of São Paulo, as the fine print of the text says.

The euphoric tone of this first category is the demonstration of young people being a role model of success through entrepreneurship, as a bet in a project of society, valued by the immaculate, necessarily view of business making. They are images that also call back to an ideal of youth as an age class that has the potential of remodeling the world, denying beliefs and practices of previous generations, with which they would not identify. And now this is made through business, a totalizing discourse of our time, with purposes around the common good. On the other hand, we ask the youth the adhesion and adequacy to a capitalist system, since it is necessary to make the world a better place, without stopping to guarantee business sustainability and profit. Maybe that is why there is a bigger presence of male entrepreneurs, since the necessary rationality for managing these successful businesses would be a trait associated to the male gender, not to women. “If, when dealt with, female emotions can be useful to increase productivity in the world of work, there is the reinforcement of the idea that they can become dangerous and unfit, if they are not submitted to a controlling practice” (LEAL, 2016, p. 178). A synthesis of this view is in the excerpt extracted of the article from 11/05/2018 (original highlight):

Future

Young adults are a beacon of hope to strengthen entrepreneurship in Brazil.

There is no doubt they are the way for our country to create high impact companies for society.

(Article “Young entrepreneurs deal better with mistakes in businesses”)⁹.

We are located in the “case” culture, of the narratives that report and publicize stories and steps of a successful business, which reveals a pedagogical character. It is not fortuitously that success cases are teaching tools in business schools, in Advertisement and Business courses. In this spectrum, the most emblematic article is the one titled “seven inspiring stories of Latin American people that thrive on e-commerce”, which covers the final step of the prize “Inspiring stories”, reinforcing the link between business media and inspiration culture (CASAQUI, 2017). This culture comprises a communicative contract between the utterer that seeks to inspire, when bringing models of the culture it represents, and the enunciatees that are projected as subjects looking for these stories, for inspiration to apply entrepreneurship in their lives. The extent of the seven stories of the prize finalists, comprising different Latin American countries (including Brazil, the biggest economies of the region, such as Chile and Mexico, and also Venezuela – country often associated to “communism” in the conservative common sense), is an evidence that, despite the cultural particularities and social-economic contexts, young entrepreneurs are united by a type of universal mindset, a superior, elevated convergence, through their entrepreneur spirit. Therefore, an imaginary is projected about the youthful community articulated to business practices that are also unified by the technologic aspect, by the economy in the digital sense, or the so-called “e-commerce”. This last detail reinforces a business profile with an identity load highly associated to young people, such as startups, or new businesses based on apps, which set the so-called platform economy.

In the second category appears what we call invested young entrepreneur, in other words, the one who society must invest on, a target of studies, public policies and initiatives of entrepreneurial scene ‘s agents. These are texts that seek to better understand the youthful entrepreneurship and point towards paths so that the issues found can be solved. That includes problematizations around the contemporary young adult, in which the magazine brings up debates and research about the hardship faced by these people in the educational scenario and in the workforce so that the entrepreneurial practice and mindset can flourish and work. Such measures enable that, through this agent, society can go forward with their development and build their future in a sustainable manner, without giving up the logic of the capital. To put it in another way, the objective is enabling the improvement of conditions so that every young person can create a business, since this is what is expected of them.

Here, contrary to what we saw in the first category, the youthful voice does not appear: experts speak on their behalf – in other words, society acts or thinks about the young person −, reverberating scenarios already shown in previous studies, in which younger people do not appear as a recurring source of journalism (DORETTO, 2015). In this category, there is a bigger presence of generic visual representations, extracted from stock images, that seek to illustrate the world of entrepreneurship (Figure 4). Following are examples of articles that are framed in this category: “What startups can teach to schools” (04/19/2018); “Teachers will be trained to teach entrepreneurship in public schools”( 05/07/2018); “The rate of young people opening businesses rises” (05/25/2018); “Number of first-time young entrepreneurs rises 58% in the last years” (10/31/2018); “Research shows profile of the Brazilian young entrepreneur” (01/18/2019); “Capital Empreendedor [NGOs] reduces the distances between businessmen and investors” (initiative comprises especially young entrepreneurs; 08/23/2018); “ENEJ 2019 will gather over 5 thousand young entrepreneurs in Gramado (RS)” (09/04/2019); “Collaborative space motivates young entrepreneurs” (09/24/2018); “This young man quit his job to open a startup. And lost” (09/27/2018); “Brazil already has over 500 fintechs in operation” (article that already in the subtitle of its first image shows that “fintech founders are restless young people”; 11/10/2019).

Figure 4
One of the stock photos used in articles of the category invested young entrepreneur

We identified, among the discourses of the category invested young entrepreneur, the coverage about initiatives in the area of education, more specifically about the so-called entrepreneurial pedagogy. In this context, education is often seen as a market, as any other sector of the economy, which must be transformed through a consumer perspective:

The young entrepreneur[Gustavo Fuga, entrepreneur founder of a language school] states that the revolution in Brazilian education will not come from the creation of “a new iPad”, but rather the reevaluation of methods that every school have. “Why can we rate an Uber driver but not an English teacher?”.

(Article “What startups can teach to schools?”)¹⁰.

In addition, the magazine itself takes on a pedagogical posture, when bringing cases of failure in entrepreneurship and utterances of experts so we can learn with such mistakes. As we see in the following excerpt of text “This young man quit his job to open a startup. And lost” (09/27/2018), which tells the entrepreneurial story of David Casarez, Latin American man that was not successful in the action made in California: “When you’re young, it is common to think that being successful is easy. But ‘people don’t want to invest in a startup managed by a young man without experience and without a plan, it doesn’t matter how good the idea is’, says Marks. Casarez learned that the hard way”, points out the text. As a publication from Editora Globo which has partnerships to promote content on entrepreneurship, with entities such as Sebrae, the magazine brings the voice and the mission of this and other organizations about young people, as target of their projects, missions and values:

Sebrae comes from the principle that entrepreneurial education contributes for the formation of autonomous, responsible citizens prepared to take on the role of leading people of their own stories and of a fairer, more sustainable society. (Article “Teachers will be trained to teach entrepreneurship in public schools”)¹¹.

In addition to presenting scenarios to be transformed in favor of entrepreneurship, the articles in this category problematize institutions that would be obstacles for the policies geared towards the construction of this “fairer, more sustainable society” imagined by Sebrae. Highlighted as antagonists are the public sector, the resistance (and inefficacy) of teachers, the lack of technological structure and other incentives. On the other hand, the economic actors take on the role of mentors, visionary “coaches” of a more efficient and modern Brazil, responsible for designing young people as future entrepreneurs, “leading people”, in other words, owners of power. We can observe, as background, an approach related to the belief based on the myth of the “invisible hand of the market” as a divine regulator of the free initiative of homo economicus (FOUCAULT, 2008). This myth feeds the imaginary of efficiency and superiority of economic agents in relation to social projects, inclusive policies and initiatives of State.

Lastly, the third category, called youth as business venture, comprise young people that materialize one of the facets of the idealization of young people, reinforced through the notion of entrepreneurship which is interdependent of this youthful condition. Adolescence, according to Calligaris (2003), would be an age group seen as idyllical by adults, since in this phase, young people have a lot of physical stamina, but still do not carry labor obligations. Youthful subjects portrayed in the magazine make this state of pleasure something permanent, even after entering the workforce (which can, moreover, happen earlier than the average of young people in middle and high-class). Because of that, entrepreneurship is not of any other, but rather an extension of certain youthful practices in is idealized expression, in which the young person has as an inherent condition the act of playing. That happens because the represented youth have made the games, fun, hobbies and pleasures of teenage years profitable businesses – which would be their endorsement for their acceptance in the context of a neoliberal capitalism. In other words, these activities become a merchandise in these articles cases. The theme is reported, in this case, because of the strange nature of the features of the business: they make money with something that should’ve ended with the maturity of these young people; in other words, the end of their youth. Something linked to the value-news in the field of Journalism (SILVA, 2005), to curiosity. They are, most of all, articles that talk about foreign cases.

Articles that belong in this type are: “16 year-old boy makes approximately 2 million reais with bow ties” (01/03/2018); “Young people create a company of “paper” wallets and earn 200 thousand reais per month” (01/10/2018); “Pets: Self-taught young man creates leash that keeps an ideal temperature for dogs” (07/17/2018); “This young woman make paintings from pets and is a hit on the internet” (09/14/2018); “13 year-old creates ‘miniskate’ and becomes a millionaire businessman” (11/21/2018); “14 year-old earns over 50 thousand reais with scented candles” (04/21/2019); “17-year-old makes his living reselling rare sneakers” (06/18/2019); “Young people transform final paper in business and earn with brand of caffeine bars” (07/25/2019); “Get to know the writer who is also a social entrepreneur” (talks about Geovani Martins, 26 years old; 08/09/2019); “Entrepreneurs create canned wine to popularize the consumption of the beverage” (10/31/2019).

It is in this category that we learn about the story of Moziah Bridges, an African American boy who founded his own bow tie store:

Wearing a stylish bow tie isn’t a desire restricted to the adult world. The american Moziah Bridges tried the accessory for the first time when he was four. However, the bow ties available in the market didn’t really strike his interest – he used to think they were very boring.

At the age of nine, he decided to fund his own bow tie shop: Mo’s Bows.

(Article “16-year-old boy earns approximately 2 million reais with bow ties”)¹².

Moziah (Figure 5) had his mother’s and grandmother’s support and became relatively famous when he participated in a TV show, Shark Tank, which spectacularizes the so-called pitches – short presentations of ideas and business projects for a group of possible investors. These players are the ones who decide whether these people are deserving of their financial support or not, according to their own criteria about what is feasible and productive to the market they represent. And, thus, the boy stood out to a millionaire businessman from the fashion industry, who invested in his idea and turned it into a business.

Figure 5
Moziah Bridges, the young entrepreneur that turned his passion for bow ties into a business

In the same trail of Moziah’s success, other young people are presented through a narrative structure that initially shows their likes, habits and passions, showing later how it transcended their daily life to become a profitable business. It is also recurring the mediation of an adult that sees the hobby as an opportunity to earn money, having as leading image the child or teenager. In turn, there are also a few teenagers and young adult that appear as mentors and enablers of their own idea to the market, as it is the case of the Californian Carson Kropfl – who, at the age 13, became a millionaire selling “mini skates”:

The young entrepreneur had always liked skate and that is why he decided to invest in this sector. The idea of creating the business came in 2016, in California. One day, the student went to school and could not fit his skate into his locker. He is an adept of the “maker culture” (do it yourself). Therefore, he started thinking of building his own “mini skate”.

(Article “13-year-old boy creates “mini skate” and becomes a millionaire businessman”)¹³.

Again, a capitalist billionaire (Richard Branson, who owns the company Virgin and one of the investors in space projects with private capital, along with Jeff Bezos, who owns Amazon, and Elon Musk, from Tesla) makes a financial investment, which represents a type of paternity in the business world for these young men, recognized by their capitalist mentality. Being “adept to the maker culture”, as the text says, is the way the article identifies the young Carson, aligning him towards the desirable behavior of the entrepreneur of our time. In this aspect, the stories of this category produce the imaginary that living the childhood and youth can be an expression of capitalism, and in a pleasurable and playful way, since the practices, desires, inventions that are common to this life stage are filtered through the lens of capitalism, of transforming culture and existence into an innovative merchandise. Therefore, PEGN shows how the production of a neoliberal subject (DARDOT; LAVAL, 2016) can be established in the first stages of life, as an inspiration so that readers are inserted into this project of society as early as possible, almost as a biological vocation. Once again, successful cases are the desirable role models, the exemplary stories of the symbolic universe of capital and its rhetoric of engagement. Failures, impossibilities due to financial status restrictions, other setbacks and obstacles of the entrepreneurial activity give way to individual initiatives, to the youthful entrepreneurial spirit, to the exuberance of success. Therefore, entrepreneurship itself gets a new meaning, as a youthful, inventive, spontaneous activity, simultaneously capable of providing to particular interests, to the restlessness and expressivity of their agents. What usually escapes this imaginary is the cultivation of a monoculture, one only mentality adhering to the system of reproduction of capital.

In synthesis, the three categories pointed out in our study represent a young person framed into the project of entrepreneurial society made by PEGN: the ideal role models are presented in a highlighted form, in a gallery of success stories, so it can work as inspiration for their readers. When the situation of the young person can become a news story far from the successful narrative, it is the theme of certain utterances of the adults heard in the text, so they could have a correction rout, so that a reflective analysis is made about the path to go forward. The goal, in every case, is that Brazilian youth (mainly men) be, now and in the future, a youth unified by the entrepreneurial ethos.

Final considerations

In the texts of the digital version of PEGN published between 2018 and 2019, in which we see the expression “young entrepreneur” or “young entrepreneurs” begin to appear, we find the ideal of entrepreneurial youth as source of inspiration for progress, since young people were represented as entrepreneurs – of businesses with profit-oriented goals or projects of social economy – equipped with the purpose of “helping the community”, and the belief that “the cause of entrepreneurship is capable of generating social economic development and transform realities”, as we see a few excerpts of the stories say. This ideal young person emergers from the discourses as a leading person of a transformation process, becoming an “inspiration to the community”. Therefore, the idea of youth as being a generating phase of social change is reinforced, minimizing the difficulties found by these subjects to insert themselves in the formal work market; the magazine prescription works as a positive discourse that superposes the illnesses of capitalism that hit young people in labor age.

The scenario of flexible capitalism (SENNETT, 2007) is the context in which “self-employment” appears as a way out, as a magical solution facing the scarcity of alternatives for young people looking for their first job or progression to an activity related to their interests and life ideals. In this sense, the inspirational discourse around youth entrepreneurship works as an antidote for a social scenario of precariousness, flexibilization, “uberization” of work – which has in young adults one of the main social groups hit by this process, worsening social and economic inequalities in contemporary capitalism.

• 1
  Modified and expanded version of a work presented at the XV Congreso de la Asociación Latinoamericana de Investigadores de la Comunicación, held between November 9th and 13th, 2020, at the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana, Medellín, Colombia (virtual)
• 2
  Available at: <https://g1.globo.com/economia/pme/noticia/2021/06/23/60percent-dos-jovens-com-ate-30-anos-querem-ser-empreendedores-mostra-levantamento.ghtml>. Accessed on: Jan 20th, 2022.
• 3
  Available at: <https://revistapegn.globo.com/Empreendedorismo/noticia/2021/11/jovens-sao-menos-de-7-dos-empreendedores-no-brasil-e-os-que-mais-lutam-contra-o-desemprego.html. Accessed on: 20 jan. 2022.
• 4
  The term was created in the press, due to the fact that the Economy Minister, under the Direction of Guedes, had been created with the fusion of three important subjects: Treasury, Planning and Industry.
• 5
  Available at: <https://www.publicidadeeditoraglobo.com.br/pegn>. Accessed on: 20 jan. 2022.
• 6
  Available at: <https://www.publicidadeeditoraglobo.com.br/pegn>. Accessed on: 20 jan. 2022. Destaques do original.
• 7
  Available at: <https://revistapegn.globo.com>. Accessed on: 4 nov. 2019.
• 8
  Available at: <https://revistapegn.globo.com/Impacto-social/noticia/2019/02/este-jovem-criou-banco-que-ajuda-empresarios-da-periferia-de-sp.html>. Accessed on: 20 jan. 2022.
• 9
  Available at: <https://revistapegn.globo.com/Como-abrir-uma-empresa/noticia/2018/11/jovens-empreendedores-lidam-melhor-com-o-erro-nos-negocios.html>. Accessed on: 31 jan. 2022.
• 10
  Available at: <https://revistapegn.globo.com/Startups/noticia/2018/04/o-que-startups-podem-ensinar-escolas.html>. Accessed on: Jan. 31st, 2022.
• 11
  Available at: <https://revistapegn.globo.com/Empreendedorismo/noticia/2018/05/professores-serao-capacitados-para-ensinar-empreendedorismo-em-escolas-publicas.html>. Accessed on: Jan. 31st, 2022.
• 12
  Available at: <https://revistapegn.globo.com/Banco-de-ideias/Moda/noticia/2018/01/garoto-de-16-anos-fatura-quase-r-2-milhoes-com-gravatas-borboleta.html>. Accessed on: Jan. 21st, 2022.
• 13
  Available at: <https://revistapegn.globo.com/Banco-de-ideias/Diversao-e-turismo/noticia/2018/11/jovem-de-13-anos-cria-miniskate-e-vira-empresario-milionario.html>. Accessed on: Jan. 31st, 2022.

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Edited by

Editor: Maria Ataide Malcher

Editorial assistant: Weverton Raiol

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  05 Dec 2022
• Date of issue
  2022

History

• Received
  01 Feb 2022
• Accepted
  03 Nov 2022