Against the grain, within the frame: Discursive negotiations of entrepreneurial mindset in selected European conservatories

This article explores how students and institutional actors in cross-section of Northern and Southern European conservatories navigate the growing dominance of the entrepreneurial mindset within higher music education. Rather than framing this engagement in binary terms of acceptance or resistance, the study highlights the subtle, affective, and discursive tactics through which individuals negotiate institutional expectations through irony, strategic fluency, reframing, and hesitation. Drawing on critical discourse analysis and informed by theories of neoliberal subject formation, performativity, institutional temporality, and affective labour, the article interprets these micro-practices as forms of both conformity and quiet resistance. Focusing on conservatory settings, the analysis attends to the frictions between policy-driven discourses of entrepreneurial subjectivity and the slower, recursive rhythms of artistic learning. It shows how institutional scripts are not simply internalised but tactically performed, rearticulated, or quietly unsettled in everyday language. By situating these negotiations within broader debates on the marketisation of higher education, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of how music students’ identities are shaped, strained, and contested in the discursive margins of institutional speech. In doing so, it invites further reflection on what kinds of subjectivities music institutions are cultivating, and at what cost.