The positive face of the young entrepreneur: the hegemonic process of social innovation in Slovenia

Abstract Neoliberal political economy, which places entrepreneurship at the centre of human well-being, sees the potential of young people as self-reliant entrepreneurs capable of relieving the capital and state of the burden of social welfare. This paper examines the process of the establishment of young entrepreneurs in Slovenia during the neoliberal economic and political transition, and as a reaction to the 2010s economic crisis. The paper shows how economic elites deployed a wide range of public and private institutions at the transnational and national levels. These then worked in synergy to provide a model self-performance for young Slovenes. Early career entrepreneurs were widely considered to be socially beneficial and viewed themselves as such as well. The media promoted them as such, thereby normalising entrepreneurship as a career option and reeling more young people in. The resulting social consensus on the benefits of youth entrepreneurship, consolidated as a hegemony, came to exert an increasingly pervasive influence over Slovenian youth. This paper frames the said hegemony as a process of mediating consent through the use of models and reviews it in the context of social innovation. Since, in Slovenia, incentivising young people to pursue entrepreneurial careers was a novelty, hegemony is examined as a process of aligning society with social innovation in the interest of the elites. The paper examines how hegemony produces and relies on “positive” models that project the positivity of the hegemony and thereby secure hegemonic consent.