Entrepreneurialism as infrastructural ideology: Institutional durability in developmentally charged domains

Entrepreneurialism is increasingly understood as a belief system that extends entrepreneurial principles into social life, yet how it becomes an institutionally durable normative order remains under-theorised. I define institutional durability as its capacity to remain authoritative and reproducible over time and across organisational sites despite actor turnover, critique, and disappointing outcomes. I theorise this capacity through infrastructural ideology: a belief system reproduced through interconnected subject positions, problem translations, organisational and evaluative arrangements, and future-making practices. A recursive model of subjectification, translation, infrastructuring, and futuring explains how programmes may change while the premise that progress should be pursued entrepreneurially persists. Developmentally charged domains intensify this process by organising intervention around deficient subjects, actionable problems, and preferred futures. The article derives compensatory, competitive, and redemptive entrepreneurialism from distinct problem–future relations and contributes by temporalising entrepreneurialism, materialising ideology, and explaining how coupling and decoupling generate durability and brittleness. • Infrastructural ideology explains how entrepreneurialism becomes durable. • Subjectification, translation, infrastructuring and futuring operate recursively. • Coupling sustains institutional durability; decoupling produces brittleness. • Compensatory, competitive and redemptive regimes justify entrepreneurial intervention. • Developmentally charged domains intensify entrepreneurial durability.