Coignet, Adeline
(2024)
Anarchist entrepreneurs?
PhD thesis, University of Nottingham.
Abstract
From anarchist bakeries to anarchist bookstores, restaurants, bike repair shops, or art stores, anarchists do engage in entrepreneurship in some forms. As shown in the literature, organising is crucial for anarchists; yet, to date, few scholars have looked into potential crossovers between anarchism and entrepreneurship. Anarchists being anti-capitalist by nature, and entrepreneurs aligning within capitalist structures, leads us to question how these seemingly incompatible concepts do co-exist for individual anarchist entrepreneurs.
This thesis studies this phenomenon by conducting 40 semi-structured interviews, learning from 42 participants, part of 34 organisations, who had anarchist values and engaged in entrepreneurial activity. Through the application of a form of grounded theory, three topics emerged as key to understand the coexistence of these competing logics from the interviewees’ perspectives. At the forefront of the participants’ experiences were the ways they perceived the concepts of anarchism and entrepreneurship, how these blended in theory and were implemented in practice, and the subsequent tensions they generated and how these were managed.
This study not only shows how the participants perceived entrepreneurship and those who practice it, particularly focusing on its capitalist connotations, but also how parallels can be drawn with anarchism. Both are fluid concepts which were sometimes viewed as sharing a desire for emancipation, through their potential for questioning capitalist structures and driving social change. Moreover, this thesis displays the various ways the participants implemented anarchist and entrepreneurial values and practices in their organisations, balancing their social goals with their organisations’ financial needs.
Overall, this thesis contributes to entrepreneurship studies, by introducing the example of extreme hybridity the participants presented through their organisations. Anarchist entrepreneurs, for individuals engaging with hybrids, did not always experience typical types of tensions, nor displayed common ways to deal with them. The coping mechanisms used by the interviewees to manage these tensions were tied to their will to enact their anarchist values through their organisations. Despite the challenges presented by the implementation of conflicting values and practices, as anarchist engaging with entrepreneurship, the participants often chose a path of resistance to capitalist structures, to fulfil their desire for emancipation and social change. This thesis, by bringing to light the perspective of anarchists who undertook entrepreneurial practices through organisations conducting commercial activities, displayed another path for entrepreneurs, especially for those with activist or radical-left political backgrounds. The anarchists interviewed provided an example of how their values could be enacted through their practices in their ventures without being completely lost, but also the tensions they faced and compromises they made, alongside the potential coping mechanisms available to them.
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