Introduction

This chapter explores the discourses of enterprise, uncovering the investment in this notion at EU, national and local levels of policy as a solution to youth unemployment. We present two different interventions on the South Coast that aim to increase youth enterprise. These schemes articulate resonating, but significantly different, discourses of enterprise and entrepreneurs. Risk and failure are closely embedded in both discourses of enterprise, but the two interventions have a very different understanding of the value of these in relation to their interpretation of the ‘type’ of young person they cater for. At South East University (SEU), a university-organized bootcamp aimed at students and graduates likely to work in fields that commonly employ freelancers, we found that failure is seen as a normal and important part of learning, and something that participants should embrace. In contrast, at Enterprising Youth, a third sector scheme aimed at the long-term unemployed, failure is viewed almost wholly negatively, and the training puts emphasis on ensuring that participants understand the risks and ‘realities’ of enterprise.

Using Foucault's notion of governmentality to consider how these young people are envisaged and constructed as entrepreneurs through notions of risk and failure, we argue that these different understandings of the young people rest on the fact that the focus of the training utilizes different technologies of governance. Foucault defined four different technologies: