POPULAR ENTREPRENEURSHIP: A Grammar of Moral Economy in Contemporary Urban Peripheries

Abstract

This article examines how popular entrepreneurship operates as a cultural grammar that disrupts established practices of wageless life in urban peripheries. Drawing on four years of ethnographic research conducted in São Paulo, it analyses entrepreneurial discourses not simply as ideological impositions, but as ambivalent mediations of everyday strategies of social reproduction. Rather than emerging solely from contemporary labour market transformations, entrepreneurship is shown to be rooted in longer‐term trajectories shaped by family practices, moral values, and experiences of precarious work. The article situates the entrepreneurial ethos within broader processes of economic restructuring and the spreading of global trends of modernity, highlighting its entanglement with shifting expectations of mobility and autonomy. Empirical material from street‐level commerce, entrepreneurship events, and in‐depth interviews demonstrates how individuals navigate between survival and aspiration, mobilizing both residual practices and new normative frameworks. While entrepreneurship may provide access to resources, recognition and future‐oriented projects, it also reorganizes existing tensions within the limits imposed by precarious conditions of life and work. In this sense, popular entrepreneurship is understood as a contradictory formation, through which longstanding ways of life are reworked rather than replaced, and where competing moralities, expectations and forms of economic action might converge.