Encountering Entrepreneurs: An Ethnography of the Construction Business in the North of Italy

This book shows the daily life of businessmen in a particularly productive area of Northern Italy, Lombardy. It provides insights into their business, entrepreneurialism, and of them as individuals, allowing the reader to immerse themselves in these businessmen’s world, full of plans, ideas, hopes, and failures in the struggle to survive during a time of economic recession.

The analysis reveals the importance of trust and networks as a way of opposing the vulnerability and risk involved in entrepreneurialism. As such, the book has an appeal that extends beyond anthropology. It will be of interest not only to students of sociology, Italian studies, and business studies, but also to anyone with an interest in seeing business through different lenses. Through its close ethnographic accounts of businessmen, it provides a different approach to capitalism and a reflection on human nature.


Elena Sischarenco holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of St Andrews, and is an Associate of the St Andrews Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies. She has previously published on informal relations and trust, and her research interests go beyond the anthropology of business.

“The book is a real novelty in the scenario of Italian social anthropology. Elena Sischarenco explores the fragmented world of little- and medium-size companies in the construction business in the province of Bergamo, following the entrepreneurs, winning their resistance, and obtaining their - sometimes unconditioned – trust. The book is an unafraid exploration of the “blurred borders between what is considered to be illegal and what it is not”, a crucial crossroad in every company ethical profile. Sischarenco’s analysis is always passionate and involved. She never “takes the distance” from her field, she doesn’t even try, which makes her book even more convincing and powerful."

Elena Bougleux Professor of Cultural Anthropology, University of Bergamo, Italy

“[This book is] a brilliant and unconventional ethnography of the entrepreneur and their consuming identity”
Jonathan Skinner
Reader in Social Anthropology, University of Roehampton, UK

“Elena Sischarenco provides a unique ethnographic account of contemporary entrepreneurialism: how small businesses survive in the world of Italian construction. Through her sensitive reportage, we witness the careful calculations of trust, friendship and familism, the competition for tenders, and how knowledge and apprenticeship, power, personality and fragility figure in the struggle for success.”
Nigel Rapport
Author of I Am Dynamite: An Alternative Anthropology of Power

“I found the book to be a very original and well-written piece of work. [It] richly weaves Sischarenco’s theoretical analysis with the views and personalities of the entrepreneurs through the use of direct quotes and insightful dialogues. This approach makes her ethnography rich in detail and very enjoyable to read. Furthermore, her research sheds new light on taken-for-granted assumptions about corruption and tender practices in Italy that would be of interest not only to anthropologists, but more generally to policy makers working in Italy and elsewhere. [This] work is timely as it brings to the fore the process of entrepreneurial ethical self-making in a time of wider economic and political transformations in Italy and elsewhere.”
Mattia Fumanti
Lecturer in Social Anthropology, University of St Andrews, UK

'A brilliant and unconventional ethnography of the entrepreneur and their consuming identity'
Jonathan Skinner, Reader in Social Anthropology, University of Roehampton

"Through the lens of ethnographic research, Elena Sischarenco explores what entrepreneurship means in terms of lived experience, in so doing, she adds a novel contribution to a complex debate that has animated the social sciences since the Nineteenth century. The book is based on Sischarenco's fieldwork in Lombardy (Italy), carried out among entrepreneurs in the building sector between 2013 and 2014. The ethnography challenges the idea, rooted in social sciences, of the entrepreneurs as rational market actors committed on finding the best use of the means of production. The ethnography shows how entrepreneurial activity is shaped by feelings, social relationships, personal knowledge, and fortuitous circumstances. The ethnography draws from post-modern anthropology for depicting a comprehensive picture of what we can call everyday entrepreneurship. It explores the ability to acquire and use information for anticipating market trends (pp. 22-55), the role of trust among customers, colleagues and worker(pp. 56-96), how entrepreneurs construct their professional identity negotiating individualism and sense of belonging (pp.97-126), and how businessmen culturally manage uncertainty and risk (pp. 127-155). The narration and ethnographic analysis focus on the inevitable contradictions experienced in everyday life by Lombard entrepreneurs. In so doing, the book cracks the fulgid image of the entrepreneur as a post-modern hero of security and determination, showing the profound human nature of the work and role. The volume is a good starting point for better understand entrepreneurship in its complexity and opens questions concerning the role of gender, class and the impact of socioeconomic change in how the profession is embodied and enacted. In particular, it contributes to a better understanding of the impact of the 2009 global economic crisis, and how it affected the very way in which entrepreneurship is understood by society in post-Credit Europe."

Michele F. Fontefrancesco, University of Gastronomic Sciences, (2019)

Buy This Book

ISBN: 1-5275-2819-7

ISBN13: 978-1-5275-2819-2

Release Date: 10th April 2019

Pages: 225

Price: £61.99

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