Beyond the Entrepreneur as a Heroic Icon of Capitalist Culture: Some Lessons from Ukraine

The aim of this paper is to contest the ideologically driven depiction of the entrepreneur as a heroic icon of capitalist culture. To do this, a 2006 survey involving face-to-face interviews with 331 entrepreneurs in Ukraine is reported. This displays that the vast majority do not conform to the depiction of the entrepreneur as a heroic icon of capitalism; just 8% of the Ukrainian entrepreneurs surveyed are engaged purely in profit-driven entrepreneurship in the legitimate economy. The vast majority of entrepreneurs either do not pursue purely profit-driven goals and adopt social motives to varying degrees, and/or operate wholly or partially beyond the legitimate economy. In doing so, this study reveals that entrepreneurship and the enterprise culture can no longer be taken as signifying the transition to a capitalist economy in this post-Soviet space. Instead, its multiple forms are here argued to open up entrepreneurship to re-signification as demonstrative of the feasibility of alternative economic futures in post-Soviet spaces beyond an immutable and inevitable legitimate profit-driven capitalist economy.