“What does it mean to be an entrepreneur to you?”

Entrepreneurship, informality, and labor aspirations in Brazil

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to demonstrate how entrepreneurship translates vulnerable and precarious occupational trajectories as a relatively positive identity denomination. The general hypothesis is that entrepreneurship correlates with informality in the labor market. In fact, it is understood that the concept in question cannot be reduced as a simple statistical aggregate, or as an ad hoc selection of economic activities. Therefore, qualitative research shows that entrepreneurship (in the order of discourse), as it spreads through labor society in general, is linked to certain community values such as trust, reciprocity and cooperation.