ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on L. Berlant’s notion of cruel optimism and her notion of optimistic attachment to explores managing simultaneously incoherent narratives of in the context of bankruptcy failure and how success ethics and the achievement principle are implicated in this process. It also focuses on exploring how the appropriation and internalization of social norms propounded by the enterprise culture might fix life narratives in a way that hinders the very possibility of identities that are ‘more sensitive to themselves’. In the enterprise culture, as D. Marquand argues, economic expectations become normative expectations and get transformed into ‘righteously’ presented demands. Though mediated by personal experience, participants’ attachment to the notion of an ‘enterprising self’ revealed itself in life accounts based on traditional conceptualizations of an entrepreneurial ethos. Entrepreneurial identity can therefore be seen as a product of its normative dominance – predicated on the reproduction of a very limited range of legitimized means of self-construction.
