Living the popular solidarity economy as an entrepreneurial bureaucrat: Creating and reinforcing ethical frameworks through middle-class consumption

Abstract

This article examines how middle-class bureaucrats in Ecuador create and reinforce particular ethical frameworks through their work, their consumption, and their “side hustles.” Having been tasked with growing and strengthening an alternative economy to capitalism, these government functionaries find it important to engage in productive and consumptive practices to help them experience the correct feelings to be able to promote the Popular Solidarity Economy and avoid being disenchanted bureaucrats. Due to the precarious context in which they work, however, these practices are generally reflective of and idealize entrepreneurial logics. I contribute to an expanding literature on the importance of affect to bureaucrats as well as putting that literature in conversation with authors writing about entrepreneurial self-making. In doing so, I demonstrate how entrepreneurial logics spread into alternative economy space by responding to the very real material and affective needs of government workers in circumstances of precarious employment.