‘Start-Up Nation’: The Making and Performativity of an Empty Signifier

Abstract

The article sheds light on the process of fabrication of a polysemous, ambiguous, and mocking French entrepreneurial expression – the ‘start-up nation’ – construed as an empty signifier. The fabrication of such empty signifiers in the discourses of entrepreneurship and management, what creates them and what they create, remains little explored questions. This article addresses the following question: how do repeated quotations of an empty signifier enable it to perform entrepreneurship? We trace the circulation of the expression from its first utterance in the political sphere by Emmanuel Macron, then French minister of the economy, through to the media and the scientific sphere, using a communicative analysis of Emmanuel Macron’s speeches (n = 4), press articles (n = 210) and academic productions (n = 30). We show the shifts in meaning and values that take place, in particular the way in which the ‘start-up nation’ takes on denunciatory and pejorative values, and is transformed from a political formula into a pejorative, decontextualized little phrase. Our results enrich the critical literature on management and entrepreneurship, particularly the analysis of the performativity of entrepreneurial discourse. By describing the manufacture of an empty signifier through its circulation in social space, the study reveals the counter-power potential of performativity. The results also highlight the surprising absence of an academic critical dimension.