Precarious Labour and the Rise of Entrepreneurial Culture in Brazil

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the changes in the culture of work in Brazil since the economic and political changes of the 1990s, with economic restructuring and the progressive flexibilisation of labour relations. This process was accompanied by strong ideological investment from the state, business organisations and the media. Added to this was the growing advance of evangelical churches and their theology of prosperity. A series of labour reforms in the period resulted in a precarious flexibilisation of labour relations with a loss of social rights, and the emergence of digital technologies and platformised jobs. The entrepreneurial ideology is internalised by workers, who increasingly take on the culture of individualism, meritocracy, do-it-yourself and the refusal of the state to mediate capital-labour relations. We are witnessing the weakening of social movements and their replacement by Social Organisations, many of them of corporate origin, which operate in the peripheral areas of the big cities, spreading the entrepreneurial ideology that takes on various guises: social entrepreneurship, favela entrepreneurship, women's entrepreneurship, Afro-entrepreneurship and others.

The research is being carried out with business organisations, observing the activities of these organisations and with groups of informal formal workers and platforms over the last five years.

The preliminary conclusion is that the neoliberal changes have caused significant cultural changes in which the entrepreneurial ideology has been internalised as a new work culture. This new culture is marked by a rationality in which criticism and rejection of wage-earning is accompanied by political and behavioural conservatism and the advance of the extreme right in the country. The political left has also incorporated the entrepreneurial discourse, naturalising this framework among workers and the poor and peripheral population.