Youth side-hustles: Enterprise culture and the post-Fordist work ethic

This article explores youth ‘side-hustles’ – or small-scale business activities pursued alongside paid employment – as a way of examining how enterprise culture and the ‘post-Fordist work ethic’ is reshaping relationships between identity, productivity and working time amongst young workers. The article goes beyond existing concerns with the ‘entrepreneurial self’ as a generic form of neoliberal youth subjectivity to focus on the everyday lives and business practices of young people who take up the call to become entrepreneurial by starting businesses. It draws on a large-scale mixed-methods project which examined the relationship between employment and entrepreneurship in the identities, motivations and everyday practices of young people with side-hustles. This article shows that young people pursue side-hustles motivated by a desire for self-realisation through productivity, and by uncertainty about the personal and financial rewards of employment. In practice, side-hustles expand the practices and temporalities of productivity as part of everyday life. Side-hustle business practices have a varied and ambivalent relationship to notions of value and profit, in which relatively limited profits are justified so long as nominally unproductive or leisure time is successfully made productive and profitable to some degree. In pursuing side-hustles, young people experience tensions between competing imperatives – between passion, commodification, productivity, value and profit. The article therefore explores enterprise culture and the post-Fordist work ethic as a site of tension and ambivalence, and establishes side-hustles as a distinct form of contemporary entrepreneurship amongst youth.