The Entrepreneurial Trap

What happens when a Silicon Valley model of work and innovation is transplanted onto an ordinary college campus?

In a difficult and daunting labor market for young, often debt-ridden college grads, entrepreneurship beckons as a way to be a heroic creator and disruptor while escaping the drudgery of vanilla jobs and the precarity of low-wage work.

Through immersive, compelling, and often humorous narratives and interviews, Victor Tan Chen and Jesse Goldstein explore the lives of students at a public university that has embraced the entrepreneurial spirit. They show how students adopt but also resist and challenge the mind-sets they are taught in entrepreneurship programs, holding on to hopes for more meaningful opportunities in a world that feels increasingly unwelcoming and unforgiving. The Entrepreneurial Trap is a parable for modern capitalism as encountered by an anxious new generation.

Victor Tan Chen is Associate Professor of Sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University and author or editor of multiple books, including Handbook on Unemployment and Society and Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy.

Jesse Goldstein is Associate Professor of Sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University and author of Planetary Improvement: Cleantech Entrepreneurship and the Contradictions of Green Capitalism.