Entrepreneurship in the Firing Line: An Empty Discourse that Eases Liberal Mimicry

Growing studies are challenging the overgeneralization of entrepreneurial discourse as a reason for turning it into an empty label. Merged with its manufactured global popularity, they underscore the ideological-political services that such an elastic, in content, and popular, in form, notion can offer to its powerful adopters. Exploring how far this elasticity can go to be utilized by a political leader with anti-American ideology, and why, unlike his counterparts, he embraces entrepreneurial discourse, the present work studies the narrative of entrepreneurship in the words of Iran’s Supreme Leader and its discursive reflection in different media and attempts to theorize it by the logic of international relations. The study reveals six aspects of his politicized conception of entrepreneurship, and the extent to which written and visual media have amplified each. Moreover, it proposes that liberal mimicry can theorize his adoption of entrepreneurial discourse in form while strategically customizing its content.