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6 - Pursuing Entrepreneurship for Employment

SMEs for Women and Youth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2025

Crystal A. Ennis
Affiliation:
Leiden University
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Summary

This chapter examines the promotion of entrepreneurship and business startups in Oman and its rhetorical targeting of youth and women. Although innovation is part of the promotion agenda, entrepreneurship is often focused on encouraging citizens to create their own private sector job. The chapter focuses on the experiences of young people in internalising entrepreneurship promotion discourses and in starting personal businesses. It illustrates two key tensions – first, the tension between rentierism embedded within authoritarian governing structures, on the one hand, and the logic of neoliberal capitalism, on the other; and second, the tensions between rhetoric and realities of youth and female empowerment narratives. Entrepreneurship is expressed and promoted as an empowering activity, and at times is experienced as such, but can also be used to legitimise or reconstitute patriarchal and authoritarian structures to accommodate the market. The space of entrepreneurship promotion is both a key tactic of labour market bandaging, and a distinct illustration of rentier neoliberalism

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Chapter
Information
Millennial Dreams in Oil Economies
Job Seeking and the Global Political Economy of Labour in Oman
, pp. 242 - 281
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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