This article explores how people who engaged in small-scale private enterprise under late socialism and early capitalism in the 1990s retrospectively construct their business activities as legitimate. Based on a set of oral history interviews with Czech small-scale and micro entrepreneurs, the article seeks to understand how the “spirit of capitalism” (Boltanski and Chiapello 2007), recognized by early 1990s policymakers as a new moral system, met the field of (post)socialist small-scale business whose actors were shaped by a range of pre-understandings emerging from the late socialist informal economy. To this end, it adopts a moral economy perspective and analyzes the vernacular means through which informants expressed moral judgment of entrepreneurial activities under socialism and capitalism by focusing on three categories: work ethic, entrepreneurial spirit, and honesty. While the particular character traits, abilities, and virtues invoked by informants remained stable, they acquired new meanings across the break of 1989 dependent on the political context. What characterizes the entrepreneurial field as opposed to other sectors of the labor market is the ubiquity of illicit and unlawful practices that informants either encountered or engaged in themselves, subjecting such practices to moral judgment. The article argues that while the political discourse of the 1990s placed high hopes in entrepreneurs as guarantors of the new moral system, embodying this ideal proved unattainable for many small-scale entrepreneurs, fostering feelings of disillusionment with postsocialist developments among some of the informants.
Pehe et al. (Thu,) studied this question.