The wonderful wizard of neoliberalism : analysis on the youth’s engagement in social entrepreneurship in the context of contemporary Taiwan

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Master’s thesis – Social and Cultural Anthropology

The Wonderful Wizard of Neoliberalism

: Analysis on the youth’s engagement in social entrepreneurship

in the context of contemporary Taiwan

Supervisor: Dr. Shanshan Lan Name: Ji-ye Oh Second reader: Dr. Yatun Sastramidjaja Student number: 11221283 Third reader: Dr. Leo Douw Word count: 29646 16/8/2018 E-mail: flowkeyslow@gmail.com

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Abstract

The thesis attempts to understand the engagement of young middle-class Taiwanese in social entrepreneurship in the context of contemporary neoliberal Taiwan. Particularly, it focuses on their motives, practices, and future imaginations that make sense of their decision to work for a micro-organization of social entrepreneurship despite its precarious circumstance. Approached from practice theory, the thesis sheds light on how they experience, perceive, and act on the deteriorating living condition in neoliberal Taiwan.

I first delineate the historical context to grasp the current youth discourse of Yanshi (Misanthropy) that reflects reflexive impotence toward the consequences of neoliberal policies. In the precarious labor market, they experience alienation and moral breakdown from work. Also, the precarious diplomatic situation of Taiwan leads them to contemplate their identity and society. As such, social entrepreneurship arises as an appealing site for them to engage in society while maintaining the sense of self.

Their engagement in social entrepreneurship is upheld by the virtue of freedom and active citizenry in a democratic society. At the same time, their practices risk to reproduce a ‘good’ citizen – that is self-responsible – in the neoliberal state. The thesis aims to show the ambivalence of practices in social entrepreneurship which functions as a mechanism that reproduces the neoliberal relations between the state and citizens, and yet, empowers young practitioners to regain their sense of agency, and restore the power to imagine the collective future against homogenizing future of neoliberalism.

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Declaration on plagiarism and fraud

I have read and understood the University of Amsterdam plagiarism policy

[http://student.uva.nl/mcsa/az/item/plagiarism-and-fraud.html?f=plagiarism]. I declare that this assignment is entirely my own work, all sources have been properly acknowledged, and that I have not previously submitted this work, or any version of it, for assessment in any other paper.

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Acknowledgment

At times, I had thought this time would never come. It could only come thanks to the many people who supported me to write the thesis.

First of all, I want to thank my family for believing in me, believing in me, and believing in me.

I also want to thank my supervisor, Shanshan Lan, who provided me with a thorough guidance step by step, insightful advice, and moral support throughout the whole Master’s program. I will always remember our conversations and your metaphor of cooking, and building a house.

I am glad that I could explore anthropology at the University of Amsterdam with great faculty members, Milena Veenis, Oskar Verkaaik, Thijs Schut, and Yatun Sastramidjaja who taught me, a non-anthropology student, to be able to conduct the research and write the thesis. I can’t thank enough the student advisor Marieke Brand for being communicative, caring and supportive.

Thanks to my classmates, I could have such a pleasant, and exciting time during the Master’s program. Especially, I want to thank Shareefa, Suchi, and Linda for digging me out of extremely loneliness during the writing phase and being there.

I appreciate Kim, Justin, Eunice, Hye-seon, Geumdeuk, Lux, So-hee, and many other friends for supporting me to study. Without their encouragement and consolation, I couldn’t have managed to finish the thesis. I also thank Haeyoung for her present, a book of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which became the inspiration for the whole thesis.

The research wouldn’t have been possible without the help of my interlocutors who spared their time, trusted me, and shared their personal stories with me. Especially, I thank Kazue, Lucy, Tu-jun, Patrick, Ting-kuan, and Yang-han for supporting me throughout the whole fieldwork with their insightful analysis and criticism. I also want to thank Bary for offering me to stay in his co-living space and encourage me to focus on research.

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Introduction: “The Kansas Prairies”

Hui-fen is a bubbly young woman in her mid-twenties. She works at an association for migrant workers. With a genuine smile, she often calls herself a weirdo: “Sometimes, my friends are bothered by me because I do some weird things!” ‘Weird things’ include talking to strangers she met at a supermarket about certain brands, or bringing reusable straws for drinks. Hui-fen might have been an ‘ordinary’ college student in Tainan province until March 18 of 2014. When the 318 movement outbreak in 2014 against the hasty ratification of the Cross-Strait Services Trade Agreement with China, Hui-fen sensed the emergency of the affair and had an urge to participate in the movement. 1 When one of her professors privately offered a transport for students wishing to participate the movement, she got right on the bus to Taipei.

1_{Instead of a well-known name of the protest, the Sunflower Movement, I will refer it to as the 318 movement} throughout the thesis to reflect the frequent usage of the term by my interlocutors.

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Looking back on her days of occupying the Legislative Yuan during the 318 movement in 2014, one of the largest student movements in contemporary Taiwan, Hui-fen recalled it as a “magical moment”.

I once left the site to pick up some stuff from home. When I arrived in my hometown,

suddenly I realized I was in such a small world. The world outside the protest was so detached from what is happening in the Legislative Yuan as if nothing had happened. It was so surreal to me. Now, a lot of people I met during the 318 are all doing… actually, they are inventing jobs. It’s like… they are doing something that people in the previous generation have never done. And it seems like what they are doing is good for Taiwan and I thought ‘let’s try out.’ I felt like… we can do something together.

When student leaders decided to cease the occupation of the Legislative Yuan on April 10, they gave the final speech that “Next, we will go deeper into people. We regard defense as an attack, and we will win”, which media reported as opening the era of the post-Sunflower

generation.2 While the market integration of Taiwan and China was suspended, the Executive Yuan of Taiwan announced the Social Enterprise Action Plan to boost social entrepreneurship in the same year.3 Without a legal definition of social enterprise in Taiwan, the concept has slowly spread throughout the island. Even with the regime change from the KMT to the DPP in the 2016 Presidential Election, the government’s interest in social entrepreneurship continued to grow. As of 2018, the Taiwanese government is in process to lay the legal ground for social enterprise.4 Along with the government initiative, major universities in Taiwan have started offering relevant education on social entrepreneurship. Ministry of Education is currently promoting the policy on University Social Responsibility (USR) project to call universities “to engage more in

contributing to the betterment of society through the integration of social responsibility” in 2016.5

2_See_{https://dailyview.tw/Daily/2017/04/01}_{(Daily View 1 Apr 2017).}

3_See_{https://startup.sme.gov.tw/social-enterprises-taking-off-in-taiwan/}_{(IEIT 8 Nov 2015).} 4_See_{https://vtaiwan.tw/topic/social-enterprise/}_{(vTaiwan accessed 3 Aug 2018).}

5_See_{http://www.usrnetwork.org/about-usrn/background}_{(URS Network accessed 3 Aug 2018).}

and See https://depart.moe.edu.tw/ed2300/News_Content.aspx?n=5D06F8190A65710E&s=F07084151BAB58C2 (Ministry of Education 1 Dec 2016).

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Such popularization of social entrepreneurship is not only a distinctive phenomenon of Taiwan. In 2015, I joined a start-up social venture in South Korea after graduation. Similar to how Hui-fen experienced the 318 movement, a totally different world seemed to exist between the two bodies of corporate and governmental work. I felt like I was that Dorothy who had arrived at the Emerald City in search of the Wizard of Oz. Social entrepreneurs I met there were passionate, proactive, and positive to change the world. Mesmerized by their message that we can change the world, I immersed myself in the field. Yet, after two years, I observed another reality in the field: their frustrations with external parties such as government or venture capital whom they financially depend on, and by their precarious living condition. At the same time, through public education, students are exposed to social entrepreneurship at a much younger age. Surprisingly, social entrepreneurs from Hong Kong, Japan, and Taiwan whom I met at

conferences, shared the similar reality as well as vision. This thesis will detail the small world of social entrepreneurship that Hui-fen and I experienced as coevals living in neoliberal times. By delving into the case of social entrepreneurship in Taiwan, I aim to deconstruct that small world of social entrepreneurship in relation to the neoliberal transition of society and to understand engagement of young people in sustaining the small world with regard to the local context. In doing so, I developed the following research question and sub-questions.

Research question

How can we make sense of middle-class Taiwanese youth’s engagement in social entrepreneurship in the context of neoliberal transformations in Taiwan?

Sub-questions:

1. What are the historical and social backgrounds conducive to the emergence of social entrepreneurship in Taiwan?

2. How do they narrate their motives to work at a micro-organization in social entrepreneurship? 3. How do they interpret meanings of social value and practice those values at a

micro-organization despite difficulties they encounter?

4. How do they imagine their future in relation to their engagement in social entrepreneurship? In the following section, I will explain the theoretical framework to look into the questions raised above.

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Theoretical Framework

Departing from Practice Theory

Practice theory offers a framework to explain the relations between hegemonic power structure and agency. While taking structural forces into consideration, “it restored the actor to the social process” (Ortner 2006: 3). It understands the structures as being “never total in a historical sense, but always also remnants of past ("residual") hegemonies and the beginnings of future ("emergent") ones” (ibid.: 6). It sheds light on “the way in which such systems are “grounded” in various kinds of social relations and social practices” (ibid.: 4).

Then, social order does not appear as “a product of compliance of mutual normative expectations” but being embedded in “collective and symbolic structures, in a ‘shared

knowledge’” (Reckwitz 2002: 246). The symbolic structures of knowledge “enable and constrain the agents to interpret the world according to certain forms, and to behave in corresponding ways” (ibid.: 245-246). For example, Sopranzetti (2017) shows how Taxi drivers in Thailand narrate their motivations to choose a precarious life in favor of freedom and understands them in relation to post-Fordism emerging in Thailand. He argues that “it is always an alignment

between people’s agency, desires, previous experiences, and existing possibilities that pulls them into hegemonic consent, and not passive understandings of false consciousness or subjugation” (79).

In the thesis, I regard social entrepreneurship in Taiwan as an emerging structure

accompanied by the neoliberal transformation of the society. By taking the historical background of Taiwan into consideration, I focus on how the aspirations and practices of young Taiwanese practitioners of social entrepreneurship align and are aligned with other existing discourses in neoliberal Taiwan. Furthermore, I will show how their practices hold the possibility to diverge from the limited neoliberal imagination of future. In the following of the section, I will lay the ground of theoretical framework to understand young practitioners of social entrepreneurship in Taiwan based on three strands of theories: neoliberalism, social entrepreneurship, and youth.

Contextualizing Neoliberalism

One way to understand neoliberalism is to read it as a set of ideology accompanied by economic policies that promote the free market. Embracing neoliberalism, governments relax its

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control over the market and privatize previously available social welfare systems. However, the power of the state is never reduced but substituted by private companies and institutions

(Aretxaga 2003: 394). Rather, Trouillot (2001) argues that state processes and practices become recognizable in multiple sites through state effects produced by state-like institutions such as nongovernmental institutions. These state-like institutions participate in sustaining writing “the national state as a lived fiction of late modernity” (ibid.: 130).

Under neoliberalism, the relationship between state and citizen changes fundamentally with a specific subject formation (Anagnost 2013: 4). As a “human engineering project”, neoliberalism creates self-enterprising subjectivities in which “empowering individuals”

calculate their chances, and are willing to bear the risk that comes with individual choice (ibid.: 9). In line with it, through outsourcing social welfare provision to non-state institutions, new modality of government is reinforced, “which works by creating mechanisms that work all by themselves to bring about governmental results through the devolution of risk onto the enterprise or the individual and the responsibilization of subjects who are increasingly empowered to discipline themselves” (Ferguson and Gupta 2002: 989).

While it appears as the all-encompassing power structure, Kingfisher and Maskovsky (2008) suggest to decenter neoliberalism as “partial, incomplete, contradictory and both dialectics with and determined by other social forces” (119). Anagnost (2013) also argues that neoliberal subjects are often “multiply located in competing regimes of value and whose daily practices are caught up in negotiating the ruptures between them” (9). She further suggests to contextualize it within previous state-led projects such as “modernization projects” in

understanding neoliberalism in East Asia. In the case of Taiwan, State Neo-Confucianism and Enlightenment or Democratic Consumerism are two preexistent value regimes to be taken into account when understanding neoliberal globalization in Taiwan (Pazderic 2013). Pazderic suggests that in Taiwan, neoliberal globalization is within “the messy coexistence” of two preexisting systems and “incites, reinforces, and collides with the behaviors and attitudes of the other two preexisting systems” (ibid.: 129).

While State Neo-Confucian value system “places the individual within an assured set of relationships and behavioral structures that in no way place the individual in a predicament of autonomy” (ibid.: 129-130), King and Bond (1985) argues that the Confucians understand the individual comprise a self as an active and reflexive entity. By revisiting the concept of self in

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Confucianism that coexists with that of modernity (Giddens 1991) and that of neoliberalism (Anagnost 2013) in Taiwan, I will show how young practitioners engage in social

entrepreneurship as a means of self-determination while reproducing State Neo-Confucianism, that is the neoliberal state in this case.

Social Entrepreneurship and Civil Society in Neoliberal Landscape

Since the 1990s, the concept of social entrepreneurship has received growing attention from media, public, and the academia (Leadbeater 1997; Hulgård 2010). While the concept of social enterprise has been debated (Martin and Osberg 2007; Dacin et al 2011; Abu-Saifan 2012), Grenier suggests that social entrepreneurship is about “an approach rather than specific social issues, where an entrepreneurial process is portrayed as relevant to all areas of social change and as equally effective within all contexts” (2008: 128). Hence, in a broad definition, organizations or activities that attempt to tackle social problems through a business model are understood as practices of social entrepreneurship and categorized as social enterprises.

Unlike traditional intermediate organizations such as charity, nonprofit, or voluntary association, social enterprises are referred to as alternative intermediate organizations that go beyond for-profit organizations in the private sector and government in the public sector to pursue the common good for the society while keeping the financial sustainability for its autonomy (Dart 2004: 411). While social entrepreneurship is promoted as a new mechanism of democratic citizens to restore civil society (Henton et al 1997; Spinosa et al 1999; Haugh 2007; Schwab 2008), a growing body of researches have taken a more critical approach toward social entrepreneurship (Dey 2014; Dey and Steyaert 2016).

Contesting views on social entrepreneurship reflect the paradigm agitation of the concept of civil society in democratic society (Wagner 2012). When de Tocqueville first suggested an extensive concept of civil society, his public and private distinction was highly associated with political order between the state and citizenry. de Tocqueville’s distinction of the state later affects the two different paradigms of the civil society as “delegation of power from citizens to their state in a system of representative governance” and “addressing decentralization of public administration” (ibid.: 299). Understanding voluntary organizations in the civil society as the governing system, and integral part of a democratic society was predominant until the 1970s. However, the political paradigm of intermediate organizations in the academia have been

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replaced, if not, blurred by the economic paradigm of approach to intermediate organizations (ibid.: 305). In the 1970s, after the economic crisis, the economic framework of voluntary

associations received great attention from scholars and policymakers. The third sector was newly coined to refer to intermediate organizations capable of dealing with the failure of the welfare system. Non-profit organizations(NPOs) became the major intermediate organization in the discourse of the third sector, and voluntary actions began to be recognized as unpaid labor and an in-kind revenue source for non-profits (ibid.: 307).

Social entrepreneurship signifies the fluctuation of the concept of the civil society and the relations between citizens and the state under neoliberalism (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001). It can function as a mechanism where citizens learn to adapt to and normalize neoliberal

transformation of society (Kelly et al 2015). Such tendency is also observed in Taiwan. Social enterprises in Taiwan emerged with the development of the civil society and socio-economic changes in the late 1990s (Defourny and Kim 2011). After the lifting of the martial law in 1987, NPOs exploded in kinds and numbers in the early 1990s (Kuan and Wang 2015: 5). In the same period, the government introduced policies encouraging the privatization of welfare services to lessen the fiscal burden. It began to contract out social welfare provisions to commissioned NPOs. NPOs took this opportunity to provide a service paid by users, moving towards a social enterprise model (Defourny and Kim 2011)

Teasdale (2012) suggests that in England, policymakers keep the definition of social enterprise loose and inclusive in order to address a variety of social problems through the form of social enterprise as a policy tool. In Taiwan, social enterprise remains as a prefigurative form of business without a clear legal boundary. The Taiwanese government is reviewing the Company Law to diversify the purpose of private firms by which social enterprise can be officially registered and governed. The extensive understanding of social enterprise mirrors various organizational forms that practice social entrepreneurship in Taiwan: association, foundation, NPOs, private enterprise and hybrid forms of the above (Huang and Gao 2016: 19). However, what constitutes social good of social enterprises is rarely discussed in the public and left to individual interpretation, which can result in “social impact without social justice” (Ortner 2017).

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Youth in Neoliberal Time

With the prevalence of psychological researches, adolescence has been widely

understood as a specific life stage, a biological and psychological transition from childhood to adulthood. Youth as a universalized concept, are studied to undergo identity crisis and to develop the sense of self as a complete individual by overcoming it (Erikson: 1994). With evolutionary tradition of thought, “the senses of growth, transition, and incompleteness are implied in the concept of adolescence while adulthood indicates both completion and completeness” (Bucholtz 2002: 532).

Such psychological approach to youth can obscure political agenda embedded in the discourse of youth. Comaroff and Comaroff (2006) argue that youth are historical offspring of the modernity in which “youth is cast as both the essential precondition and the indefinite postponement of maturity” (267-268). In the social space of youth, “the nation-state seeks to husband its potential, in which it invests in its human capital” (ibid.). As such, Lesko (2012) explores how youth are monitored and administrated to for the progress of the society (4-5). She suggests that the manipulation of youth takes place with “the panoptical time that emphasizes the endings toward which youth are to progress and place individual adolescents into a temporal narrative that demands a moratorium of responsibility yet expects them at the same time to act as if each moment of the present is consequential” (ibid.: 91).

In late modernity, the linear temporal dimension has been challenged with technological advancement. With the end of modern time-structure of industrial production that assumed linearity and belief in progress, Nowotny argues that the future lost its attractiveness as a sign of certain progress, and the present has been extended with its importance (2018: 11). Huang(2013) observes that as Taiwan entered the phase of late capitalism, family roles and social norms shifted and pre-adulthood has been greatly extended. Young Taiwanese tend to deviate from the traditional pattern of life course transition in a heterogeneous way. To them, life has become “a planning project” with the predominant discourse of individual choice (Beck-Gernsheim 1996).

With the loss of the meaning of the future as an assured and achievable progress, the future is now understood as the direct consequences of the present in neoliberal “anticipatory regimes” (Adams et al 2009). By provoking affective reactions toward a particular image of future, the regimes urge the subjects to react in a certain way, at much younger years (ibid.: 253). Again, youth appears as a social category that holds the key for the future prosperity and

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“integral element to the opening up of new economic spaces of profitability” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006: 276). For example, Song (2007) shows how South Korean neoliberal state provides conditional welfare systems for the youth. The youth are “touted as a generation that had the potential to survive the challenges of continuously changing times, and thus undertake an unstable employment environment and lifestyle” (ibid.: 333). In other words, the neoliberal vision of continuous self-development capitalizes on the energies and resilience of the youth, while gradually eroding the life and spirit from the stresses of endless self-making (Anagnost 2013: 14).

In reflecting on the contemporary anthropological researches, Ortner remarks that the counterpart of dark anthropology that studies neoliberal structural oppression with Foucauldian approach would be the researches that focus on “themes like care, love, empathy, responsibility, on trying—even if failing—to do the right thing” (2016: 287). Anthropological inquiries have untangled how the subjects they studied participate in reproducing the neoliberal rationale within the existing condition (Kelly et al 2015; Sopranzetti 2017; Pimlott-Wilson 2017). On the other hand, such contextualized understanding of neoliberalism allows the possibility to open up new political initiatives (Ferguson 2009). Lorey (2015) suggests that with the experience of

precarization, "the possibility arises at the same time of being able to leave and start something new: the potentiality of exodus and constituting" (105). In fact, a growing body of

anthropological researches presents how the subjects reinterpret and deviate from the existing neoliberal conditions (Lukacs 2013; Dolson 2015; Raschig 2016).

The thesis takes a nuanced approach toward neoliberalism and attempts to present the muddy coexistence of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ aspects of neoliberal practices. It will show how young practitioners of social entrepreneurship embody the neoliberal rationale and reproduce it in relation to the context of Taiwan. An anthropological approach will allow to closely examine the open-ended process of how people engage in and negotiate with implicit power relations that penetrate their daily life experiences (Comaroff 2010). At the same time, their practices hold the potential to bring an unexpected outcome. Although it is incipient and informal, I hope to sketch out how young practitioners cross the theoretical framework I delineate in the introduction and challenges the dominance of neoliberal ideology.

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Methodology

Setting and Population

My research took place in Taipei, a capital city of Taiwan within a duration of three months between January and March in 2018. Cities have been “the incubators for many of the major political and ideological strategies through which the dominance of neoliberalism is being maintained” (Brenner and Theodore 2002: 375-376). Taipei serves as “Taiwan’s urban center for the continuous globalization process” and its role has been reinforced to lead Taiwan’s

globalization project (Kwok 2006: 2-3). Furthermore, in an attempt to urbanize the city, both central and local government actively promoted neoliberal policies on the land through

deregulation and privatization of public land as well social services such as public housing since the end of the 1980s (Jou et al 2012: 168).

The entrepreneurial ethos run through the city and Taipei represents one of the Asian neoliberal urban cities (Jou et al 2012: 152-4). The current mayor of Taipei city actively promotes Taipei as a hub for international entrepreneurs.6 The city government established StartUp@Taipei, an institution to provide all-encompassing resources for entrepreneurs from consulting to subsidy and investment plans.7 Major infrastructures for social entrepreneurship have been clustered in Taipei as well: co-working spaces, universities, venture capital firms, event spaces and government offices.

My form of staying in Taipei is also influenced by its speculative real estate market. Considering the amount of rent, I decided to follow a ‘creative’ way that many young Taiwanese commonly employ for long-term stay across Taiwan: Work in exchange for accommodation (Dagonghuansu). In this way, I sustained my accommodation at a co-living space in the suburb of Taipei. This choice of accommodation exposed me to a greater population of young

professionals who similarly maintained long term accommodation, enabling me to better understand the youth perception of the current Taiwanese society.

The main focus of the research is young middle-class Taiwanese who practice social entrepreneurship at a newly established micro-organization. I roughly defined youth as a period

6 See

https://english.gov.taipei/News_Content.aspx?n=A11F01CFC9F58C83&sms=DFFA119D1FD5602C&s=4D229636 9D9509CF (Taipei City Government 18 Dec 2017).

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before the beginning of parenthood. Most of my informants are in their twenties but the

population varies from early twenties to late thirties. Except for one couple in their early thirties, all of my interlocutors were single. I categorized them as a middle-class because of their

educational and familial background: all have enrolled or finished university education, and they do not have an urgent need to support their family financially.

I focus on those who establish or work for a small-sized (less than 5 full-time workers), relatively new (less than ten years) enterprise or organization is that they epitomize

entrepreneurial aspect of their practices.I could confirm that micro-organizations are one of the important pillars that sustain social entrepreneurship in Taiwan at a public lecture by Dr. Hu8, a professor of business administration and at a research group discussion led by Dr. Wu9, a professor of sociology both at Fu-jen Catholic University. Their form of work varies from part-time, temporary position, a member of a task force, to a full-time position. Hence, I decide to refer to them as young practitioners of social entrepreneurship in order to reflect the

interlocutors’ refusal to be referred to as social entrepreneurs or social enterprise, while their practices show their engagement with social entrepreneurship.

Research Methods

The main methodology for the research unfolds into four types: informal conversation, semi-structured interview, participant observation and group discussion. In total, I interviewed eleven female and five male young practitioners. As a comparison, I interviewed college students, young and older professionals of which thirteen are female and seven are male. They work for conventional business firms, traditional NPOs, unions and large-size social enterprise. When some interlocutors showed reluctance or uncomfortableness toward a formal interview, I asked major questions through informal conversations to interact with them more casually.

Snowball sampling method was especially effective since the network of young

practitioners was small and loose but very extensive. Also by conducting participant observation of events and meetings on social innovation and entrepreneurship, I could meet more

interlocutors. All the interviews and informal conversations were conducted in Mandarin with a dictionary. When needed, I asked interlocutors to give further details on key terms or local

8_{Hu Zhe-sheng, public lecture, 12 Feb 2018 See also}_{https://www.facebook.com/events/335553110274184/} 9_{Wu Chung-Shen, a group discussion, 8 Feb 2018.}

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expressions. In order to confirm my understanding, I employ those terms in a different setting with other interlocutors. Interviews were normally held at their offices or at the mutual co-living space, and on average lasted two to three hours, with a chosen set of interlocutors.

As a regular visitor, participant, and temporary volunteer, I participated in daily activities and weekly events held by micro-organizations. The emphasis of my focus remained upon five micro-organizations including a cooperative, independent bookstore, association, and private firm. Extensive participant observations at their workplace enabled me to find an implicit

practice of social good. Thanks to the help of professors in Taiwan, I was also able to participate in a lecture on social innovation at National Taiwan University, and monthly meetings of a research group at Fu-jen Catholic University on comparative studies on social enterprises of Japan and Taiwan. Moreover, under the theme of domestic social issue and youth, I followed a site of protest and local community markets organized by and for youth. By participating in them, I could get a sense of current social issues and understand better the perspective of young practitioners on politics.

Finally, I organized three group discussions on the topics of ‘Success’, ‘Doing good’ and ‘Society’ with young practitioners as well as students and young professionals. The group

discussion allowed me to understand the common ground of youth culture. Some of the activities include drawing a mind map of keywords such as family, or government, or reflecting on their life path in terms of success and failure. Additionally, at the end of the fieldwork, I presented a brief summary of observation in collaboration with a key interlocutor. Thanks to active feedback from six young practitioners, I received constructive criticism as well as confirmation on my findings. The final presentation lasted four hours, followed by a further discussion on the topic of politics and youth.

Ethics

As a young female researcher from South Korea, I had several advantages in conducting the research. It was easier for me to form a friendship and build trust with young people in the field. My understanding of Mandarin helped me to form a rapport with them. As a graduate student, I could address myself properly for further access to students and scholars in the

universities. My previous experience at social enterprises also enabled me to resonate with young practitioners more smoothly and understand the situation and jargons better. As a cultural

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outsider, interlocutors seemed to feel safer to share their stories and personal opinions on sensitive issues. Yet, I could sense that my presence as a young Korean had an impact on interlocutors’ behavior. Often, I was asked to share my experience and opinion about social enterprises in South Korea, which invoked comparative discussion among interlocutors.

Since the research requires me to collect personal life stories and interpretations as well as observe participants’ practice in their work which directly relates to their livelihood, an ethically sensitive approach to the subject is of importance. My priority is to protect the privacy and safety of every participant in my research. During the fieldwork, I explained the purpose of the research, informed participants of the usage of materials I produced with them, asked

permission for recording the interview and maintained the confidentiality of the information they shared with me. In the thesis, I used pseudonyms for all the names of interlocutors and

organizations.

Fassin notes a tendency among young scholars in anthropology that moral indignation has become a major factor in terms of choice of topic (2008: 337). I can relate my research to his remark because it attempts to explore the moral values people and organization of social

entrepreneurship embrace under the neoliberal transition of society. I entered the field with established assumptions and judgments due to my previous experience at social enterprises. In an attempt to maintain “discomfort with ethics” (Caduff 2011: 477), I tried to be mindful of word choices and reactions, to give sincere answers and opinions to the questions of interlocutors and acknowledged that my views were partial and open for further discussion.

Outline of the Thesis

The thesis consists of four chapters. In Chapter 1, I will introduce the historical

background of Taiwan that is crucial towards the understanding of the aspirations, practices, and future imagination of young practitioners of social entrepreneurship in Taiwan. By taking the historical background of Taiwan into consideration, In Chapter 2, I will show how the motives of young practitioners reflect their experience and perception of neoliberal transition of the

Taiwanese society, and lead them to work for a micro-organization in social entrepreneurship. In Chapter 3, I will show how newly established micro-organizations in social entrepreneurship accommodate their aspirations without impairing their sense of self. Then, I will present how they interpret the meanings of social good and their practices despite precarious environments of

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social entrepreneurship. In doing so, I will point out inevitable limitations of their practices which renders practices of social entrepreneurship ambivalent. In the final Chapter 4, I will show how the ambivalence of practices in social entrepreneurship reflect their two different images of future. While their practices in social entrepreneurship are limited, yet they hold the possibility to diverge from the neoliberal singular imagination of the future.

The names of the chapters are originated from a book of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” written by Lyman Frank Baum in 1990, in which Dorothy and her comrades embark their journey to the Wizard of Oz for their wishes. In the end, they uncovered that the great Wizard of Oz was a con artist and had no magical power to realize their wishes. It was their adventure that persuaded them to believe that they have courage, wisdom, and ability to return home in

themselves. With her silver shoes, Dorothy returned to the Kansas prairies where her aunt Em and uncle Henry resided. Nothing seemed to have changed much after all. Her family was still in the same desperate condition as a farmer. Yet, I believe that after her journey Dorothy will not be the same person as she used to be.

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Chapter 1. “The Cyclone”

: Historical Background of Contemporary Taiwan

When Hui-fen got on the bus to participate in the 318 movement, she did not know much about the Agreement per se. Yet, she reckoned that it was against the interest of the local

Taiwanese economy, while favoring that of China, and that it was undemocratically processed at the Legislative Yuan, which provided sufficient reason for her to get on the bus immediately. Despite continuous stigmatization of the protest by traditional media, public opinion quickly grew in favor of the protestors. During the protest, students, volunteers, NPOs, labor unions and older pro-independence activists surrounded the building as a subdivided zone (Rowen 2015: 13-14) and organized various activities for public participants. In total, the movement lasted twenty-three days. It mobilized approximately 700,000 people on the street and succeeded in preventing

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the government from closing the deal (Wang 2017: 178). The major rally during the 318

movement marked “the largest nonpartisan, and pro-democracy rally in Taiwan’s history” (ibid.: 14).

All but two of my interlocutors participated in the movement. The degree of participation varied. On one hand, some, like Hui-fen, were in the Legislative Yuan during the whole

movement or organized series of events outside of the protest site and volunteered to deliver foods and other basic materials to the participants. On the other hand, much less degree of engagement in the protest was also noted. Some were still high school students during the time and out of curiosity dropped by after school to witness a lively crowd with a group of friends. An interlocutor informed me that “it was more like a night market in Taipei. People go there to eat street food, enjoy the atmosphere and just experience it.”

Various elements have been attributed to the cause of the huge mobilization such as anti-free trade sentiments, Taiwanese nationalism, and/or pro-democracy. Ho (2015: 75-6) argues that the government’s abrupt decision and violation of democratic procedure provoked “a sense of threat” to citizens. The sense of threat without a ‘savior’ was expressed in major slogans of the movement, such as “Don’t sell Taiwan” or “Our countries, We save” which shows the strong will of citizens to ‘self-help' Taiwan in the absence of the exertion of explicit state power.10 On the other hand, Wang (2017) finds the generational justice factor particularly telling in

explaining the huge mobilization of youth. By seeing it as a “structure of feeling”, he argues that the 318 movement is “less as an ideological struggle” but more of “an affective response to the uncertainties of the future released by neoliberalism” (ibid.: 179).

Cheng (2014) remarks that the 318 movement became a moment that "awoke a younger generation's awareness of politics, democracy and the identity of Taiwan as a country” (88). As Hui-fen noted in the Introduction, the 318 movement marked an important turning point for a group of youth to "invent jobs" or "do different things from the previous generation". Taking the 318 movement as the watershed of contemporary youth culture in Taiwan, I will delineate the contemporary history of Taiwan to understand the relevant context where young practitioners of social entrepreneurship are located. Then, I will introduce a cultural discourse of Yanshi

(misanthropy) among youth, which I interpret as another affective reaction toward neoliberal

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transition. In the last section, I will outline the legacy of the 318 movement, Tongwenceng, which is a social group of youth who share similar value and vision for society.

Liberated Colonies and Authoritarian Developmental Regime

In 1945, Taiwan was liberated from Japanese colonial governance following the end of the Second World War. The island had returned to the Republic of China, which was led by the Kuomintang (KMT) at the time. In the social anomic situation between sudden regime changes, local Taiwanese observed the government had engaged in corruption, arbitrary seizure of property and mismanagement of the island. On February 27 of 1947, an island-wide uprising of local Taiwanese took place, followed by the 228 massacre by the KMT against such local Taiwanese protestors. In 1949, as the KMT lost its control over mainland China during the Chinese Civil War, it retreated to the island of Taiwan with approximately two million Chinese, which formed a distinctive social identity of mainlanders(Waishengren). In order to prevent further civilian mobilizations for Taiwanese independence and Communist invasion, the KMT imposed the Martial Law in 1949, which lasted for thirty-eight years until 1987. Under the martial law, the KMT strictly suppressed mobilization of local Taiwanese, the formation of civil organizations and democratic movements (Mulvenon and Yang 2003: 172), which turned "a generation of politically conscious social elites into self-imposed political passiveness" (Chu and Lin 2001: 113).

With the U.S. protection and financial support for Asian democratic countries during the Cold War, the KMT promoted a modernization project through state-led industrialization and public education (Gray 2011). The industrialization process of Taiwan unfolded in two major transformations of industries led by the state: from an agricultural economy to labor-intensive industry by the early 1970s, and to high technology-based industry with emphasis on export afterward (Tsai 1989; Yeung 2017). In the process of modernization, “with strong military power and enforcement of bureaucratic institutions, the regime featured strong elite and technocrats in the government, control over the native Taiwanese, and comprehensive appropriation of

productive resources by establishing numerous public sector enterprises” (Tsai 2001: 363-4). The mainlander KMT controlled the most large state-owned enterprises including banking system while the business activities of local Taiwanese were limited to small-medium enterprises (Gray 2011: 590-592).

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For successful industrialization, the KMT strategically expanded the public education. Junior high schooling became free in 1968, and compulsory in 1982 to meet the needs of

massive labor force with basic literacy skills as Taiwan’s economy shifted toward labor-intensive industry (Liu and Armer 1993: 318). Higher education was only limited to the elite. The KMT did not show strong interest in providing it for masses until the new industry of knowledge-based economy required highly educated labors in the 1980s (ibid.: 318-319). Furthermore, holding on to the goal of retrieving the mainland, the KMT positioned children “as future national warriors in service of Chiang Kai-Shek’s mission to ‘recover the fallen Mainland’” (Lan 2014: 535). Hence the compulsory education focused on subjects making with Chinese identity. The history of the island was re-written as a part of China since the ancient time (Jacobs 2011: 195-196).

Under the strict supervision of the KMT regime with US economic and political aid, Taiwan underwent compressed modernization characterized as rapid industrialization and dramatic democratization at the end of the 1980s (Lan 2014: 533). Taiwanese middle class was typified by occupations such as government personnel, professional and technical worker, managerial workers or small businessmen with its relative equity in number and wealth (Tsai 1989). With such an economic boom, noneconomic aspects of social changes took place such as the formation of strong middle class, consumerism with urbanization, educational attainments, health care and social welfare system (ibid.). Along with the middle class with an increased consuming power, Taiwan turned to a consumerist society with urbanization (Trappey and Kuan Lai 1996; Chen 2002). The materialistic markers of the modern middle-class family appeared in the public discourse of the Five Examination, which is comprised of Car, Money, House, Wife, and Children. Presupposing a middle-class nuclear family with a male breadwinner as an ideal basis of society, the passing of all the Five Examinations represents a part of a middle-class and hence, becoming the normal, in the post-war era.

The Beginning of Democratization and Neoliberalization

The KMT-led authoritarian developmental regime started to fall apart as the geopolitical landscape changes in Asia since the 1970s as well as the offspring of the development itself (Gray 2011). With the decline of its economy and trade imbalance with Taiwan, the U.S. pressured the KMT to implement neoliberal structural reforms in the 1980s: reducing Taiwan's exports to the U.S. and urging to adopt liberal market policies such as opening up the market of

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Taiwan for U.S. goods and U.S.-based FDI (Huang 2009b: 44-45). Facing the difficulty of diplomatic isolation due to conflict over sovereignty with China, the KMT had little choice but to accept neoliberal reforms in search for close ties with the U.S. and other international trade organizations (Tsai 2011). Those reforms also included fiscal austerity, and privatization of state-owned corporations (ibid.: 360). Furthermore, as Taiwan lost its seat at the UN as a

representative of China, the KMT regime "felt compelled to respond to the crisis by enhancing its own democratic legitimacy at home through a steady opening of the electoral process" (Chu and Lin 2001: 118).

In the meantime, the very success of ‘development’ undermined the autonomy and legitimacy of the developmental state (Evans 1995). The new social forces arose with the modernization, each of which stood against Taiwan’s authoritarian developmental projects. Gary(2011) categorized them into four groups: 1) a social group that urged the government to act for new issues such as consumer protection, environmental protection, and rising housing costs, 2) a group that focused on disadvantaged groups and ethnic minorities’ right regarding native language and preservation of cultural identity and land, 3) a group that challenged the state’s corporatist control over key social groups, such as workers, farmers, students, women, teachers and intellectuals, and 4) a group that emerged to challenge the rules surrounding political sensitive issues, such as the ban on private contacts between Taiwan and mainland China, and human rights (590). With the lift of martial law in 1987, preexisting social forces took part in shaping civil society of Taiwan and numbers and kinds of NPOs exploded in the 1990s (Kuan and Wang 2015: 5).

The democratic movement organized by local Taiwanese elites and businessman slowly took over the island in the 1980s and a new opposition party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) declared its establishment in 1986. In 1996, the first democratic presidential election was held in which Lee Teng-hui, the first ‘Taiwanese’ president from the KMT was elected. Since 1996, the electoral voting turnout of presidential election maintained more than 70% until 2012.11 Along with political transition toward democratic government, the reform of civic education in secondary school was undertaken. The education in history and geography of the island, and democratic citizenship, have been strengthened in which moral values of democratic citizens and national identity are fostered (Morris and Cogan 2001: 114). Two mandatory

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courses, “Understanding Taiwan” and “Civic and Morality” were included in public education with explicit emphasis on values such as honesty, patriotism, filial piety, justice, responsibility reflecting the Confucian cultural tradition (Liu 2000: 75-76).

Entangled with democratization in the 1990s, both the KMT and DPP consent on neoliberal transition which explains no huge public opposition toward it (Tsai 2011: 371). According to Tsai (2011), the KMT did not regard privatization of state-owned enterprises as a retreat of a state because they could still appoint bureaucratic entrepreneurs in the management. Rather, privatization was considered as an opportunity to maximize the profit of state-owned corporations through a more efficient operation and to change its public image of corruption. For the DPP, privatization was a way to end the collusion between the KMT politicians and public-owned banks which provided the KMT massive loans with low interest for political funding. In the meantime, local capitalists saw an opening of a new remunerative market of finance, which was restricted to public banking managed by mainlanders. Local enterprises saw a niche market to provide public services, and to expand its financial basis to form a conglomerate. Public space of Taiwan was opened up not only for voting public but also for a well-resourced local business community (Gray 2011: 53). With the political choice of neoliberalization and democratization, it attributed to the growing crony capitalism in Taiwan.

Accelerating Neoliberal Transformation and Knowledge Economy

Soon, a political choice of neoliberal transformation (Gray 2011) began to have severe impact on the economy of Taiwan. With the entrance of China in the international political economy, Taiwanese enterprises began to relocate major labor-intensive industries to lower-wage economics mainly to China for practical reasons: “geographical, cultural and linguistic proximity” (ibid.: 592). As a result, “the growing power of business and the economic logic of lower wages and greater market opportunities has taken precedence over security issues relating to overdependence of Taiwan on the Chinese economy” (ibid.: 593). The state lost control over financial decisions in Taiwanese companies in core industries (Wu 2007: 998).

Instead, the Taiwanese government enacted a structural reform on industry toward the knowledge economy, that is less capital intensive but highly profitable. This hegemonic discourse of knowledge economy accelerated with a report published by the OECD in 1996 in which knowledge has become “the driver of productivity and economic growth”. Developing

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national innovation systems became a determinant factor for the transition which “consist of the flows and relationships among industry, government and academia in the development of science and technology” (OECD 1996: 7). Taiwanese government reserved itself in developing policies for nurturing the knowledge economy while the void was filled with private firms and

technology-centered entrepreneurs (Yeung 2017: 95). Furthermore, as cultural and creative industries received attention worldwide in the millennium, the government recognized

importance of incorporating cultural and creative element in knowledge economy for industrial competitiveness (Lee 2015: 466).

In the meantime, since the late 1980s, the number of higher educational institutions as well as students expanded rapidly (Tsai 1989: 32). Along with growing social demand for education based on Confucian value, the central government discarded regulations on limiting the establishment of private universities (Wang 2003: 265). According to Ministry of Education, the number of higher educational institutions soared from 8 in 1953 to 155 in 2017, among which private institutions amounted to 107.12 The quantitative increase in universities

demonstrate higher education in Taiwan has transformed from an elite type educational system into a universal type educational system (Hou 2011: 180-181). However, with the state’s market-oriented policies on education, the neoliberal transformation of higher educational institutions was undertaken (Chou and Ching 2012: 29). Universities are required to equip with financial independence, efficiency, and international competitiveness. As such, competition for

universities in higher ranking intensified in order to maintain individual competitiveness for social mobility in the neoliberal world (Huang 2012: 43).

While the percentage of laborers with higher educational level is increasing in Taiwan, the knowledge economy is unable to offer mass employment of such graduates. Wang (2009) analyzed a change in the occupational structure of the Taiwanese economy toward the

knowledge economy. He showed a great decline in elementary labor work and machine operator positions, while professional occupations and associate professionals increased to 8.2% and 19.1%, respectively in 2006. In line with it, the GDP created in the knowledge-based economy amounted to 52.5% of the total GDP of Taiwan in 2006 (ibid.: 131-132). The information-intensive industries occupied above-wage earners, caused greater income disparity in Taiwan since 1980, and left many of labors below-average income level (ibid.:134).

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In order to deal with youth unemployment in precarious labor market in post-Fordism, the Taiwanese government implemented the ‘22K’ policy to reduce the soaring unemployment rate among youth, which hit the highest rate of 16.28 percent in 2009 following the global financial crisis. 13 The policy was to provide subsidies of NT$22,000 (approximately US$665) for monthly wages to firms that hire college graduates between 2009 and 2011. However, later the policy gained a notorious name of 22K spell among youth: “it became the standard entry-level salary in many companies, thus stagnating growth in earnings for newcomers to the job market” (Chen 2018: 2763).

The burden of bearing the precarity is solely on individuals. The developmental welfare system of Taiwan has maintained its focus on discouragement of dependency on the state, and the ultimate goal of economic development (Kwon 2005: 493-494). Even within the new social protection schemes, training programs and unemployment benefits were implemented to increase the job capability of workers rather than job security (ibid.). In 2012, chief secretary of the Council of Labor Affairs’ Bureau of Employment and Vocational Training acknowledged that Taiwan's high youth unemployment rates resulted from competition for jobs among university graduates and lack of job openings. However, he also added that parents ‘spoil’ children to financially support them too much and many young people are unwilling to work.14 Such conditions render Wang’s argument plausible in which he explains the 318 movement as affective response to the growing impact of neoliberalism on youth (Wang 2017).

The Predominant Feeling of Yanshi

It has been four years since the 318 movement. Have circumstances of the youth changed much? Surely, they changed the government from the KMT to the DPP in the 2016 General Election, where youth voting turnout recorded 74% while the total voting rate recorded the lowest of 66% in ten years.15 For the first time, the DPP positioned the majority both in the Executive Yuan and the Legislative Yuan. However, many young people indicated that they haven’t experienced any real changes in their life after the political regime change. The DPP was no less responsive to the concerns of youth such as un(der)employment, income inequality, or housing prices than the KMT.

13_See_{https://tradingeconomics.com/taiwan/youth-unemployment-rate}_{(Trading Economics Accessed 3 Aug 2018).} 14_See_{https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/1969281}_{(Taiwan News 12 July 2012).}

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With less likelihood to realize their aspiration for a better future, an affective reaction toward the pessimistic future prospect under neoliberalism emerged among youth, which is culminated in the public discourse of Yanshidai (Misanthrope generation). In literal meaning, Yanshidai is a combination of two words, Yanshi(misanthropy; 厭世) and Shidai (generation; 世 代). In 2017, The News Lens, a new online media in Taiwan, highlighted the keyword Yanshidai and released fourteen featured articles to closely examine the growing social problem of low wage and poverty of youth.16 In the special issue, Yanshidai refers to a specific generation born after 1990 in Taiwan, who achieved the best education level ever in the history of Taiwan and yet face a risk to fall into working poor with a hopeless vision without improvement in future.

In Chinese, the word Yanshi(厭世) consists of two words, Yan(hate; 厭) and Shi(the world; 世). Yanshi can be used as a noun, an adjective, and a verb to describe a person or an event that provokes the affect of misanthropy which is an English equivalent. Socrates once elaborated the origin of misanthropy that “develops when without art one puts complete trust in somebody thinking the man absolutely true and sound and reliable and then a little later

discovers him to be bad and unreliable and when it happens to someone often, he ends up hating everyone” (quoted in Stern 1993: 95). However, it is improbable that a person experiences misanthropy from one occasion of betrayal. Rather, it is more plausible to argue that misanthropy is caused by a pattern of betrayal experienced in a larger setting, such as community or society. As such, Smith, an America sociologist, investigated factors of misanthrope in America and hinted the relation between misanthrope and social institutions by defining misanthrope as people who “are more anomic, have negative views of the nature of the world, and have less confidence in the leaders of most institutions” (Smith 1997: 172).

In terms of institutional betrayals in the context of Taiwan, two social institutions played a key role in causing Yanshi among youth. According to Hui-fen, it is elaborated as the maxim of the parent generation: “Things that worked for my parents’ generation, like ‘work hard and you will be paid for your hard work', doesn't work for us anymore.” Her own analysis resonates with that of Wu, an author of a book Yanshidai: low income, poverty and invisible future, published in December 2017. He noted that the Yanshidai finds inapplicable the old traditional logic of

"dedicate yourself and you will win" by the previous generation.17 Indeed, the youth in Taiwan

16_See_{https://www.thenewslens.com/feature/millenial-angst}_{(The News Lens Accessed 3 Aug 2018).} 17_See_{http://www.cna.com.tw/news/acul/201712220166-1.aspx}_{(CNA 22 Dec 2017).}

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work hard to enroll in top universities and wish their efforts to be compensated in the future- be it salary, satisfactory working condition or welfare provision. However, their average entry level salary, 28,116NTD in 2016, hasn't changed for approximately twenty years.18_{In 2016, the}

annual working hours in Taiwan was 2,034 in average and ranked the fifth longest working hours in the developed countries.19 In their perspective, achieving the normal middle-class status by passing the Five Examination of material signifiers has become abnormally difficult.

They end up wandering in the precarious labor market. The National Statistics of Taiwan shows that in 2017, 55.01% of the unemployed are an age group between 25 to 44 years old, and 54.45% of them received higher education or above. Among the unemployed, 76.45% of them are non-first job seekers. The major reasons of unemployment were analyzed as dissatisfaction in the previous job (36.84%), lay off or closing the business (25.63%) and the termination of

temporary or seasonal work (10.29%).20 Under such circumstances, the youth experience the affect of Yanshi as a betrayal of the dominant and optimistic middle-class work ethics for social mobility.

Another institutional betrayal stems from major political parties who were accountable for tackling structural failures of the economy. The long-lasting cronyism of political parties in Taiwan continued even after the democratic regime change in 2000 (Ip 2008: 174). When Chen Shui-bian, the first president from the DPP, was elected in 2000, the DPP had no institutional connections with business groups for its political power. Instead of reform on such political structure, the DPP government also adopted the old system of government-business collusion and established its own corrupt relationship with business which severely compromised the efficacy of the government’s economic policy (Gray 2011: 53). When President Chen, as well as his family, was charged for his implication with corruption with larger corporates in 2006, "the public has lost trust" in the president (Ip 2008: 174). In 2018, a slight hope that things might change after the 318 movement seemed to have been shattered when the DPP pursued amendment on the Standard Labor Act for more flexibilization of labor in favor of local

Taiwanese business groups. Unlike their parents’ generation whose understanding of politics is

18_See_{http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2017/06/02/2003671759}_{(Taipei Times 2 June 2017).} 19_See_{https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3265470}_{(Taiwan News 1 Oct 2017).}

20_See

https://www.ndc.gov.tw/en/News_Content.aspx?n=607ED34345641980&sms=B8A915763E3684AC&s=1897C802 5B0899A0 (National Development Council Accessed 3 Aug 2018).

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featured as polarization between pan-KMT or pan-DPP, young people tend to regard both political parties to be ineffective in solving real problems and to be only self-serving for power. Under such condition, their political effectiveness diminishes and they attempt to take a distance from politics.

In 2017, the Association of Music Workers in Taiwan selected a song “I am still young, I am still young” as the top ten songs of the year. Produced by a young Taiwanese band

Laowangband, the song captures well the dominant feeling of Yanshi among the youth in its lyrics: Give me a bottle of alcohol. And give me a cigarette. I’ll just go as I wish. All I have is time. I don’t want to be in the days of future, crying alone with no way to move forward. Yanshi is then collective affects caused by social betrayals and reveals “cruelty” they experience for holding onto their dream and ideal that can no longer be achieved in the neoliberal world (Berlant 2011). With their lost faith in future progress, all they have is an emptied time in the present. They do not want to end up in the inevitable and singular future that neoliberalism projects onto the youth in Taiwan (Wang 2017). Yet, with no means or orientation to achieve their dream, what they do or can do is floating around in the present with a bottle of alcohol and a cigarette. Yanshidai then is a local manifestation of global precariats who have “no ladders of mobility to climb, leaving people hovering between deeper self-exploitation and disengagement” (Standing 2011: 20) as well as “reflexive impotence that they know things are bad, but more than that, they know they can’t do anything about it” (Fisher 2009: 21).

The Legacy of the 318 Movement: Formation of Tongwenceng

Four years also passed by Hui-fen since the occupation of the Legislative Yuan during the 318 movement. In the meantime, she graduated from university. After the graduation, she worked for conventional corporations as an intern, part-time or temporary worker. Having found her previous jobs dissatisfactory, and feeling Yanshi about the current situation in Taiwan, I was informed that she had also thought of leaving Taiwan and going abroad. However, in the end, she decided not to do so.

I saw some Taiwanese abroad complaining and criticizing Taiwan while they did nothing to change it. I didn’t want to be one of those people. Then, after the 318, I saw my Tongwenceng

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became really thick. It has so much impact on me and even my friends who did not participate in the 318 movement. So I decided to stay in Taiwan and do something here.

Tongwenceng (Stratosphere; 同溫層) is a metaphorical neologism circulated mainly among youth to refer to their subjective world in which members share similar values, experiences, and perspective of the society. Its English equivalent would be a “filter bubble” in the social media that allows users to customize their settings and interest in certain topic and information (Pariser 2011). In Taiwan, Tongwenceng phenomenon became more visible with the development and frequent usage of social media in daily life as well.21 While my interlocutors attributed it to different elements and characteristics that they commonly share with their own Tongwenceng, the commonality lies in that in the subjective world other than family and friends, people seek for and exchange affirmation, consolation, and validation on individual subjectivity – beliefs, moral values, political stance with each other.

Especially, in the context of Hui-fen and young practitioners of social entrepreneurship, their Tongwenceng resonates with the youth culture featured in the 318 movement. First of all, as “the democratic generation” who reached their adulthood after the 1980s, they treat rights to freedom of speech, political participation or democratic citizenship as crucial elements of democratic society they live in (Rigger 2011). To them, Taiwanese identity is “a source of pride and curiosity” and regard China as “neither a fearsome enemy nor a lost homeland” but “simply another foreign country” (ibid.: 70). Also, while they share the feeling of Yanshi about the future which appears to them as inevitable, homogenous, and precarious, they deem such future as “that must be resisted now by imagining a new collectivity to withstand the wheel of time” (Wang 2017: 187). Against the precarious and inevitable future image under neoliberalism, they cherish the present and pursue daily “small revolutions” through consuming fair trade products and independent music, and producing documentaries to reveal social issues for the better future (ibid.: 186). While they do not oppose the project of ‘globalization’ as a whole, they demand fairer competition in the market. They do not disagree with middle-class work ethic but they do question the definition of success in material terms.

As social media had played a key role in mobilizing the youth during the movement (Cheng 2014), it continues to loosely but extensively connect people who share the value and

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political statement of the 318 movement. In this sense, the 318 movement acted as a catalyst for youth to form an “intimate public” in which “one senses that matters of survival are at stake and that collective mediation through narration and audition might provide some routes out of the impasse and the struggle of the present or at least some sense that there would be recognition were the participants in the room together” (Berlant 2011: 226). The Tongwenceng of young practitioners then provides “the feeling of immediacy and solidarity by establishing in the public sphere an affective register of belonging to inhabit when there are few adequate normative institutions to fall back on, rest in, and return to” (ibid.). Social entrepreneurship, then, is one of the approaches that these young people could take in resisting the reflexive impotence under the dominance of Yanshi, and starting to act upon social issues on their own.

In this chapter, I explained the dynamics of youth culture in facing the political and economic impasse that contemporary Taiwanese society is caught up with. First, I delineated how the impasse has become a shared knowledge among youth considering the history of contemporary Taiwan in relation to neoliberalization. With knowledge economy and flexibilization of labor market, young people end up with a precarious job after undergoing competition for higher educational institutions to secure future social mobility. They express their despair through Yanshi discourse in which the featurelessness of the future has been

accepted a social fact. However, the legacy of the 318 movement remains to influence a group of young people by binding the intimate public into a social group of Tongwenceng. With shared value, beliefs and political sensibilities, they attempt to break the current impasse and overcome the predominant influence of Yanshi. In the next chapter, I will present how young middle-class Taiwanese read the contemporary history, reject the normal path to social reproduction of middle-class, and foster an aspiration to engage in social entrepreneurship.

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Chapter 2. “The Journey to the Great Oz”

: Motives of Young Practitioners

In this chapter, I will present several common motives of young practitioners to work at a micro-organization and engage in social entrepreneurship. I begin with analyzing the structural influences behind their casual narratives of motivation. Institutional promotion of social

entrepreneurship, their Tongwenceng, and middle-class background enable them to diverge from the normal path and engage in social entrepreneurship. Then, I will present how their motives reflect current neoliberal Taiwanese society by focusing on their experiences of precarious conventional jobs as well as their neoliberal rationale to regard themselves as an enterprise. Newly established micro-organizations of social entrepreneurship occur to them as a new opportunity to incorporate their personal interest and moral values into work without damaging the sense of self. The dominance of a descriptive understanding of social good grants young practitioners to freely interpret the meaning of good. Their emphasis on freedom exceeds to an extent that they discard the label of social entrepreneurship. While the interpretation of social ‘good’ is upon individuals, their interpretation of ‘society’ converges into Taiwan. In the last

The wonderful wizard of neoliberalism : analysis on the youth’s engagement in social entrepreneurship in the context of contemporary Taiwan