The Establishment Strikes Back? The Life and Times of Takafumi Horie

Abstract

This paper uses newspaper articles to construct an account of the meteoric rise and eventual fall from grace of Takafumi Horie, a Japanese Internet entrepreneur. This trajectory is explored through a qualitative methodology that analyses the content of articles in international newspapers reporting key events in Horie's story. Tracking the representation of Horie as the story develops uncovers the ambiguous nature of the concept of entrepreneurship in Japan, where the enactment of entrepreneurship takes place within and at times against the mainstream of significant change in the nature of work in Japan. The paper concludes by linking Horie's story to the temporal construction of the entrepreneur in a social context in which bureaucratic challenge leads eventually to entrepreneurial marginalization through the likelihood of a jail term. Overall, the paper adds to the literature concerning the mutable and contested nature of the term ‘entrepreneur’.