"Trabalhadores do futuro": discursos e práticas empreendedoras em uma empresa júnior de São Carlos-SP

Abstract

The productive restructuring has triggered new configurations in the world of work. With this change, a new profile of worker emerges, aligned with the premises disseminated by neoliberalism from the 1970s onwards. This new worker is characterized by flexibility, competitiveness, and being an entrepreneur of oneself, concerned with ensuring employability. Willing to take risks and intensify their working hours, this worker seeks not just a guarantee of stability but a job where they feel they are making a difference in the world. Thus, this study aimed to understand how the entrepreneurial discourse is incorporated and mobilized by students participating in a junior company at the São Carlos campus of the University of São Paulo (USP). It examines how entrepreneurial discourses and practices take shape in a project that simulates the experience in the labor market and how they influence students' perceptions of the new configurations of work - flexible, with reduced labor rights, and marked by a neoliberal logic that encourages "self-entrepreneurship." The research was conducted through a case study, utilizing observation techniques, semi-structured interviews, and collecting materials from the company's social media for discourse analysis. It is concluded that these discourses prevail in EESC Jr. and in brazilian Junior Enterprise Movement (MEJ), through a strongly disseminated corporate culture that encourages competitiveness, flexibility, intense work, and training as a way to ensure employability, all in the pursuit of work that is capable of transforming lives. Personal achievement is considered an important factor for future professional trajectories.