Start-up Wolf

This book examines how socially privileged entrepreneurial talents adopt and champion the wolf culture, that is, a fast-paced, competitive, and demanding work culture, prevalent since China's mass promotion of entrepreneurship and innovation.

Olivia Yijian Liu is an entrepreneurship researcher, an ethnographic fieldworker, an area specialist focusing on global China, and a strategy consultant. She obtained her PhD from the University of Oslo.

1. Introduction: Start-up wolf of Shenzhen 2. Contextualising transnational entrepreneurs in China 3. Performative governance: The campaign of mass entrepreneurship and innovation 4. To be entrepreneured: Creating hierarchies among privileged biographies 5. Entrepreneurship competitions: The state and market ideals of talents 6. Striving talents: Performing excellence for economic privilege 7. Precarious privilege: Rationalising wolf-isation and sacrifice 8. After-wolf: Downsizing, resignation, and self-reconfiguration 9. Ending Remarks: The Shenzhen model of high-tech entrepreneurship and beyond