Is older entrepreneurship being silenced? A policy analysis of Finnish government programmes

ABSTRACT This post-structural policy analysis examines Finnish government programmes through the lens of neoliberal governmentality and the concepts of the entrepreneurial self and active ageing. In the context of Finland, as a Nordic welfare state in transition to a competition-state model, this study examines how government programmes construct an ageing workforce, especially regarding older entrepreneurship. The results suggest that older people are not only constructed as a difficult-to-employ workforce but also as passive and vulnerable care recipients. Furthermore, as a construction, older entrepreneurship is absent from the studied documents, suggesting that the older entrepreneurship is a marginalized group that has been silenced. This article increases knowledge about this silencing in terms of governmentality and provides perspectives via which to develop a more inclusive entrepreneurship policy.


Introduction
The EU (e.g. 2003;EU 2012aEU , 2012b) ) has actively promoted entrepreneurship among various marginalized groups.In Finland, however, marginalized entrepreneurship, including older entrepreneurship, may be underrepresented (EU/OECD 2018).Research on socially, institutionally, and culturally marginalized entrepreneurship, as well as entrepreneurship among those with few resources, is fragmented (Pidduck and Clark 2021).Previous research on older people in the workforce has focused on employment or retirement (Ainsworth and Hardy 2008;Moulaert and Biggs 2013;Rudman 2006) and not on entrepreneurship (Figueiredo and Paiva 2019).'Older entrepreneurship' has varying definitions, but it often refers to becoming an entrepreneur or self-employed at the chronological age of 50 or later (Ratten 2019).Like critical age studies (Powell 2014;Whiting and Pritchard 2020), however, we understand age, ageing, and older entrepreneurship as socially constructed, which enables us to study how social structures and cultural practices shape the meanings of age (Pritchard and Whiting 2014).
The study is based on governmentality theory (Dean 1999;Miller and Rose 2008;Rose 1992).The term governmentality draws attention to a certain way of thinking and acting that is involved in any effort to know and govern the wealth, health and happiness of populations (Rose and Miller 2010).In this article, we focus on the ways in which the wealth of the population is governed through the neoliberal ideals of the entrepreneurial self (Dean 1999, 167-168) and active ageing (Moulaert and Biggs 2013) in Finnish government programmes in the 2010s.
We use Bacchi's (2009) governmentality-based post-structural approach known as 'What's the problem represented to be?' (WPR) to analyse constructions of the ageing workforce and older entrepreneurship in these documents.The Foucault-influenced approach critically scrutinizes problematizations (the ways in which 'problems' are produced and represented; Bacchi 2009) in governmental policies and practices.Governing involves problematizing, that is, shaping issues as 'problems' and constituting subjects through problem representations (Bacchi 2009;Rose and Miller 2010, 279).
In this approach, discourses are understood not as language or communication but, rather, as the knowledges through which we are governed (Bacchi 2015), and silence is understood as an integral part of discourse (Foucault 1990, 27;Thiesmeyer 2003).The WPR approach not only examines the ways in which 'problems' are presented but also what is left unproblematic in problem representations.It explores the silences (important dimensions of an issue that are excluded or unexplored) and speculates regarding other potential ways of representing 'problems' in identified problem representations (Bacchi 2009, 40).In this analysis, we use government programmes (Rose and Miller 2010) as research data, creating a macro-level context for our study of silence (Thiesmeyer 2003).The research documents consist of three Finnish prime ministers' government programmes during the 2010s: Jyrki Katainen (2011), Juha Sipilä (2015) and Sanna Marin (2019).
Two research questions are put forward: First, how are citizens invited to participate in the workforce, as entrepreneurial selves, in the constructions of the workforce in Finnish government programmes of the 2010s?Second, how is older entrepreneurship constructed or even silenced in these invitations?In answering these questions, we examine silence in terms of governmentality.

The entrepreneurial self and active ageing in neoliberal governmentality
In governmentality theory, the object of governance is the entire population (Dean 1999, 19) and governance takes place by producing political subjects.Productive power affects to the population through subjectification.In subjectification, political discourse makes the entrepreneurial self and other subject positions available for citizens, allowing individuals to govern themselves and others (Bacchi 2009, 38;Rose 1999).Miller and Rose (2008) explain governmentality as a mentality of governance through rationality and technologies.Rationality (e.g.welfarism and neoliberalism) refers to the ways in which a society recognizes and understands moral content, values, and the knowledge of governance.Neoliberal rationality emphasizes the freedom of individuals and autonomy (Miller and Rose 2008;Rose 1999).It criticises the political subject of the welfare state as passive and dependent, and it represents citizenship in the competition state as active and autonomous (Rose 1992;Rose and Miller 2010).
Human technologies refer to concrete practices and institutions through which political power is exercised.Technologies of the self operate through subjects.As technologies of the self, the concepts of the entrepreneurial self (Dean 1999, 167-168) and active ageing (Moulaert and Biggs 2013) reflect neoliberal rationality (Rose 1992).They are related to a wider context that characterizes the transition from the welfare state to the competition-state model (see van Dyk 2014), which Finland has also faced since the late 1980s (Kantola and Kananen 2013).In neoliberalism, the language of entrepreneurial individual, with its autonomy and freedom to choose, has become a dominant requirement for political power and government programmes (Rose and Miller 2010).It is through the technology of enterprising self that individuals themselves are mobilized in alliance with political objectives, in order to deliver economic growth, successful enterprise and optimum personal happiness.Thus, good government is based on the ways in which individuals govern themselves without the need for direct political intervention (Rose 1992).
On one hand, the entrepreneurial self invites everyone to be productive and responsible for enhancing their own value-creating qualities in not only one's working life but, rather, all aspects and phases of life (Miller and Rose 2008;Rose 1992).On the other hand, the entrepreneurial self can be seen as inherently elitist and exclusionary (Bröckling 2015).In the context of working life, citizens, as a workforce, are offered entrepreneurship as a model of autonomous and creative subjectivity in the neoliberal spirit of aiming for excellence and success (Rose 1992, 154).However, not all citizen groups are invited to join the hegemonic ideal of entrepreneurship (see Christiaens 2019) and different groups are offered different types of entrepreneurship (see Doody, Chen, and Goldstein 2016).For example, in the context of entrepreneurship education or farming, the enactment of entrepreneurship discourse tends to single out citizens who are evaluated as lacking some of the qualities of the potential needed to become entrepreneurial (Korhonen, Komulainen, and Räty 2012;Pyysiäinen and Vesala 2013).Thus, not all citizens are invited to act as entrepreneurial selves.According to Christiaens (2019), there are cases where neoliberal technologies suspend the application of entrepreneurship to abandon groups of populations that are considered unproductive for economic growth.'When the subjects are rejected, the administrative bodies do not care to entrepreneurialize them, but to exclude them from the population they control' (Christiaens 2019, 105).We analyse whether older people who engage in entrepreneurship represent such an abandoned group for Finnish governments.
'Older people' does not have a specific definition (Eurostat 2019;Stypinska 2018).The concept of older entrepreneurship has also been defined in various ways, for example, as third-age, late-life, and senior entrepreneurship (Ratten 2019).Raemdonck et al. (2015) point out that research on the older workforce is difficult because age can be approached from many different perspectives, as well as that chronological age has generally been used.However, Pritchard and Whiting (2014) argue that seeing age and ageing as socially constructed allows one to move away from chronology and explore how social structures and cultural practices are related.We understand older entrepreneurship as a social construction that emphasizes 'new understandings of the intersection between age and enterprise in later life' (Whiting and Pritchard 2020; see also Powell 2014).
Like the concept of the entrepreneurial self, the concept of active ageing is a neoliberal technology of the self through which citizens are governed.It has its roots in the concept of successful ageing (Katz and Calasanti 2015), which supposes to prevent the onset of old age (van Dyk 2014;Walker 2006).However, successful and active ageing can be seen as marginalizing concepts (Whiting and Prichard 2020;Ainsworth and Hardy 2008;van Dyk 2014) in that they define the majority of the older population as unsuccessful (Katz and Calasanti 2015).In the EU (Walker 2006), successful ageing has evolved towards the concept of productive ageing, which emphasizes the development of the human life course (Moulaert and Biggs 2013).
The implications of active ageing have been studied in the areas of social and welfare research (Powell 2014), policymaking (Evans and Nistrup 2020), working life, and retirement (Moulaert and Biggs 2013;Rudman 2006).However, research on the relationship between the entrepreneurial self and active ageing is rare (e.g.Stypinska 2018).They seem to be intertwined, but there are dilemmas in this regard.Firstly, the entrepreneurial self has been associated with efforts to manage ageing through vigorous exercise and healthy lifestyles and, thus, achieve personal, professional, and financial success (Thomas et al. 2014).However, Whiting and Pritchard (2020) argue that the intersection of age and older entrepreneurship is a more complex phenomenon than the binary of continued youthfulness versus decline.They discuss the category of older people who are too old for the labour market and too poor to retire.Secondly, although both are neoliberal technologies of the self (Moulaert and Biggs 2013;Rose 1992), they are incompatible because entrepreneurship idealizes the young, active, and competent body (Ainsworth and Hardy 2008;Whiting and Pritchard 2020).Indeed, Ainsworth and Hardy (2008) argue that entrepreneurship is an aged structure from which older people are excluded regardless of how active they are.

Research on silence
The literature distinguishes between the concepts of silence, which is an individual's own choice, and silencing, which is an active and socially constructive practice on the part of others (Thiesmeyer 2003).This article examines the latter.Silencing typically includes the use of force, material consequences, and unequal negotiations (Thiesmeyer 2003).Examples include the power that is used by the mass media (Wodak 2003), the authorities (Lambertus 2003) and political actors (Schröter 2013).However, it is not easy to study or even notice silencing, due to the wide range of communicative phenomena that are interpreted as silence (Murray and Durrheim 2019).
Researchers offer two main, partly overlapping, approaches to studying silence and silencing.The language-based approach uses linguistic data and case studies of verbal and textual discourse.The social-sciences-and-humanities approach examines discourses within an entire society (Murray and Durrheim 2019;Thiesmeyer 2003).We use Bacchi's (2009) post-structural policy analysis, which represents the latter.It systematically poses questions, also concerning silences, to policy discourse, such as the following: 'What is left unproblematic in this problem representation?Where are the silences?Can the "problem" be thought about differently?' (Bacchi 2009, 48).In entrepreneurship research, the silencing of marginalized groups has been linked, for example, to women's invisible and often ethnically (Verduijn and Essers 2013) and culturally marginalized (Storr and Butkevich 2007) entrepreneurship.While silenced entrepreneurship has been studied by using Spivak's (1988) concept of postcolonial silencing (e.g.Storr and Butkevich 2007), we found no research on the topic that draws from governmentality theory.
In the silence and silencing literature, discourses have been examined as nationally, institutionally, and interactively contextual (Thiesmeyer 2003).Our context is the first of these; This study analyses older entrepreneurship and silencing in Finnish government programmes.

The Finnish context
Finland is classified as one of the social democratic or universalist Nordic welfare states, which share the promotion of high levels of equality and reliance on the wider public sector and social security system.As a small and open economy, Finland is dependent on international competitiveness in foreign markets and exports (see Heinonen and Hytti 2016).Since the late 1980s, Finnish governments, regardless of their political stances, have been moving towards a competition-state model, which is challenging welfare-state model in Western countries (Kantola and Kananen 2013;Saarinen, Salmenniemi, and Keränen 2014).In the 2010s, Finland was recovering from the global economic crisis.This, together with an ageing population and changes in the economic environment, threatens the sustainability of the Nordic welfare model but also provides an opportunity to re-evaluate it (OECD, "Finland: Working Together to Sustain Success, OECD 2010).
Most Finnish companies are small enterprises.In 2018, the share of enterprises employing less than 50 persons was 99% of all companies, which was slightly above the EU average (Eurostat 2022).In the 2010s, the number of self-employed entrepreneurs varied between 230,000 and 250,000 representing about 10% of Finnish employed population.During that period, the share of older (statistically, 55-74 years) entrepreneurs increased from 26.6 to 27.9% of all self-employed entrepreneurs, reaching 67,000 in 2019 (Statistics Finland 2022).In Finland's Country Policy Assessment (EU/ OECD 2018), the operating environment for entrepreneurship was found to be positive.Regulation was reported as low, and support for entrepreneurship was available.However, the lack of tailored measures for underrepresented or disadvantaged groups in the labour market, such as youth, women, older people, the unemployed, the disabled and immigrants, was identified as a weakness.According to the assessment, the employment culture seemed much stronger than the entrepreneurship culture in Finnish working life.
The content of Finnish entrepreneurship policies has developed over time from the creation of jobs to supporting international growth and, further, to enhancing sustainability and combating the grey economy (Heinonen and Hytti 2016).The role of the state in Finnish entrepreneurship policy increased during economic crises, both in the early 1990s and 2008, despite the continuing trend towards a competition-state model and the neoliberal shift from regulation to reduced national decision-making.It was concluded that Finland has developed mixed approaches to policy-making, depending on the economic, social, and cultural environment (Heinonen, Hytti, and Cooney 2010).Koskinen and Saarinen (2019) identified two parallel entrepreneurship discourses in Finnish government programmes from the 1970s to the 2010s: the macro-level economic growth discourse and the micro-level subjectification discourse of ideal entrepreneurial citizenship.In Finnish government programmes, they concluded, entrepreneurship functions as a metaphor for ideal citizenship.
To recapitulate, the present study set out to examine, in terms of neoliberal governmentality, how Finnish government programmes of the 2010s construct the ageing workforce, especially older entrepreneurship.

Methods and data
Our research represents a discursive approach to interpretive policy analysis that focuses on meanings and government practice beyond policies (Wagenaar 2011, 124-5, 132).We use Bacchi's (2009) governmentality-based post-structural WPR approach, according to which political subjects are constituted in discourses that are understood as socially produced forms of knowledge (Bacchi 2009, 35;2015).The chosen approach is critical in that it systematically questions problem representations regarding what types of presuppositions, assumptions, and silences, as well as discursive, living, and subjectification effects, they may contain (Bacchi 2009, 48).We analyse problem representations specifically related to constructions of entrepreneurship and the ageing workforce in Finnish government programmes of the 2010s.We analyse what kinds of discourses and categories these problem representations tend to produce, as well as what kinds of silences are constructed in discourses.
We focus on the discourses and categories produced in government programmes, not the concrete content of policy per se (Bacchi 2015(Bacchi , 2017)).We identify key concepts, categories, binaries, and discursive practices that constitute categories (Bacchi 2009).We understand a category as a socially constructed difference, such as 'young and old' or 'global and local'.Rather than focusing on a category per se, such as age, we are interested in categorization (i.e.how discourses are doing age; Bacchi 2017).
Finnish government programmes of the 2010s (Katainen 2011;Marin 2019;Sipilä 2015) were chosen as the text corpus because they represent a technology of governmentality that targets to the entire population (Miller and Rose 2008).They also represent a macro-level context for the study of silence (Thiesmeyer 2003).We understand a government programme to be a comprehensive, strategic document that records the government's goals and how they are to be achieved, as well as knowledge of the area or problem being addressed (Rose and Miller 2010).We excluded from the research material the government programmes of the short-term prime ministers of the 2010s because they were considered similar to the included documents (see Saarinen, Salmenniemi, and Keränen 2014).The primary research data are in Finnish.English translations on the government webpage (www.valtioneuvosto.fi)are used in quotations.
Although the governments' political orientations (Table 1) and, thus, the emphases of entrepreneurship policy differ, we understand that neoliberal rationality cannot be reduced to individual political parties in Finland (see Saarinen, Salmenniemi, and Keränen 2014).Therefore, we analyse the government programmes simultaneously and do not separate the results by government.We use the terms 'government' and 'government programme' as synonyms in the sense that the government is the author of the programmes.
The primary research data range in length from 74 pages in 2015 to 216 pages in 2019, as well as being 90 pages in 2011.Each analysed government programme contains more detailed measures in the form of appendices.Workforce and entrepreneurship are discussed extensively in various parts of the documents.As shown in Table 2, none of the documents includes a specific entrepreneurship policy, but entrepreneurship is most often discussed in economic and industrial policies.We focused our reading on the mentions of age, ageing, and entrepreneurship, especially in economic and industrial workforce and entrepreneurship policies, but also in welfare and social policies (Table 2).The material was analysed from the point of view of how age and ageing were constructed in it.
We began the analysis by examining problem representations (Bacchi 2009) in relation to constructions of age, ageing, and the workforce.We then focused on discourses produced in government programmes aimed at solving these problems.In these discourses, we discovered explicit and implicit categories and category groups.We identified the entrepreneurial discourse on the entire working life, in which we identified three key categories for working-life actors with various governmental roles and goals.We then identified categories for various socially constructed age groups of employment and entrepreneurship and noted the absence of the older entrepreneurship category.As the final step in the analysis of the entrepreneurial discourse, we compared the Finnish government programmes to the EU's documents to discover the cultural context (Bacchi 2009) of entrepreneurship policy in the EU and potential silences in Finland.We concluded our analysis by identifying and examining the social policy discourse on ageing (i.e.how ageing is constructed in the Finnish government programmes of the 2010s beyond working life).

Ageing-related problem representations
In Finland's government programmes of the 2010s, we found various ageing-related policy proposals within economic and industrial, workforce and entrepreneurship, and welfare and social policies.
The ageing-related problem representations were a lack of economic growth, competitiveness, and entrepreneurship; population ageing and the sustainability gap; too-short careers and passive citizens; and ageist prejudices, poor work abilities, and other problems in working life (Table 3).
The best way to achieve economic and social well-being was represented to be strengthening economic growth and exports.Thus, weak growth and low exports appeared to be the most important problem representations.
Finland's economy and employment can be restored to growth only through entrepreneurship and work.Measures to improve competitiveness will strengthen exports and conditions for businesses operating in the domestic market.(Sipilä 2015, Section 2) 'Work generates welfare' (Katainen 2011, Section: Introduction).Further, in the above quotation, entrepreneurship, together with work, represents as a key concept in achieving international competitiveness.Although the risk of losing competitiveness appeared to be a significant problem in national politics, the lack of entrepreneurship is constructed as a problem for Finnish governments (see EU/OECD 2021).
The sustainability gap in general government finances stems mainly from a rapidly deteriorating dependency ratio caused by the ageing of the population.From the viewpoint of sustainable public finances, it is crucial that as many people of working age as possible are in work.(Katainen 2011, Section 1) However, in the above quotation, the ageing population is seen as a weakness that jeopardizes wellbeing.On one hand, documents construct Finland as a rapidly ageing society.On the other hand, the ageing of the population is represented as leading to a sustainability gap.It is represented as a problem and a crucial factor in international competitiveness.
Working careers will be prolonged at the beginning, middle and end.The aim is to change the course of labour market policy from passive to active, as in other Nordic countries, and to target services more efficiently than at present (Marin 2019, Section 3.5).
Social security must [. ..] help create opportunities for employment, entrepreneurship, active individual initiative, participation, and lifelong learning in all situations.(Marin 2019, Section 3.6) In addition to short careers, the above quotations represent a passive labour market policy and a social security system that is in need of reform as additional problems that increase the need to activate the workforce.The transition from a welfare state to a competition state requires career lengthening on the part of all age groups.Other Nordic welfare states (e.g.Sweden) are cited as a justification for the government's neoliberal rationality in activating the workforce and the labour market.The goal is to extend working life at the end of the career in the neoliberal spirit of efficiency, which is very much in line with the EU's idea of promoting the concept of active ageing and the employability of older workers.However, the need for age management in the following quotation implies that age-related issues are problematic for Finnish working life.
Age management will be fostered as part of the development of management, meaning the consideration of age-related factors in daily management that ensures that young, middle-aged and older employees are given the means to achieve their own and the organisation's goals.(Katainen 2011, Section 7) In government programmes, poor working-life quality and the incapacity to work are presented as the most significant factors in shortening careers.Age management is offered as a tool with which to improve efficiency and also well-being in the workplace.The workforce is exposed to neoliberal selfresponsibility techniques in an attempt to achieve their own and the organization's goals.Age management is proposed equally for all age groups.However, the following quotation shows that older people are constructed as more problematic than other age groups.
Finland will be a more age-friendly society that recognizes and prepares for the social effects of its ageing population.Older people are not only service users; they are also an important resource in society.The aim is to raise the number of healthy years, improve people's functional capacity and secure efficient and timely services.(Marin 2019, Section 3.6) The goal of having everyone on board (Marin 2019, Section 1) can be seen as the moral umbrella of welfare policy.However, in the above quotation, the ideal of an age-friendly society in the future implies that today's society is not age-friendly.Focusing on the health and social effects of an ageing population, such as memory disorders, the emphasis of older people's rights, and healthy lifestyle counselling (Marin 2019, Section 3.6), suggests that older citizens are especially passive and require guidance from others (i.e.younger people).Although government programmes seem to construct older people as a resource, ageing is viewed in terms of health and social effects, not work or entrepreneurship.

The entrepreneurial discourse
In government programmes of the 2010s, entrepreneurship appears as a key concept in achieving economic growth and competitiveness.It appears alongside employment after having received little attention from the Nordic welfare state (see Hjorth 2008).In our data, the entrepreneurial discourse consists of the entire working life, which is reflected in the widely used construction 'work and entrepreneurship'.
Finnish society is based on hard work, respect for work and entrepreneurship, equality, solidarity and caring for one another (Katainen 2011, Section: Introduction, italics added).
Finland's economy and employment can be restored to growth only through entrepreneurship and work (Sipilä 2015, Section 3, italics added).
[. ..] wellbeing and prosperity will continue to be based on knowledge and skills and on work and entrepreneurship .(Marin 2019, Section 1, italics added) In the quotations above, work and entrepreneurship are strongly linked as critical success factors in Finland.The word pair appears as a construction that promotes very different goals on the part of policymakers.In our data, it is incorporated into wellbeing, prosperity, equality, solidarity, and caring for one another, as well as growth, employment, and the economy, which reflect the intertwined rationalities of welfarism and neoliberalism (see Rose and Miller 2010) and their ideals.The problem representations related to a lack of competitiveness and entrepreneurship produce an entrepreneurial discourse that combines work and entrepreneurship into the sum of working life.Entrepreneurship serves as a metaphor for ideal citizenship (see Koskinen and Saarinen 2019).
In the entrepreneurial discourse, we identified three key categories of working-life actors based on the various roles and goals that governments pursued in order to enhance international competitiveness (Table 4).Depending on the key category and the goal, governments adopt the role of accelerator for the hero category, facilitator for the ordinary category, and problem solver for the marginalized category of working-life actors.
Hero enterprises and entrepreneurs (Table 4) are targeted to collaborate and innovate with universities, research centres, and ecosystems, which indicates neoliberal governing through technologies of institutions, systems, and knowledge (Rose and Miller 2010).Growth companies, such as startups and small businesses, are promoted in areas such as information technology, clean technology, and creative companies.Skilled workers and funding seem to be concerns in the hero category, as does ensuring the resilience of entrepreneurs, which indicates the intertwined rationalities of welfarism and neoliberalism (see Rose and Miller 2010).The following quotation illustrates the category of hero entrepreneurship and the government's role in and goal regarding it.
The Government will promote the competitiveness of Finnish work and entrepreneurial activity in the global market.Economic growth must be ecologically and socially sustainable.Enhanced competence and the creation of an attractive and functioning environment are key issues for companies [. ..]Industrial policy measures will be targeted above all to support new growth-oriented businesses that offer jobs and seek internationalization. (Katainen 2011, Section 1) Government programmes construct categories using, explicitly and implicitly, the binaries of the 'global and domestic' market and 'sustainable and non-sustainable' growth.The focus of hero working-life actors is on the global market, not the domestic one.Explicit reference is made to ecological and sustainable growth, implying that other types of growth may not be appropriate.The growing expertise in the hero category implies lower skill levels in the other categories.The hero category embodies neoliberal rationality, in which both entrepreneurs, as employers, and society must develop peoples' skills, which emphasizes the importance of knowledge (Rose 1999).
In our data, hero entrepreneurship appears as hegemonic.It is associated with the young and successful, international, growth oriented, and technically oriented, which also points to the masculinity of the governments' construction of ideal entrepreneurship (see Koskinen and Saarinen 2019).Hero entrepreneurship reveals the rationality of neoliberalism and its ideals, such as profitable growth, autonomy, and entrepreneurship.In the hero category, Finnish governments seem to rely on a traditional construction of entrepreneurship (Ogbor 2000), which includes discourses on money, financial success, innovation, creation, growth, and profitability (Figueiredo and Paiva 2019).
The ordinary category of working-life actors (Table 4) reflects competitiveness and growth, but it does so in more moderate way than the hero category.Regarding the ordinary category, governments aim to improve the business environment by enhancing digitalization, customer-orientation, social security for entrepreneurs, pension security, and the hiring of external employees.
Business competitiveness and conditions for business activity will be strengthened by all decision-making.Industry's operating costs will not be increased by the Government during the government term.Market activity, free competition and opportunities for SMEs to participate in procurement processes will be promoted by reforming key legislation and removing sectoral regulation that prevents competition.(Sipilä 2015, Section 4) As the above quotation shows, the role and goal of government is to enhance the overall business environment and operating conditions of ordinary companies, for example, by deregulating the business environment.The quotation suggests that, without government support, owning and investing in ordinary businesses is not as profitable as it should be.It suggests that the diversification of the economic structure will enhance competitiveness (i.e.reaching the standards of the competition state).
Marginal working-life actors (Table 4) are identified, for example, in labour-intensive industries, such as construction, accommodation, restaurants, agriculture, and fishing.This category seems awkward for both welfare and competition states.
The employment opportunities of people with disabilities and people with partial work ability on the open labour market will be promoted [. ..]The entrepreneurial prospects of people with disabilities will be improved.(Sipilä 2015, Section 6) The above quotation illustrates how the government attempts to achieve the employment goals of difficult-to-employ, marginalized people by promoting both employment and entrepreneurship.Via government programmes, entrepreneurial prospects are enhanced for those with disabilities, people with only partial work abilities, and immigrants (i.e.marginalized groups that still include potential entrepreneurs).Marginal working-life actors appear to include those in the grey economy, finance criminals, foreign companies and their personnel, and companies registered abroad.On the other hand, marginalized entrepreneurship is also represented in the research data by sole and microentrepreneurs, immigrant entrepreneurs, and the self-employed.
In our data, the entrepreneurial discourse focuses more on hegemonic hero entrepreneurship and employment than on ordinary and marginal working-life actors, which is in line with a problem representation that emphasizes competitiveness and entrepreneurship to succeed in international markets.

Age categories regarding employment and entrepreneurship
The central categorizations of age for employment and entrepreneurship (Table 5) show different ways of doing age in the entrepreneurial discourse of Finnish government programmes of the 2010s (Bacchi 2017).
In both employment and entrepreneurship age categories, governments seem to rely on highly educated and qualified young people but show more concern for young people at risk of exclusion, especially unemployed youth and those with immigrant backgrounds.In documents, a similar distinction is made between the work-aged categories, in which people at an active work-age are represented as potentially competent.However, people with low skill levels or disabilities and members of other marginalized groups in the 'work-aged at risk' category are represented as requiring support to keep them in employment.For example, youth and the long-term unemployed are constructed as requiring measures to prolong their careers, even more than other groups.The older workforce is constructed as difficult to employ and they are absent from entrepreneurship.In the policy regarding generational change in companies, the younger generation, rather than older entrepreneurship, is represented in a focus group (see also TEM 2022).Access to employment-promoting and individual services will be enhanced for those in need of special support.
(including people with partial work capacity, immigrants, people with disabilities, young people and older members of the workforce; Marin 2019, Section 3.5, italics added) In the above quotation, the older workforce and other marginalized workforce are distinguished from the remainder of the workforce as a difficult-to-employ group.In our data, instead of constructing older people as skilful, active, autonomous, and self-determined and representing active ageing in working life, they are viewed as marginalized and passive or simply as older citizens who are retiring and using social and welfare services.The concept of active ageing seems to be absent from the entrepreneurial discourse of Finnish government programmes of the 2010s.Bacchi (2009) invites researchers to explore the silences within political discourse because governments and their political discourses play a crucial role in the subjectification of citizens (Dean 1999, 32).To understand the cultural context (Bacchi 2009) of entrepreneurial discourse and the potential silences therein, it is worth noting that, before and during the 2010s, the EU (e.g. 2003;2012a) actively launched guidelines to strengthen various groups of marginalized entrepreneurs, including senior entrepreneurs (EU 2012b).Although the EU does not seem to have a comprehensive policy supporting older entrepreneurship (Wysokińska 2014), many European countries have launched policies and projects with respect to older citizens' employability and entrepreneurship (Stypinska 2018;Wysokińska 2014).However, Finland's methods of promoting the employment of the older workforce have focused on maintaining the ability to work and coping with paid work, not promoting entrepreneurship (e.g.Valtioneuvosto 2019).

Silenced older entrepreneurship
In the study of European policies on senior entrepreneurship, Stypinska (2018) identified a narrative that represents entrepreneurship as a hierarchical and homogenous structure in which older entrepreneurship is presented as vulnerable, disadvantaged, and marginalized, as well as being underrepresented.In Finland's Country Policy Assessment (EU/OECD 2018), the Finnish entrepreneurship environment was found as positive, but marginal groups were underrepresented, including older entrepreneurship.Based on our data, and since older entrepreneurs make up well over a quarter of all self-employed entrepreneurs (Statistics Finland 2022), we suggest that older entrepreneurship is not only marginalized in but absent from Finnish government programmes of the 2010s.
Given that senior entrepreneurship has been actively promoted by the EU to its member states, the absence of older entrepreneurship in Finnish government programmes of the 2010s may well imply silencing (Thiesmeyer 2003).Based on the analysis of the categorizations of age and the way of doing age in our data, we hold that entrepreneurship is not offered to older people but is offered to others (Bacchi 2017).

Social policy discourse on ageing
The above analysis suggests that both the entrepreneurial self and active ageing are dismissed in the entrepreneurial discourse concerning the older workforce in government programmes of the 2010s.Although the ageing of the population is represented as a problem in entrepreneurial discourse, the older workforce is given few opportunities to continue as active agents in working life.Therefore, we move on to analyse what is the problem represented to be (Bacchi 2009) in welfare and social policy, in which government programmes recognize and prepare for the social effects of an ageing population.The problem representation focused on the availability of health and social services.We found that, in the social policy discourse on ageing, older people are represented as the passive recipients of care who are close to retirement.Special attention will be paid to those who will be retiring soon.We will monitor and improve the quality and availability of nutrition services and the potential for social eating, both for older people living at home and for those living in care units.(Marin 2019, Section 3.6) In the quotation above, the near-retirement workforce is guided to a healthy old age.The government refers to the EU policy against age discrimination, which promotes inclusion, lifelong learning, and age-friendly work (Marin 2019, Section 3.2).For the EU, active ageing means 'helping people stay in charge of their own lives for as long as possible as they age and, where possible to contribute to the economy and society' (Eurostat 2019, 9).However, in our data, older people are presented as in need of care, instead of actively ageing.
[. ..] priority will be given to [. ..] better recognition of violence against vulnerable groups including older people, immigrant women, children and people with disabilities [. ..]. (Katainen 2011, Section 4, italics added) The above quotation shows how older people are portrayed as vulnerable.In our data, they appear as socially excluded; poor; and, thus, more subject to social and welfare policy than workforce or entrepreneurship policy.Older people are not only constructed as a difficult-to-employ workforce and silenced entrepreneurship group in the entrepreneurial discourse of Finnish government programmes; they are also represented as inactive and vulnerable care recipients in the social policy discourse on ageing.Consequently, Finnish government programmes of the 2010s tend to marginalize older people in general and silence older entrepreneurship in particular.

Discussion and conclusions
This article set out to examine how neoliberal rationality manifests in Finnish government programmes according to the concepts of the entrepreneurial self and active ageing.Two research questions were put forward: (1) How are citizens invited to participate in the workforce, as entrepreneurial selves, in the constructions of the workforce in Finnish government programmes of the 2010s, and (2) how is older entrepreneurship constructed or even silenced in these invitations?We addressed these research questions using the post-structuralist WPR methodology (Bacchi 2009).In answering these questions, we examined the silence in terms of governmentality.
Our macro-level policy analysis of entrepreneurship and ageing is novel, highlighting the empirical and methodological contribution to the research on marginalized entrepreneurship.As to the first research question, we analysed the entrepreneurial discourse on the sum of working life, in which we identified three categories of working-life actors and governments' roles and goals for them.We found that the highly valued hero category represents the traditional hegemonic construction of entrepreneurship (Ogbor 2000), which is close to the ideal identified in Finnish government programmes in an earlier study (Koskinen and Saarinen 2019).In addition to the commonly discussed hero category, we found the categories of ordinary and marginal working-life actors and several age categories for employment and entrepreneurship.We noticed that the older workforce was constructed as difficult to employ.Regarding the second research question, we found that older entrepreneurship was not present in the entrepreneurial discourse on the sum of working life, which we interpreted as silencing.Furthermore, in the social policy discourse on ageing, older people were constructed as passive and vulnerable recipients of care rather than as actively ageing.
Our contribution to research on entrepreneurship and regional development is the exploration of entrepreneurship policy in the Finnish context, as a Nordic welfare state in transition to a competition-state model.Our observations of entrepreneurship, as a contextual social process, are in line with previous research (e.g.Heinonen, Hytti, and Cooney 2010).The transition to a competition-state model typically weakens national policies in favour of post-national policies, such as the EU's policies (Jessop 2004).In Finnish government programmes of the 2010s, however, the EU's guidance concerning senior entrepreneurship (EU 2012b) seemed not to affect national policies (see also TEM 2022).
Also, our study contributes to critical age studies.The findings on the entrepreneurial discourse and the social policy discourse on ageing in a competition state are similar to those of Rudman (2006), who considered older people, as retirees, to be vulnerable and nonideal.The EU has responded to the demographic challenge of an ageing population by proposing the concept of active ageing to its member countries.Unlike former studies in the EU context (e.g.Stypinska 2018), we found that the concept of active ageing does not appear in Finnish government programmes of the 2010s; rather, older people seem to move directly from working age to the fourth age, when they are in need of care (Laslett 1989).We suggest that constructing older people as vulnerable and recipients of care may represent the underlying presupposition of policymaking in the government programmes of the 2010s (see Bacchi 2009).
Finland's population is ageing more quickly than those of other EU countries (World Bank 2021), which is seen as placing a strain on the economy.In Finnish government programmes of the 2010s, however, older entrepreneurship is not represented as a means of promoting the national economy.Paradoxically, the concepts of the entrepreneurial self and active ageing, which reflect neoliberal rationality as technologies of the self, seem not to appear together in the national political discourse of Finland. Hjorth (2008) argues that a high level of social security makes the development of entrepreneurship not so topical in the Nordic welfare states.This may partly explain the absence of older entrepreneurship in Finnish government programmes despite the transition to a competition-state model.Moreover, Christiaens (2019) argues that those entrepreneurs who do not achieve the efficiency and profitability goals of the economy of a competition state may find themselves not only marginalized but considered an abandoned population group.We suggest that silenced older entrepreneurship could represent such an abandoned group.
Among the hegemonic discourses in societies, there are discourses about minorities in which they are not heard (Resende and Silva 2016;Schröter 2013;Spivak 1988).We see that the Finnish national policy discourse of the 2010s ignores the question of heterogeneity in later life.The discourse normalizes certain ways of being; it legitimizes vulnerable and unproductive identity categories for older people and denies their potential entrepreneurship (see also Thomas et al. 2014).
Representing older people as a burden on the economy and the welfare system involves the possibility of age discrimination on a macro level (see Stypinska and Nikander 2018).In those EU countries in which age discrimination is highest, the older workforce often prefers self-employment to employment (EU/OECD 2021).Skilled unemployed older people represent a growing segment of the population, underscoring the pressure of reluctant entrepreneurship (Figueiredo and Paiva 2019).Also, in Finland, older people have been more likely to be involved in necessity entrepreneurship than younger people (Järnefelt 2011), which may explain the increase in the share of older entrepreneurs in employment in the 2010s (Statistics Finland 2022).We recommend further research on the nexus between older entrepreneurship and macro-level age discrimination.
Our research should be interpreted in light of following limitations: our analysis of government programmes of the 2010s does not concern a broader policymaking process nor political discourse in other policy documents.We suggest interviews with decisionmakers and other stakeholders to shed light on the policymaking process.Our research data point to governments silencing older entrepreneurship.Interviews with policymakers would enable us to reveal the thought process behind this silencing.There has been no recent research on how policy measures are targeted at an older workforce.We recommend this as a topic for further research to determine whether the silencing of older entrepreneurship is also reflected in instruments, institutions, and the implementation of policies.Neoliberal rationality places demands on the construction of identity (Rudman 2006), which may also be affected by silence.Next, in our broader study of older entrepreneurship, we examine interviews with older entrepreneurs to determine how neoliberal technologies of the self and silence in the national political discourse affect their subjectification.
To conclude, the knowledge presented in government programmes is an essential element of exercising legitimate power (Miller and Rose 2008).We argue that the same applies to silence.Because our research increases knowledge about silenced older entrepreneurship and promotes an understanding of inclusive entrepreneurship policy, it is of great relevance to policymakers.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding
The work was supported by the Yksityisyrittäjäin säätiö.

Table 1 .
Party distribution on the day of appointment (www.valtioneuvosto.fi.).

Table 2 .
Sections analysed from the government programmes.

Table 3 .
Ageing-related problem representations in Finnish government programmes of the 2010s.
Too short work careers, too passive labour market, social security system that needs reform to create opportunities Age management, ideal of age-friendly society, lifestyle counselling for older people Age-prejudices in working life, poor quality of working life, incapacity for work, health and social effects of older people

Table 4 .
Governments' roles and goals for key categories of working-life actors.

Table 5 .
Central categorizations of age for employment and entrepreneurship.