The emergence of "startuppers" in Morocco: institutions, trajectories, social networks.

Summary In recent years, Morocco has been characterized by the appearance of associations, incubators and other institutionalized networks that promote the "start-up spirit. The circulation of these Western discursive registers, readily associated with the idea of modernity and progress, raises questions about the relays they find within the country and the reappropriations they are subject to. Far from the hackneyed image of the few "success stories" of the American West Coast, we ask ourselves what it means to be a "startup" in Morocco in the 2010s. Who are the people who start up and what is their rationale for doing so? Our desire to denaturalize entrepreneurship and to study the plasticity of its so-called start-up form is coupled with a theoretical ambition, namely to conceive the entrepreneur as an actor who is both socialized and embedded in relational structures. To do this, the thesis is situated at the crossroads of a "dispositionalist" sociology and a sociology of embedding. The first part apprehends the creation of start-ups from a macro-social point of view and illustrates how the strategies of the "promoters" of the start-up are oriented towards an attempt at symbolic revolution in the Moroccan field. By selecting the profiles of "startuppers" and by exerting on them an enveloping action, these "promoters" participate in the emergence of a group likely to relay the ideology that the start-up is carrying.The second part then looks at the microsociological scale of individual trajectories, on the conditions depossibility of a commitment in "uncertain horizon" that represents the creation of a start-up. The sociogenetic analysis of the discourse of "startuppers" suggests that the aspiration to economic enrichment is rarely a central logic of action. The third part shows, at the meso-social level, that this project is supported by a search for autonomy of the "startuppers" with respect to some of their networks and spheres of belonging, in particular the family. These strong ties are particularly little used to obtain resources, which limits the possibility of their intrusion into the start-up. The space of autonomy created through the company is nevertheless conditioned by the profitability of the latter. The "startuppers" thus find themselves in tension between the desire to be unique and autonomous from certain ties on the one hand, and the need to build an economically sustainable business on the other. The intersection of the levels of analysis of the act of entrepreneurship and the temporalities that make it possible leads us to argue that there are no more "startuppers" than there are "entrepreneurs," but rather individuals who, at a given moment in their existence and in a given context, find it interesting to - and can - claim to be such.