Financial inclusion is promoted as a development program to solve the lack of access to formal
financial services for billions of people around the world. South African policymakers, financial
service providers and academics have embraced this concept to describe their focus on some of
the country’s political, social and economic imbalances. These mainstream discourses create
specific notions of entrepreneurship. Through discourse analysis of ethnographic interviews this
study contends that small business owners articulate entrepreneurial subjectivities not aligned to
those financial inclusion discourses. We conclude that small business owners produce discourses of
self-determination – a fourth mode of objectification that augments the original three proposed by
Foucault. The limitations of current financial inclusion discourses are thus examined along with
opportunities for innovation in commercial, policy and research endeavours.