Revitalizing Entrepreneurship Education

Adopting a critical approach in the classroom

Karin Berglund, Karen Verduyn, Karin Berglund, Karen Verduyn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138213791
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315447582
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Within mainstream scholarship, it's assumed without question that entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education are desirable and positive economic activities. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical approaches and political-philosophical perspectives, critical entrepreneurship studies has emerged to ask the questions which this assumption obscures.

Students of entrepreneurship need to understand why and how entrepreneurship is seen as a moral force which can solve social problems or protect the environment, or even to tackle political problems. It is time to evaluate how such contributions and insights have entered our classrooms. How much – if any – critical discussion and insight enters our classrooms? How do we change when students demand to be taught "how to do it", not to be critical or reflexive?

If educators are to bring alternative perspectives into the classroom, it will entail a new way of thinking. There is a need to share ideas and practical approaches, and that is what the contributions to this volume aim to do and to illuminate new ways forward in entrepreneurship education.

Part I

Setting the scene

Introduction

Challenges for entrepreneurship education

Karin Berglund and Karen Verduijn

Introduction

The last decade or so has witnessed the rise of “critical” entrepreneurship studies (CES). CES questions dominant images and conceptualizations of entrepreneurship, entrepreneuring and the entrepreneur, and create room for other understandings and approaches. Generally, critical entrepreneurship scholars feel a need to connect entrepreneurship (more) to society (and not only to the economy), and to make students aware of this.

In this book we build on the presumption that it is timely to interrogate if and how CES contributions and insights have entered our classrooms. With students interested in the entrepreneurship phenomenon generally expecting merely the “conventional” (instrumental) approach towards the same, and for us to stipulate the importance of new venture creation with regard to our economy’s health and vitality, some of us (i.e. entrepreneurship educators) might see the need to point at how entrepreneurship is broader than that, that there are multiple “versions” of it, that the entrepreneurial identity is a layered one, and not without its repercussions, and that entrepreneurship provides us with a Western world discourse that is classed, gendered, ethnocentric and thus excluding. Yet many new versions wish to tackle such issues, while paying attention to troublesome global developments, where contemporary neo-liberal displacements become entwined with entrepreneurship and blur boundaries between individuals, organizations and society. By shifting responsibility from society to the individual, thus bringing entrepreneurship in in new guises, it is no longer (solely) a question of economic and other gains but of taking (social, ecological and cultural) responsibility. However, when neo-liberal pursuits attempt to open up market society, the economic dimension is not pushed aside but spills over into and influences all the other aspects of life today. This provides a challenge and poses questions as to how to enact this in our classrooms and thus offer a critical entrepreneurship education.

We situate critical entrepreneurship education at the crossroads of “lower education” (preschool, compulsory school, upper secondary school) and higher education. While lower education has witnessed a striving to broaden the understanding of entrepreneurship by, for example, linking it to social and environmental issues, creativity and also democracy and politics (cf. Leffler, 2009; Holmgren, 2012), this broader view is rarely reported on in literature on entrepreneurship pedagogy used in higher education (for an exception see e.g. Hjorth, 2011; Barinaga, 2016). At the same time, in preparing this volume, we have come across many initiatives positing entrepreneurship as a broader phenomenon, and problematizing its different faces in our teaching. In experimenting with pedagogical purposes, approaches and content, the authors in this volume work with such issues as reflexivity, gender, the entrepreneurial self, responsibility, awareness, creativity and vulnerability. To further spur this kind of development, this book aims to make it clear why critical questions need to formulated, and how they can be enacted to evoke students’ understandings of the plurality of entrepreneuring (cf. Chapter 4 in this volume). Evoking students (and ourselves) to new entrepreneurial realities aligns well with a need to also challenge ourselves and our students to engage in a dialogue of what entrepreneurship (education) might become.

In this introduction we provide the reader with a short reminder of how entrepreneurship education is generally categorized in teaching “in”, “for”, “through” and “about” entrepreneurship. We also discuss some of the contemporary concerns of the field of entrepreneurship education. This is followed by an introduction to critical entrepreneurship studies and the questions that guide such efforts. Third, we discuss concerns expressed in critical pedagogy literature, especially in relation to the enterprising self, as well as some of those offered by the critical management education literature. Fourth, we sketch what this may entail for (critical) entrepreneurship education. We conclude by introducing the individual chapters in the book.

The field of entrepreneurship education

Entrepreneurship education (EE) has gained increasing attention and no longer interests only scholars in higher education but also teachers in elementary school, along with politicians, policymakers and education stakeholders. In a literature review, Alain Fayolle (2013) concludes that the field of EE is fragmented. There is little consensus on what unites EE, how the field (or area) should be defined, and what it contains in terms of theories, issues and teaching philosophy and pedagogies (also see Nabi, Linan, Fayolle, Krueger & Walmsley, 2017). Rather, at best diversity, and at worst fragmentation, seem to prevail. This may be an effect of the expansion of EE to broaden its focus and encompass more in terms of its objectives (O’Connor, 2013) and pedagogies (Nabi et al., 2017). Kirby (2007) points to the need for entrepreneurship educators to “develop graduates who can be innovative and take responsibility for their own destinies not just in a business or even a market economy context” (p. 21). Thus, EE has transgressed from being limited to offering a place for students to learn about the creation of new ventures to inhabiting a space where it sets out to facilitate for (young) people to be able to “cope with uncertainty and ambiguity, make sense out of chaos, initiate, build and achieve, in the process not just coping with change but anticipating and initiating it” (Kirby, 2007, p. 23). It appears that EE is used for many different things, in different contexts, with different groups and for different reasons.

A division of EE into the categories “about”, “for” and “in” was made by Jamieson in 1984. This division has spurred scholars to develop ideas relating to the diversity of and within entrepreneurship education. With reference to Henry, Hill and Leitch (2003), Taatila (2010) defines “for” as a preparation for self-employment/venture creation, and “in” as a form of management training for established entrepreneurs. To Kirby (2007), “for” is about developing the attributes of entrepreneurship in students, “through” is when the business startup process is used to enable students to acquire both business understandings and entrepreneurial competences, and “about” refers to the traditional pedagogical process of teaching students by providing them with academic knowledge about entrepreneurship. We adopt these four angles (in, for, through, about: IFTA) to shed some light on the diversity with regard to how entrepreneurship is thought of, shaped and practised in an educational context.

Within the scope of our introduction to entrepreneurship education, we want to highlight a few concerns voiced by entrepreneurship educators. First and foremost, there is a growing awareness that entrepreneurship is more than “business making” (cf. Gibb, 2002; Kirby, 2007; Thrane, Blenker, Korsgaard & Neergaard, 2016). With entrepreneurship education initially focusing on new business creation, and doing so by adopting predominantly economic and business perspectives and models, we see a wider range of approaches being embraced, and a growing number of entrepreneurship courses and programmes adopting a “broader” definition of entrepreneurship (i.e. as more than business making). With this broadening of previously set boundaries, we also witness a call to continue to wonder how entrepreneurship education can remain (or be made) entrepreneurial (cf. Kuratko, 2005; Fayolle, 2013; Hjorth & Johannisson, 2007). Experimenting with both ways to bring the various understandings of entrepreneurship to the fore and in particular “where” to teach our courses seems to be a relevant theme. In experimenting with pedagogical approaches, emphasis is being placed on the creative-relational nature of learning (cf. Hjorth & Johannisson, 2007; Hjorth, 2011), with reflections on not only our roles as educators and our (hierarchical) positions in teaching but also the relationality involved in engaging students as active (co)learners. In thinking about our roles as educators, we may feel the need to explore the relationship between education and provocation (Hjorth, 2011), with less emphasis on “reproductive continuity” (i.e. the reproduction of knowledge) but with more room for invention, i.e. creating other concepts, allowing for new ways of understanding (ibid.).

Notwithstanding these developments and the variety of and in (designing) entrepreneurship education, there appears to be a striking consistency with regard to an assumed consensual aim for more and more students to start up a business (or, broadly, organization) either after or during the education. The idea of promoting entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education is both omnipresent and pervasive (also see Nabi et al., 2017), to the extent that students are not only educated for entrepreneurship but also graduated to do it. Pittaway and Cope (2007) write that there are “two distinct forms of output: first, to enhance graduate employability and second, to encourage graduate enterprise” (p. 485). When the assumption is “the more, the merrier”, the ambition to broaden entrepreneurship education may falter as it is locked into its own narrow box where performativity rules (cf. Dey & Steyaert, 2007). The knowledge that counts is the knowledge that can be acted upon and measured in terms of success or failure, whereby learning for the sake of learning is by definition ruled out. It is this tendency to shift the “why” of education, or at least make it more one-sided, that is of concern to critical thinkers (Ball & Olmedo, 2013; Dahlstedt & Fejes, 2017). Entrepreneurship is transformed into a guiding principle for how we are to conduct our lives in accordance with the formula for “entrepreneurial freedom”. This may involve starting a new business of the conventional type and taking a product to the market, or becoming self-employed and “living your dream”: at best a “free life”, at worst a life where you struggle to make ends meet, something you share with many others in a similar precarious situation. Or it could imply having to continuously ask yourself how to improve as if you were your own producer, marketer and seller (Berglund, 2013). Or it may involve engaging with others to come to grips with such societal concerns as inequality, social exclusion or environmental pollution, with entrepreneurship becoming the process of joint efforts to turn this problem into an opportunity where the two logics of solving a problem and thriving on the market may turn into a conflict. Entrepreneurial logic intervenes and turns stable employment into a process of employability; it compels us to engage in our personal development rather than to enjoy it; it moves political and voluntary action into the background as ideas for our collective good are offered through entrepreneurial paths. Thus, entrepreneurship (and the education that follows) is not simply one course among others to choose from, but has paved the way for how we can live the present. It is exactly this tendency, and the omnipresence of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education, from which there is no escape, not as students, teachers, children, adults or simply humans. This is of concern when entrepreneurial values underpin the idea of the contemporary citizen (Dahlstedt & Fejes, 2017). If entrepreneurship education is to remain vital, we cannot deny these problematics since entrepreneurship (and entrepreneurship education) are everywhere. As entrepreneurship educators we must embrace these problematics, ponder over them, use “other” theories to reflect on them, continue to pose new questions and invite our students to do so as well. So, to keep EE “fresh” we should remind ourselves of the dangerous side of it, in particular that which has seemingly become “untouchable” from interrogation. We can therefore no longer avoid the provocative questions (cf. Hjorth, 2011) but should instead use them to ask ourselves, and our students, whether there are other ways to live the present than the “conventional” entrepreneurial way.

We will return to IFTA in the fourth section to shed light on what a critical reflection of entrepreneurship can bring about in proposing “other” forms of in/ for/through and about. But first we invite the reader to “enter” the field of critical entrepreneurship studies, for it is usually from the concerns raised in that field that educators start to think of raising critical awareness in relation to their entrepreneurship courses and/or programmes.

Concerns of critical entrepreneurship studies

This section offers an in-depth elaboration on critical entrepreneurship studies (CES), which builds on Denise Fletcher’s short introduction to the subject. Having already witnessed two reviews of this field (Spicer, 2012; Fletcher & Selden, 2015), we can say without hesitation that it has expanded considerably since the early days of Nodoushani and Nodoushani (1999), Ogbor (2000) and Armstrong (2005). In line with Alvesson and Willmott’s (1996) definition of critical management studies, critical entrepreneurship studies has set out “to challenge the legitimacy – and counter the development of – oppressive institutions and practices, seeking to highlight, nurture and promote the potential of human consciousness to reflect critically upon such practices” (p. 13), specifically in connection to entrepreneurship discourse (cf. Armstrong, 2005) and entrepreneurial practices (cf. Beaver & Jennings, 2005). Some milestones that we believe have shaped the field are the “movements books” by Daniel Hjorth and Chris Steyaert (2003, 2006, 2010), which together with special issues (Hjorth, Jones & Gartner, 2008; Tedmanson, Verduijn, Essers & Gartner, 2012; Rehn, Brännback, Carsrud & Lindahl, 2013; Verduijn, Dey, Tedmanson & Essers, 2014; Essers, Dey, Tedmanson & Verduijn, 2017) have challenged mainstream understandings and discourses of entrepreneurship.

CES offer insight into how entrepreneurial discourses have multiplied by expanding into new contexts (such as social entrepreneurship; see Ziegler, 2011), where entrepreneurship benefits values over and above economic values, where an understanding of entrepreneurship as socially constituted is shaped (Fletcher, 2006; Jack et al., 2008; Korsgaard, 2011) and where entrepreneurs “other” than the stereotypical Western world self-made middle-aged man are given a voice (Banerjee & Tedmanson, 2010; Achtenhagen & Welter, 2011; Essers & Tedmanson, 2014; Ozkazanc-Pan, 2014). Critical scholars continuously testify to how entrepreneurship continues to pervade many areas of not only economic life but also social life, including the world of school (Berglund, Lindgren & Packendorff, 2017). Altogethe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword: teaching entrepreneurship is walking a tightrope
• Foreword: critique, entrepreneurship, practice: a prolegomenon
• Prologue: looking to the future: how can we further develop critical pedagogies in entrepreneurship education?
• Acknowledgements
• PART I Setting the scene
• PART II On evoking
• PART III On moving
• PART IV On challenging
• PART V On dialogues
• Epilogue: critical entrepreneurship education: a form of resistance to McEducation?
• Index