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Abstract

This article offers reflections based on the special issue on unsettling entrepreneurship education (EEP 3(3)) in which contributions have resisted the tendency to see students as consumers with the ‘right’ to take part in entrepreneurship education (EE) so as to effectively shape their enterprising selves. Here we resume our editorial discussions of what unsettling entrepreneurship education could mean for us – as entrepreneurship researchers and as teachers – and seek to mark out new directions both for research and education by reflecting upon ethical perspectives, identity work, and how EE can be seen to create an affective and emotional workspace. These aspects not only invite us to ask new research questions, but may also challenge our position as teachers in EE and invite us to reflect upon our view of students. To frame the need of continuous reflection, when navigating the terrain of EE in neoliberal society, we both take off and arrive in the current Covid-19 pandemic and suggest that this crisis can teach us something as valuable as ‘standing still’, which helps us all to reconsider what kind of entrepreneurial society that we build together with our students in entrepreneurship education.

Keywords

unsettling entrepreneurship education continuous reflection navigating entrepreneurial terrains affective and emotional workspace ethics and identity work

Unsettling Entrepreneurship Education: The Work Continues

During the past few years we have been exploring how to ‘unsettle’ entrepreneurship education (EE) through unravelling the taken for granted assumptions and practices of entrepreneurship in education (Berglund & Verduijn, 2018). With this in mind, we initiated a special issue on this topic in Entrepreneurship Education and Pedagogy (Berglund et al., 2020). The contributions in this special issue challenged us as teachers to invent new pedagogical approaches and also spurred us to pose new thought-provoking research questions. Indeed, just because we have worked on unsettling entrepreneurship education does not mean that EE is now settled again, and that we can rest. On the contrary, the work continues.

The necessity to keep on reflecting on unsettling EE became apparent also through the ongoing present-day crisis. At the time of writing this text, we find ourselves in the peculiarities of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has suddenly changed the pedagogical scene and has put forward the need to move our pedagogical aspirations of unsettling to a digital platform and online teaching (Liguori & Winkler, 2020). This invokes further questions: is it even possible to introduce critical entrepreneurship education in these times? Will the students follow our thought – on distance? How can we reach out to them in this situation? Are they capable of any reflection – let alone critical ones - in the midst of this crisis? To our surprise, the initial experiences from the past few weeks and months suggest that the students have actually been more tuned into interrogating entrepreneurship from the critical perspective during this Spring than previously. Did the Covid-19 pandemic entice students to asking the critical questions when seeing that the society suddenly showed some of its deficits and inadequacies? Perhaps the sudden crisis has brought students to experience precarity, and to asking questions, themselves, not to unsettle, but rather ‘resettle’ society into a new direction (e.g., Rae, 2010)?

These questions do not yet have answers but posing questions (rather than answering them) is often helpful when navigating in an uncertain terrain. It is important to continue to reflect and to be brave enough to embrace complexity and cope with ambiguity (Kirby, 2007). In this reflection paper, we highlight some themes that we deem important for the future of entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurship education research.

The Prosaic of Unsettling Entrepreneurship Education

The recipe book model is still very much alive within the EE field (Berglund et al., 2020). Based on a functionalist and reductionist idea it offers instructions for students to develop as entrepreneurs and learn about the creation of new ventures (Bager, 2011). At the same time, EE is increasingly understood as inhabiting a space where it sets out to facilitate (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). This calls for new approaches in resonating with a growing awareness that entrepreneurship is more than “business making” (cf. Gibb, 2002; Kirby, 2007; Thrane et al., 2016) and that there is a wider need for citizens to develop an entrepreneurial identity (rather than just new venture creators). Consequently, EE is no longer predominantly linked to business studies, but also embraced in other disciplines, such as medicine (see, e.g., Jansson et al., 2018) and arts education (see, e.g., Beckman, 2007). Furthermore, EE now considers connecting entrepreneurial practices to sustainable development (Lindbergh & Schwartz, 2018); raises questions of how to work against or despite of the gender-biased entrepreneurship discourse that also invades the classroom (Jones, 2018); cuts loose from rational expectations of creativity to spur efficiency (Resch et al., 2018); and takes the opportunity to re-think what entrepreneurship, as well as EE, could be(come) in higher education (Tunstall, 2018).

These examples highlight how both researching and practicing EE have welcomed broader and more critical approaches to interrogate prevailing entrepreneurship norms and methodological approaches. Extant EE literature now not only includes a broader spectrum of students, contexts, and entrepreneurial approaches, but involves a critical approach to EE to help us all better navigate the EE terrain in neoliberal societies. Neoliberalized societies typically give primacy to market mechanisms such as deregulation, privatization, and market competition (Harvey, 2005). While this tells one side of the story—of changing economic conditions in which societies can prosper—an effect is the particular identity formation this requires from citizens to conduct themselves under such conditions (Bröckling, 2015). Studies interested in the relation between EE and the neoliberalization of societies address these requirements in terms of cultivating an enterprising or entrepreneurial self (Bröckling, 2015; Peters, 2005; N. Rose, 1998). How the entrepreneurial self is constituted can vary depending on the context in which it is required, but it is generally formed through discursive, relational, and ideological aspects. Further, it blends rationalism, optimism, agency, responsibility, flexibility, and willingness to self-configure to adjust itself to the given context’s expectations (N. Rose, 1998). The entrepreneurial self thus takes shape as an ‘ideal’ subject, striving to optimize the same and take responsibility for its successes and failures (Bröckling, 2015).

The fostering of entrepreneurial pupils and students has not only been recognized in relation to educational efforts at large (Peters, 2005), but was highlighted through particular efforts in promoting science (Bragg, 2007) or via market concepts such as Young Achievements (Berglund et al., 2017) by commodifying access to education (Connell, 2013) or through teachers’ performative pressures (Holmgren, 2018). Hence, to make contemporary neoliberal societies function, students and pupils are encouraged to subjectify to the entrepreneurial self and embrace an entrepreneurial identity (Dahlstedt & Fejes, 2019). From a normative standpoint, this can be seen as a fruitful way to include young people to accept and integrate into neoliberal conditions. However, scholars have indicated the critical tendency of neoliberal societies and their aligned entrepreneurial selves to submit to market mechanisms and systems (Dahlstedt & Fejes, 2019); to individualize responsibility (Berglund et al., 2017); to sustain gendered, classed, and racial hierarchies (e.g., Gill, 2014; Komulainen et al., 2009; Ogbor 2000); to ignore human limits (Berglund, 2013); and to distort democratic principles (Peters, 2005).

With this broadening of previously set boundaries, we witness a call to continue to wonder how EE can remain (or be made) more entrepreneurial (cf. Fayolle, 2013; Hjorth & Johannisson, 2007; Kuratko, 2005) not only in the context of neoliberal societies, but also in those of the entrepreneurial university (Hytti, in press; Tunstall, 2018). In this vein, Verduijn and Berglund (2020) point to how educational principles of deconstruction and reconstruction can inform teachers and students about conditions of contemporary life and how “the entrepreneurial” (in Schumpeter’s view, breaking with the mold) should be understood differently than enacting a business opportunity on the market (see also Bureau & Komporozos-Athanasiou, 2017). Against this backdrop, we advocate the need for unsettling EE in two different but interrelated ways: 1) unsettling entrepreneurship by teaching in entrepreneurial ways and 2) unsettling EE by posing new research questions. This calls for (new) teaching approaches and pedagogical practices.

What follows is a ‘mosaic’ of an unsettled EE (as an alternative to a recipe book) that opens up to new EE research and teaching avenues.

The Practice of Unsettling Entrepreneurship Education

First, unsettling entrepreneurship by teaching in entrepreneurial ways, with ways to both bring the various understandings of entrepreneurship to the fore and find ‘where’ to teach our courses, seems to be a relevant theme (Johannisson, 2016). In experimenting with pedagogical approaches, emphasis is being placed on the creative-relational nature of learning (cf. Hjorth, 2011; Hjorth & Johannisson, 2007), inviting reflections on our roles and (hierarchical) positions as educators (e.g., Bureau & Komporozos-Athanasiou, 2017; Fenwick, 2005; Verduijn, 2018) and on engaging students as active (co-)learners (Wettermark et al., 2018). In thinking about our roles as educators, we may need to explore the relationship between education and provocation (Hjorth, 2011), with less emphasis on the reproduction of knowledge (reproductive continuity) to generate room for invention, i.e., creating other concepts and allowing for new ways of understanding. This resonates with calls to let alternative forms of EE take place (Berglund & Verduijn, 2018; Hytti & O’Gorman, 2004). To nurture, and provide space for alternative and inventive pedagogies to emerge implies recognizing entrepreneurship as historically, culturally, and socially contingent (Berglund & Verduijn, 2018), which assists us as teachers in acknowledging the potential of making EE more entrepreneurial. This also invites students to approach entrepreneurship from a broader perspective and ponder what it means to be(come) an entrepreneurial citizen in contemporary society so that active and reflexive choices can be made.

Second, unsettling EE invites us to pose new research questions. It could be argued that the field is characterized as relatively naïve in viewing EE in a predominantly positive light and adopting a “the more the merrier” approach (Weiskopf & Steyaert, 2009). Indeed, EE at the university level puts a strong focus on profit-oriented start-ups and new venture creation and fosters a consensus where “the core of entrepreneurship is related to the process of opportunities, new venture creation, growth, risk and acquisition and allocation of resources” (Kyrö, 2015, p. 610). Beyond questions of “how to legitimize EE” in other non-business disciplines and faculties, there is relatively little debate and few discussions on transferring and embedding EE in these different contexts (Kozlinska et al., 2019), but the idea of spreading EE across campuses is taken for granted and reduced to a question of persuading faculty of its usefulness (West et al., 2009). Few suggest a deeper debate of what enterprise really is about (or “what we are actually teaching when we teach enterprise education”; Farny et al., 2016, p. 16). Axiological debates (do we want to? should we? and how should we do it?), are mainly silenced or downright missing (Kyrö, 2015). There is relatively little discussion as well on how EE may readily become a highly elitist project targeting those in technology or science interested in venture creation, excluding the vast majority of students in multidisciplinary universities (Hytti, 2018). Further, these approaches mostly ignore questions of gender, class, or ethnicity (Berglund et al., 2017). EE’s “effectiveness” is mainly reduced to a few measures related to venture creation, such as entrepreneurial intentions (Bae et al., 2014), and there is relatively little interest in developing additional or alternative measures (see, e.g., Hytti et al., 2010), let alone engaging in more profound discussion about the wanted (or unwanted) outcomes of EE.

Based on the special issue we have edited (published as EEP 3(3)), we wish to highlight and elaborate three specific themes that have emerged in the issue’s editing process: 1) ethical perspectives in EE, 2) EE as a domain for identity work, and 3) EE as an affective and emotional work space. These three themes relate to how entrepreneurship is unsettled in teaching, as well as how it can be further unsettled by arranging a research agenda for EE to navigate this new terrain. However, the themes also relate to each other and should rather be seen as interconnected and entwined. Thus, they should not be reduced to “tools,” but understood to provide a lens that directs our attention to how EE can be unsettled in higher education and how we can approach the unsettling of EE from a research point of view.

Ethical Perspectives in EE

Ethical issues appear to propel wishes among teachers and researchers to unsettle EE and find ways that allow for a reflexive EE account to be imagined and conducted in higher education. These ethical issues guide us toward bigger questions, such as, why do some ideas become entrepreneurial opportunities while others are repressed and silenced? This reflects ethics as a practice where there is no moral higher stance to detect (cf. Dey & Steyaert, 2016), only spaces where we consciously and continuously need to ask ourselves as teachers a number of difficult questions, including: Who wins and who loses in the accounts we reproduce of entrepreneurial activity? What are the intended—but also unintended—effects of exposing students to some versions of entrepreneurship and not to others? How can we meet students’ possible confusion when the perspectives and theories of entrepreneurship unfold more unpleasant versions than expected? Thus, instead of inviting students to engage in a dialogue, we may unwittingly repel them from the topic, whereby they may end up feeling even more uncomfortable and return to a monologue with themselves. For example, voicing questions and raising debate about gender, class, or race in relation to EE may not result in the dialogues intended (Jones, 2018).

The ethics of unsettling EE revolves around posing skeptical questions and evoking unpleasant and even uncomfortable versions of entrepreneurship, all while still remaining hopeful and experimenting with how entrepreneurial efforts change the directions of things (cf. Verduijn & Berglund, 2020). The questions posed here could guide us as teachers to remain present in the teaching situation, be prepared to meet unenthusiastic reactions, and provide a thicker story that paints the background for problematizations when necessary (cf. Wettermark, 2020). This would ground us in an ethics of unsettling, where we continuously are in dialogue with ourselves, colleagues, and students of why, how, and with what direction we seek to transgress norms and boundaries of what entrepreneurship ‘is’, and to understand what it may ‘do’ to us, and how we can relate to this in pedagogical contexts.

One example where questions became discernible in particular during the master thesis process (Zawadzki et al., 2020), discusses how teachers attempted to join the debate surrounding the negative outcomes of neoliberal rationality in business schools and respond to the growing demands for the reinvention of management education (Steyaert et al., 2016). Using action research (AR) as a teaching process, Zawadzki et al. (2020) sought to reorient both students’ and their own thinking and actions to find routes to enact themselves as entrepreneurial selves in more meaningful and ethically aware ways. However, throughout the process, they faced the question of where this teaching effort leads us. Why do some students follow and others do not? Thus, in their experimentation, the teaching process—and the questions that unfolded—became an ethical reminder.

Contrarily, in Talmage and Gassert (2020), ethical questions were explicit from the start. In their approach to unsettling EE, students were invited to continuously and consciously work with the following three questions: 1) What is entrepreneurship?; 2) What constitutes entrepreneurial success?; and 3) What are the effects of entrepreneurial activity on various stakeholders? By returning to these questions and reading about creative destruction, entrepreneurial discovery, risk-taking, and social entrepreneurship from a dark side, students are guided toward a better understanding of how they can assess (social) entrepreneurship as responsible and sustainable, as well as enact ethical practices toward such aims. Inviting students to reflect upon the darker side of social entrepreneurship involves perspective training. It is an important step toward a practice-based approach to ethics, where entrepreneurial selves find ways to “actively produce conditions of freedom for themselves as well as for others without supposing a ‘true self’ or a utopian space of liberty beyond power” (Dey & Steyaert, 2016, p. 627).

Revisiting ethics underscores how it is bound with identity work. Unsettling EE identity is a social process, which makes us aware of an array of ethical questions aligned with inclusion and exclusion. This is discussed next.

EE as a Domain for Identity Work

Entrepreneurship scholars have long been interested in entrepreneurship as a site for identity construction and identity work (Anderson & Warren, 2011; Lewis, 2013; Orlandi, 2017), which is also reflected in EE discussions, where the focus is often on how to help students shape a more entrepreneurial identity (e.g. Rigg & O’Dwyer, 2012). In this light, Talmage and Gassert (2020) emphasize the need to problematize the ethical implications of a too business-oriented entrepreneurial identity. In their classroom, EE becomes an arena to close in on ‘the social’ in relation to entrepreneurship as a highly ambiguous topic. For instance, both abortion rights advocates and opponents could claim social motives for their stance (see also Cho, 2006). What Talmage and Gassert (2020) seek to do is not to find a ‘right answer’, but let students engage in discussions on how boundaries are drawn and the effects this may have on identity constructions and how society is organized. Thus, participants are not invited to discuss if “I am or could be an entrepreneur” or “what kind of an entrepreneur I am,” but to better understand what it might mean to navigate as an entrepreneur/-ial person in the context of social entrepreneurship.

Recent studies have acknowledged how “creating an entrepreneurial identity” may lead to a governing of young people to fit the neoliberal market society as well (Berglund, 2013; Hytti & Heinonen, 2013; Siivonen et al., 2019). EE is not merely about improving participants’ knowledge base or offering enterprising skills, but also an arena of identity work in shaping students’ identities and subjecting them to identity regulation (Hedeboe Frederiksen & Berglund, 2020). It may be easier to detect efforts to turn students into entrepreneurs than to discern the processes of fostering students as entrepreneurial selves who fit the needs of late capitalism (Berglund et al., 2017). Although this subject position is difficult to detect—and therefore to resist—students have recently circumvented it through compliance or truth-telling strategies (Hedeboe Frederiksen & Berglund, 2020). Zawadzki et al. (2020) illustrate the struggles involved in resisting neoliberal demands and the efforts needed to affirm an ethical reorientation of the entrepreneurial self in management studies. Similarly, from their liminal-liminoid continuum Gaggiotti et al. (2020) relate how students are invited to form “new” (alternative) selves through experiential learning.

As previously mentioned, a common practice in EE is to invite guest speakers and practitioners into the classroom (see e.g. Komulainen et al., 2020; Pittaway et al., 2010) who may have fairly normative and fixed ideas about appropriate ways to act and be entrepreneurs. Komulainen et al. (2020) portray how entrepreneurs are invited to inspire students to imitate these invited entrepreneurs. It is worth noting that the role of guests and practitioners may be even more important in extracurricular activities than in the classroom. Thus, it becomes interesting to investigate the collective identity work in these formal and informal learning arenas: how the ‘superhero’ entrepreneurs are accepted or refused and what kind of counter-identities are produced. This brings forth the need to investigate the co-construction of identities in EE between the multiple stakeholders who are present or depicted as the ideal models against whom the students and participants should model themselves.

An interesting question is also to investigate identity work in the broader context of education outside entrepreneurship courses and events, especially in light of the potential tensions that this brings forth. For example, academic research has examined the question and potential tensions between academic and entrepreneurial identities (Jain et al., 2009), though we know relatively little about this from the student perspective beyond the student entrepreneurial identity construction (Donnellon et al., 2014). The different university disciplines and academic cultures form the EE contexts, and thus it becomes interesting how students negotiate their student and entrepreneur identities in the context of their academic field.

Furthermore, we should not limit our investigations to how students engage in just these processes. The articles in this special issue call for extending this area of research to understand and embrace the identity work of teachers as well (see Wettermark, 2020; Zawadzki et al., 2020). Within the EE domain, there may be paradoxical tensions between the assumed “freedom” inherent to entrepreneurship (and entrepreneurship teaching) and the normative expectations set by our institutions and voiced by the students in terms of relevant content and the required qualifications for an entrepreneurship educator. For instance, the credentials and legitimacy of entrepreneurship teachers without their own entrepreneurship experience tends to activate discussions, e.g. in social media. Then again, university rules and accreditation policies may require teachers to have a Ph.D. in their given field. How then do teachers negotiate these different expectations and construct their educator identities between the practical and the academic?

EE as an Affective and Emotional Workspace

Start-up culture and, related, start-up events have recently been studied as particular socio-material settings where human actions are entangled with and intertwined with materiality. Furthermore, affects—that is, embodied sensations—invoked in and through these socio-material entanglements have been under investigation (e.g., Katila et al., 2019). EE is increasingly organized outside traditional classrooms or auditoria, moving to open, co-working spaces and involving pitching competitions in front of juries or panels, accompanied by “pizza and beer” (Parkkari & Kohtakangas, 2018). The multisensory environment (music, video, masses of people and presentations, etc.) is seen to intensify the affectual sensation, thus stimulating individuals’ attachment and identification with the topic at hand (start-ups) by creating a sense of fun, excitement, and energy. Further, the affective experience as related to pitching with the ticking clock, fast talk, and embodied performances creates meanings of speed, effectiveness, and vitality (Katila et al., 2019). This draws attention to the importance of materiality in questions of EE and entrepreneurial learning (Fenwick, 2014), especially in relation to learning spaces and learning arrangements. Relatedly, Komulainen et al. (2020) is contextualized in an “entrepreneurship week” consisting of various activities such as lectures, workshops, a business breakfast, an innovation competition, and a cocktail party, just to name a few. These kinds of EE settings, consisting of both the formal and informal, have become common and thus could offer several interesting avenues for further research.

In this same vein, emotions have become an important area of entrepreneurship research (Fodor & Pintea, 2017). Some examples include studies that have focused on investigating the role of passion (see, e.g., Cardon et al., 2017) and fear of failure (e.g., Cacciotti et al., 2016) in entrepreneurship. Further, there is a growing awareness of entrepreneurship contributing to the mental health and wellbeing of entrepreneurs, though not always in positive ways (Stephan, 2018). In EE, recent research has informed of positivity and optimism as important ingredients and forms of identity regulation in extracurricular EE organizations and entrepreneurship societies (Siivonen et al., 2019). However, when it comes to understanding EE as an arena for emotional work, it represents a more recent research interest (e.g., Fellnhofer, 2017; A. L. Rose et al., 2019). Hence, we point toward the need to develop a better understanding of emotions in relation to EE, and to further address a larger variety of emotions that need to be investigated in EE, and more generally as part of entrepreneurial journeys, such as e.g. feelings of discomfort, vulnerability, and shame. Wettermark (2020), for example, discusses some negative student reactions in a course she teaches and how the students struggle with a sense of discomfort. They complain about instructions being vague and the course being chaotic and filled with miscommunication and misunderstandings. All of this is done purposefully; it has a role in the course. Wettermark (2020) does not seek to please her students as if they were consumers, but she does mean to address critical themes in a critical manner. Likewise, Gaggiotti et al. (2020) purposefully create learning experiences that allow students to dwell in ambiguity and uncertainty as a deliberate teaching strategy.

Wrapping Up: From the Skeptical Toward the Hopeful

A consideration for further reflection concerns rethinking the role of action in EE. A lot of (mainstream) EE seems to be almost obsessed with “action,” perhaps resulting from the primacy the field grants experiential learning (Pittz, 2014). Even if researchers advocate for the need to better understand how knowledge is derived from experience (Hägg & Kurczewska, 2020), gaining experience through action continues to demarcate EE practices. Speed, “getting out there into the real world,” and coming up with solutions in a fast tempo are familiar in many EE courses. This sense of busyness and the speed that comes with it can be both intriguing and energizing to some but equally alienating to, and thus excluding, others (see, e.g., Katila et al., 2019). Thus, exercises involving a process of dialogue, reflection, and action (such as Talmage & Gassert, 2020) can also be seen as attempts to downplay the pressure on students (and teachers) to come up with “the best solution.” Rather, this exercise provides a space to ponder the problematics of (social) entrepreneurship in its many outfits. While the exercise focuses on helping students better understand success and failure beyond profit and production, it also invites the provocative question of wouldn’t it be better sometimes for humans to take a step back and abstain from acting? Indeed, where the rule says we should activate students, we also need to allow a sense of standing still and being reflexive. And, this is, we believe where the Pandemic may have been helpful. With a classroom full of students (at an online teaching platform) in different kinds of lockdown, separated from each other, far away from the typical classroom and the ‘usual world’, our experiences from the spring of 2020 is that this forced all of us to stand still. Taking a break. A deep breath. At least for some time. With standing still in a crisis comes reflections. For the first time, as a teacher it has been possible to come to a course with students who had already begun to interrogate (social) entrepreneurship by reflecting upon how (poorly) society was built, how it could be re-built, what kind of ethics should underpin such a society, and how we – jointly – could shape a world that would give us space, also when everything is back to ‘normal’, to continue to reflect.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

The authors warmly thank the editors of Entrepreneurship Education and Pedagogy for enabling the debate on unsettling entrepreneurship education to unfold in the journal.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The authors would like to acknowledge the financial support provided by the Academy of Finland (grant #295960). The authors would also like to thank the Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship for hosting a seminar where ideas for this special issue were discussed.

ORCID iDs

Karin Berglund

Ulla Hytti

Karen Verduijn

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Navigating the Terrain of Entrepreneurship Education in Neoliberal Societies

Abstract

Keywords

Unsettling Entrepreneurship Education: The Work Continues

The Prosaic of Unsettling Entrepreneurship Education

The Practice of Unsettling Entrepreneurship Education

Ethical Perspectives in EE

EE as a Domain for Identity Work

EE as an Affective and Emotional Workspace

Wrapping Up: From the Skeptical Toward the Hopeful

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

ORCID iDs

References