Prologue
Looking to the future: how can we further develop critical pedagogies in entrepreneurship education?
Denise Fletcher
In this foreword, I contribute to discussions on the nature, purpose, meaning and form of revitalizing entrepreneurship education and I do this by thinking about the future and trying to envisage the societal changes that are likely to occur in the next five to eight years. At the same time, I have in mind two other issues which are important for shaping how entrepreneurship pedagogy might look like in the coming years. The first issue stems out of what I see as the increasing homogeneity of entrepreneurship programmes in business school curricula. The second relates to the co-created and “flourishing” visions of the 50 + 20 agenda1 (positive social impact, disruptive innovation, social inclusion, scalability, flourishing, consciousness of connectedness) – visions which are both indispensable and inspiring for revitalizing entrepreneurship education.
In the coming decade, society will experience huge changes, which will have major consequences for the way we live, consume, interact and organize ourselves socially, economically and politically. The changes relate to, for example: (i) digitalization and our evolution towards a technology-immersed world; (ii) the use of robots (bots) as assistants and companions in households and workplaces; (iii) post-truth styles of communication enabled by social media; (iv) the craving for authenticity, meaning and purpose in human connections, jobs, occupations and careers but also in products, services that we consume and the social structures we live in; (v) flexible forms of working centred on projects that emphasize creativity; (vi) the shared or “maker” economy, which blurs (national/global, personal/work and producer/consumer) boundaries.
These societal, cultural and technological changes will have a significant impact on the form and organization of work activities. They will also impact entrepreneurial activities and more specifically the way these activities are expressed, performed and enacted. This means that business education in general, and entrepreneurship education in particular, should evolve to take account of (and also to anticipate) these changes and the new “demands” they will create.
For example, creative capabilities will be much in demand by employers as routine work tasks become automated. There is likely to be an increased demand for technologically competent and ICT-literate students with some skills in data analytics. A range of transferable professional skills and knowledge that enhance employability will be highly sought-after (i.e. social media management, pitching, public speaking, negotiation skills and emotional intelligence as well as participatory styles of management, leadership and diversity management). There is also likely to be a growing demand from organizations for students who are socially aware and who can analyse, synthesize, lead, envision and participate in (internationally) diverse teams to bring about social, business and organizational transformations. Above all, there will be a pressure for business education to be relevant, accessible, transparent and accountable to organizations, the general public and society at large (Donaldson, 2002; Pfeffer, 2009; Starkey & Tempest, 2009; Kieser, Nicolai & Seidl, 2015; Nicolai & Seidl, 2010; Fotaki & Prasad, 2015; Baden & Higgs, 2015; Alajoutsijarvi, Juusola & Siltaoja, 2015).
It is clear that entrepreneurship curriculum has a particular role to play in leading (critical) curriculum innovation. This is because, quite naturally, the cultivation of forms of innovation and enterprising skills or competencies is our core business. Also, entrepreneurship pedagogies are often premised on the practices of creativity, experimentation, exploration and discovery – all of which necessitate relevant and multimodal teaching methods, approaches, learning styles, tools and models. Programme directors, course tutors and business school leaders will not only be expected to respond to the needs of different stakeholders vis-à-vis global trends but also (and more challengingly) to anticipate and foresee what the demands/expectations might be. At the same time, we will need to translate these future needs into educational programmes that are socially/economically relevant and which prepare students appropriately for these new societal and technological challenges.
This takes me to my next observation, which is that the entrepreneurship curriculum is becoming increasingly homogenized in the sense, that beyond different institutional contexts, there is perhaps little difference between the content of an entrepreneurship course in Sweden, the UK, the Netherlands or Luxembourg. As the topic of entrepreneurship has become more popular, recognized and legitimized, so too have the “stock in trade” tools and concepts we use in the field (i.e. principles of effectuation, business canvas model, the business plan, elevator pitches, pivoting, the notion of opportunity, prototyping, etc.). This suggests that entrepreneurship programmes are facilitating generic skill sets which, although relevant for employers, are not necessarily oriented to the future needs/challenges of society. This also means that it is harder to set apart entrepreneurship programmes in different countries and ultimately suggests that the value of entrepreneurship education is less about content and more about the country-level ecosystem for entrepreneurship/startups and the opportunities for jobs, placements and network opportunities that this brings.
These observations have implications for the purpose, role and shape of entrepreneurship education in the future. What new fresh/innovative (and critical) learning experiences could be added to our curricula that stretch students to bring about market/product transformations in the media-savvy, technologically immersed society outlined earlier? Do the “stock in trade” tools of our teaching practice (the business canvas model, the business plan, the elevator pitch) have a future in entrepreneurship learning and teaching? How can we ensure that our teaching practices are well placed for anticipating societal and technological changes, especially when most of our research is retrospective and the explanatory modes post hoc? In short, what will help business schools and programmes differentiate their entrepreneurship education in the future and what role will critical thinking, theories and pedagogies play in this? I turn to a couple of refreshing examples from other fields of the management sciences where colleagues have presented alternative ways of thinking about business education.
At the level of leadership education, Collinson and Tourish (2015) present some new directions for “teaching leadership critically”. In this essay, the authors are critical of the over-reliance on transformational models that stress the role of (usually white, male) charismatic people – models which overlook or downplay the dynamics of power, the influence of context and the significance of follower dissent and resistance. Their answer – to consider the pedagogical potential of an emergent, alternative paradigm questioning deep-seated assumptions that power and agency should be vested in the hands of a few leaders. They also offer a number of guiding principles from their experiences with students. These centre on: encouraging student participation and dialogue in courses; highlighting the importance of power in leadership practices as well as the multiple contexts and cultures through which leadership dynamics are produced; the paradoxes and unintended effects of leaders’ practices; the damaging effects of over-conformity to destructive behavioural norms (i.e. the promotion of mono cultures that stifle critical feedback and the negative consequences of certain leadership dynamics (p. 590)).
Malcolm Parker (2016) also poses a refreshing set of questions concerning what a different sort of business school research and teaching agenda might look like (p. 150). He adopts a reformist agenda to demand a new way of thinking about organizing: “how can the discipline of management in both research and teaching stop being mere advocacy and become a proper field of enquiry?” (p. 150). His answer – a School of Organizing – which, rather than reducing everything to management or business, would take account of the different forms of organizing that exist in the world. The need to focus on organizing, he argues, is important because the problem of organization is not taken seriously enough and yet organizing features are very prevalent in all life and society, in cooperatives, markets, kinship groups, partnerships social movements, hierarchies, networks etc. He goes on to argue that we need multidisciplinary approaches to study these complex forms of organizing, which would be an “invitation to learn about organizing, all of it, not just management or entrepreneurship” and not as “sites for the production of global managerialism” or for showing inequality but “as a school for people who want to learn from other places, other times, other politics and to consider this for their own attempts to create organisations” (p. 154).
These are both passionate and convincing pleas and something for us to think about in the field of entrepreneurship where we have our own history of critically inspired viewpoints. Critical perspectives have been moderately influential in transforming our conceptions of entrepreneurship into ideological critiques that challenge received wisdom and knowledge about society, the economy and the various organizational, institutional and managerial practices. Such work usually involves a “questioning [of] established social orders, dominating practices, ideologies, discourses and institutions” (Alvesson & Deetz, 2000, p. 1) and it usually embodies an ideological and/or politicalmoral purpose. At a personal level, I recall being “blown away” by the early commentaries critiquing the concept of entrepreneurship in the late 1990s/early 2000s in the form of Nodoushani and Nodoushani (1999), Ogbor (2000) and Armstrong (2005). In these works, the authors deconstructed the ideological roots of entrepreneurship with its purported avant-garde and “anti-management lyricism” (p. 48). Ogbor (2000) was also concerned with “deconstruction in order to denaturalize or call into question the knowledge claims of the entrepreneurial texts/discourses, and to reveal how they present as inherently neutral the ways things are always done” (p. 607). Adding to these, Armstrong’s critique (2005) also provoked a sceptical view of entrepreneurship by revealing the dysfunctional and ideologically controlling effects of the concept of entrepreneurship. Since then, many other studies have invoked critical modes or stances in entrepreneurship research (Jones & Spicer, 2005, 2009; Weiskopf & Steyaert, 2009; Steyaert & Dey, 2010; Spicer, 2012; Tedmanson, Verduijn, Essers & Gartner, 2012; Verduijn, Dey, Tedmanson & Essers, 2014).
These viewpoints offer something new and different – or, to use the words of Steyaert and Dey (2010), they enable entrepreneurship scholarship to stay fresh, pluralistic, reflexive and perhaps even dangerous. They are indicative of the post-positivist expansion of entrepreneurship research and “party on” calls for a richer, more multicontextual, multilevel, pro-social and compassionate approaches that advance comprehensive (inter)activity-based understanding(s) of the entrepreneurial phenomena (Shepherd, 2015). Such perspectives reflect a wish for transformational research and teaching that not only retains the vitality that engendered this domain of research in the first place but which also takes account of the grand challenges we face in the global world such as poverty and environmental issues (Shepherd, 2015). At the level of learning and teaching, however, critical perspectives are sometimes perceived by students as overly theoretical or too remote from their daily preoccupations. In addition, with the increasing instrumentality of students, they often find it difficult to see the need for critical perspectives as they can appear to counter their (hero) expectations of what it is to start a new venture.
To help overcome some of these challenges, I now sketch some preliminary ideas for a teaching and learning agenda for critical entrepreneurship. In outlining these ideas, I acknowledge our own homegrown “entrepreneuring” verb – a verb that can not only act as a conceptual attractor for research purposes (Steyaert, 2007) but also an attractor for a future critical learning and teaching agenda. I also have in mind Weiskopf and Steyaert’s (2009, p. 15) conception of entrepreneurship as “critical engagement in the world” and also a set of motivations, themes and interests that facilitate this in an increasingly visual and digitalized learning and teaching context. The forthcoming list is not conclusive but offers some ideas for optimizing existing critical teaching practices and extending them further.
The potential for transformative (critical) entrepreneurship education
A starting point for facilitating critical modes of learning and teaching are the use of creative modes of curriculum design and assessment methods that develop engagement in entrepreneuring (i.e. negotiation, pitching, networking, stakeholder management, testing assumptions, bricolaging, pivoting, prototyping, etc.). These creative modes of engagement centre on learning oriented towards action, designing and problemsetting that opens up new pathways for bringing futureoriented visions, concepts and ideas into realization through interaction, stretching, staging and legitimizing. These modes of learning encourage students to cope with uncertainty, asymmetric information and to adapt and plan according to the changing and contingent environment.
Such engagement modes include any situation where students need to relate, engage, and interact in order to test assumptions, challenge expectations and validate hypotheses about potential future markets. This could be during: (i) interventions into entrepreneurial settings (i.e. incubators, social enterprises, start-ups, agencies, support organizations); (ii) interviews with local entrepreneurs, actors – by critiquing their discourses, policies, practices; (iii) placements in start-up companies, or work projects for start-up companies emphasizing problem-solving, process flow and designing solutions; and (iv) pitching exercises in incubator contexts, involving incubator managers, local entrepreneurs and investors. For tutors, creative engagement can be facilitated through the use of “real time” cases and/or video cases that take account of how “modern students are immersed in a visual society” (Tejeda, 2008, p. 434) and enable students to “elaborat[e] concepts/topic content” (Clemmes & Hamakawa, 2010, p. 562) or “tie … together” complex organizational processes (Proserpio & Gioia, 2007, p. 79). Other examples of visual learning modes are video pitches; video business plans; slide decks, role play and improvisations; the use of video diaries or visual mind maps; and narratives. Such modes encourage multimodal engagement (involving the emotions, listening and observation skills) and they also draw attention to the importance of body language, facial expressions and the nuances of “human interaction that can help to bring behavioural phenomenon into sharp focus” (Tejeda, 2008, p. 434), attuning us to be socially aware.
The benefit of these modes of engagement and interaction is that students are directly implicated in reallife organizing and entrepreneuring – making decisions, evaluations and judgements about what works or what needs adaptation, managing relations with diverse team members and stakeholders to realize future goals and tasks and, more importantly, taking responsibility for these actions. Through attention to process, practice, contingency, complexity theory, bricolage and design thinking, students can experience how entrepreneuring is a process that is non-linear and always contextualized and usually unfolding over time in incremental steps as one outcome provides the context for the next outcome or decision. Using such approaches, students can be challenged to not think of entrepreneurial outcomes and events as “properties” of alert individuals in the way of “possessive individualism” and instead they can conceive of them as the outcome of interactions, fragments of conversations and other contextualized experiences. They would then be able to understand embodiment (and the constraints or enabling aspects of embodiment) and also appreciate materialities (artefacts, prototypes, physical objects, narratives) – rather than just the personalities or actions of heroic entrepreneurs. They would also be enabled in understanding complexity, and appreciating the interconnectivity between one decision (or non-decision) and the outcomes and/or ethical dilemmas this generates.
Moreover, in these forms of critical learning and engagement the core principle is that students can observe, experience and identify what are usually presented as ordinary ways of perceiving, conceiving and behaving. They can hear talks from entrepreneurs or watch films, documentaries and podcasts to understand the multiple (and often contested) contexts in which entrepreneurial activities take place and look for areas of suppression, control, domination or loss of autonomy and voice (as well as examples of emancipation, self-expression and freedom to act). They can also be challenged to trace the influence of history, culture and societal forces in shaping their and others’ behaviours. They can observe social positioning(s), dominant values at play, and how certain discourses permeate the way people act/interact and account for their behaviours. They can evaluate how entrepreneurial actions disrupt established routines and orders, whether this is through their own interactions with one another, looking for market opportunities or through engagement with stakeholders who give critical feedback. Furthermore, as they engage in future thinking to reflect on how new markets or services or institutional practices may become transformed, they can also become more alert to the ways in which entrepreneurial settings might be potential sites for power dynamics and control or which sites and contexts are more productive for participation and resolution.
In addition to active participation in events and practices, when hearing entrepreneurial accounts students can also be encouraged to adopt an active listening stance. Instead of listening to entrepreneurs in a passive mode, listening out for success and heroic stories, students can be assessed on their appreciation of the heterogeneity of entrepreneurial narratives while looking for patterns, mechanisms, discourses or materialities that disable, emancipate, constrain or limit. They can also start to be more aware of body language, facial expressions, impression management, staging and performance, as well as considering why entrepreneurs choose to construct their stories in the way they do. In forms of assessment, tutors can also use criteria that shows students sensitivity to the emotions, politics, ethical aspects, diversity issues and power asymmetries that have been involved in entrepreneurial experiences.
Already many of these approaches to learning are being practised in entrepreneurship education. However, and I speak as much to myself when I say this, perhaps there is scope to further develop and extend such practices. In so doing, this might help to normalize critical entrepreneurship learning (rather than seeing it as something radical or alternative). Engaging in these kinds of educational practices will enable us to differentiate our courses and exploit to the full the unique contextualized and situated experiences that our education programmes have to offer. At the same time, in true entrepreneurial spirit, we should have an eye to the future and be alert to the societal and technological trends that are coming. A more optimized critical entrepreneurship teaching agenda then could contribute to the flourishing principles of the 50 + 20 agenda – visions which target bringing out the best individual, organizational and systemic possibilities for the world. Embracing such visions and principles will help entrepreneurship programmes to ensure that they are producing locally anchored entrepreneurship programmes that are relevant for and anticipatory of societal needs. In addition, they will help to ensure that students have creative, flexible, diversity-sensitive, emotionally intelligent, authentic skill sets that foster social awareness and proactivity and which might engender positive social and organizational transformations.
Note
1 The 50 + 20 Agenda describes a vision for the transformation of management education in which the common tenet of being the best in the world is revised in favour of creating businesses that are designed and led to achieve the best for the world. See http://50plus20.org/5020-agenda.
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