8 Entrepreneurship and the entrepreneurial self

Creating alternatives through entrepreneurship education?

Annika Skoglund and Karin Berglund

Introduction

Entrepreneurship has spread via an abundance of organizations and people that embrace the prosperity its logic currently promises. Apart from the generation of new companies and market places, this promise also entails a flexible invention of entrepreneurial subjectivities and self-investment via alternative choices (Bröckling, 2016). We have recently seen a diversification of the contexts in which entrepreneurial subjectivities are invited to undergird entrepreneurship, for example in social entrepreneurship (Dey, 2014) and ecopreneurship. A peculiar pluralism of “entrepreneurial selves” is advancing, which makes it necessary to question how we, as educators in entrepreneurship, are offered to join in and become abiding facilitators of students’ empowerment and subjectification to entrepreneurship, now in its rejuvenated forms. Our concern is thus in line with others who have turned to Foucault to study the potential effects teaching has on student subjectivities, either positively (Sliwa, Meier Sørensen & Cairns, 2015) or negatively (Simons & Masschelein, 2008).

This chapter presents the development and implementation of a critical entrepreneurship course, “Entrepreneurship and the Entrepreneurial Self” (EES), designed for masters students. The purpose of the course is (i) to deconstruct the basic ontological assumptions of entrepreneurship and explore the extension and reformulation of these assumptions for alternative forms of entrepreneurship, such as social entrepreneurship and ecopreneurship, (ii) to analyse the broadening of entrepreneurial subjectivities that unfold hand in hand with these forms of entrepreneurship, and (iii) to go beyond these forms of entrepreneurship and subjectivities to touch upon the (im)possibility of collectively constructing new worlds.

To address these issues we chose to introduce basic readings and developments of Foucault’s work to the students (e.g. see Rose, 1999; Vrasti, 2012) and thereby enable their deconstruction of the basic assumptions and understanding of the socially and environmentally advanced entrepreneurial logic (Albrecht, 2002; Costea, Amiridis & Crump, 2012; Dempsey & Sanders, 2010; Goss, Jones, Betta & Latham, 2011; Jones & Spicer, 2009; Pastakia, 1998; Peredo & Chrisman, 2006; Pongratz & Voss, 2003). The theoretical focus for their reading is guided by a historical understanding of liberal and neo-liberal advancements and shifts in the provision of security – continuously aiming for self-regulating citizens (Foucault, 1979/1997; 1997/2004) – visible in how variegated entrepreneurial selves of today are cultivated by the enabling state and its handymen.

The perspective provided on the course presents entrepreneurship in relation to Foucault’s notion of “productive power”, where the capacities of the individual are empowered on behalf of the whole population, i.e. a “biopolitics” fascinated with life improvements (e.g. see Wallenstein, 2013). The theoretical framework emphasizes how self-regulation and the optimization of life itself, “making live and letting die” (Dillon & Reid, 2001), followed on from how liberal philosophy prioritized individual freedom in contrast to state rule (Lemke, 2001). We explain to the students how “freedom” has been linked to a construction of “the social” and “the economic”, to open up possibilities for self-creation and self-regulation. Du Gay, Salaman and Rees (1996, p. 270) have even suggested that “the character of the entrepreneur can no longer be represented as just one among a plurality of ethical personalities but must be seen as assuming an ontological priority”. At the same time, we emphasize how the promise of entrepreneurial freedoms and belief in individual capacities seductively speaks to and utilizes your “own” power to “[b]e the architect of your own future” (Pongratz & Voss, 2003, p. 248). By extension, we ask the students to critically reflect on political dimensions, human limits, alternative ideals and the collective efforts that are part of entrepreneurial endeavours (see further Costea et al., 2012) and entrepreneurial education (Berglund, 2013).

The course consists of two parallel streams, one analytical and one practical. In the analytical stream, students read about entrepreneurship from the abovementioned liberal and neo-liberal philosophy perspectives and apply this to analyse the emergence of new forms of entrepreneurship, what we call “alternative entrepreneurships” (Berglund & Skoglund, 2016). Recognizing new forms of entrepreneurship in late liberal societies brings up questions such as: How has “life” been optimized and vitalized through entrepreneurship? How does expertise call on the human to become entrepreneurial? How are new contexts cultivating entrepreneurial freedoms and self-regulation? And how do these contexts offer the entrepreneurial subject a reinvestment in the self?

In the practical stream of the course students engage collectively in a social mission of an imaginary company. Taking inspiration from the Hungarian/US IT company Prezi, this project, called “The entrepreneurial self of a company”, invites students to shape a philanthropic project. Although their student project company is fictional, the students are required to carry out a social mission and solve a social problem of their own choice. In the final presentation, the students can either utilize their theatrical skills, for example by role-playing, or show photographs, film clips, and interviews with organizations and people affected by their social mission.

This practical, creative, learning process and cultivation of the students’ imagination is later problematized in a final turn to theory, where the pedagogy applied is interrogated and questioned (Hermann, 2000). The students’ ability to take the last theoretical turn is tested in the take-home exam, designed as a reflective essay, where students are able to apply the concepts related to the entrepreneurial self to critically reflect on the foundations and effects of their social missions.

This chapter illustrates the design of the course in detail, with the hope of inspiring others to take two critical turns, one in relation to entrepreneurship as enterprising, and the next in relation to alternative entrepreneurships, i.e. social entrepreneurship, ecopreneurship, cultural entrepreneurship, sustainable entrepreneurship, etc. To end, we outline how entrepreneurship educators can take these two critical turns. The first step is to problematize how critical approaches to entrepreneurship as enterprising affects students. The second step is to question the teacher’s role as facilitator of less enterprising forms of entrepreneurship and the interpellation of a plurality of entrepreneurial selves.

Towards critical perspectives on alternative entrepreneurship

In this section we start by outlining the emergence of critical perspectives within entrepreneurship studies before we introduce the specific pedagogical approach applied on the EES course. We show how the first critical turn has pointed to possibilities of redirecting entrepreneurship in various ways, while a second critical turn has taken a more sceptical approach to the plurality of entrepreneurial subjectivities produced by this redirection.

The first critical turn – against enterprising

Entrepreneurship has historically been constituted as an engine in the production of surplus value in capitalist societies (Schumpeter, 1934). Research on entrepreneurship has also been keen to provide knowledge about processes that lead to either new, or the growth of, companies and organizations to secure the production of surplus value. Typically, researchers have focused on explaining or understanding how entrepreneurship functions are delimited in one way or another, and can be improved in order to be better executed. The belief is that entrepreneurship, in this enterprising form and preferably with as little bureaucratic involvement as possible, is necessary for our economic well-being.

Entrepreneurship as enterprising has, however, been debated and contested, and new directions have been suggested. Ogbor (2000) argues that entrepreneurship research relies on a Western ideology, which renews the primacy of the market for building the good society (see further Harvey, 2005). And with this Western idea of entrepreneurship follows gender bias (Ahl & Marlow, 2012; Wee & Brooks, 2012), ethnocentric determination (Al-Dajani & Marlow, 2010) and a classed society (Gill, 2014). In their theoretical critique of the enterprising culture, Spicer and Jones (2005, p. 229) show the complexity of subjectification processes, and especially so for the “phantasmic character of the entrepreneur” (Jones & Spicer, 2005, p. 229). A character that seems odd when applied to Berglund and Johansson’s (2007b) illustration of how entrepreneurship has been introduced to marginalized groups such as immigrant women, cultural workers and people with disabilities.

Moreover, entrepreneurship has been discussed as contextually conditioned (Welter, 2011). It cannot be directly translated from one setting to another, but requires an understanding of the particular social relations and contexts in which it is performed, for example in the developing world (Naudé, 2010) or in depleted settings (Johnstone & Lionais, 2004). Lately, it has also been argued that entrepreneurship research in general needs to acknowledge the grand challenges of the global society (e.g. poverty, environmental degradation) since entrepreneurship is well suited to respond to these threats (Shepard, 2015). Shepard points to the possibility to go beyond the production of incremental research, to “crowd out more transformational research” instead (p. 489). Hence, more focus on social engagement (Nicholls, 2010) and environmental considerations (Pastakia, 1998) has been requested.

The abovementioned criticism of conventional entrepreneurship research has led to a rewriting of entrepreneurship (also coined by Hjorth in 2001) and several special issues. In 2004, for example, Steyaert and Katz (2004) “reclaimed the space of entrepreneurship” with focus on how it shapes societies. Another example is Jennings, Perren and Carter (2005), who called the predominant positivist and normative take on entrepreneurship into question. And in 2007 Gartner (2007) invited researchers to engage with narrative perspectives to lay the ground for entrepreneurial narrative as a “science of imagination”. In addition, Rindova, Barry and Ketchen (2009) suggested a reconceptualization of entrepreneurial activity as “entrepreneuring as emancipation”. Entrepreneurship has thus been researched in new settings, in new ontological and epistemological domiciles, expanding the categories of entrepreneurship. This has broadened the contexts wherein entrepreneurship is supposed to bloom and give rise to new alternatives, at the same time as this expansion is fed by new critical perspectives.

Even if the darker sides of entrepreneurship have been pointed out (Tedmanson, Verduijn, Essers & Gartner, 2012) and entrepreneurship has been problematized beyond its possibilities for redirection (Verduijn, Dey, Tedmanson & Essers, 2014), it nevertheless remains difficult to question entrepreneurship and its promises. Instead, entrepreneurship scholars have turned to how entrepreneurship can be redirected to provide more ethically thought-through solutions that focus both on how alternative values can be studied by researchers and created by entrepreneurs. The more or less normative research approaches taken have introduced discussions and debates with the wish to avoid the tendency to reconstruct a one-dimensional view of entrepreneurship. As a result of this first critical turn, we are now offered a plethora of directions for breeding new entrepreneurs. Likewise, at the beginning of the EES course, we provide the students with a theoretical background and empirical examples that help them to take the first critical turn, against enterprising entrepreneurship, in a move towards alternative entrepreneurship.

The second critical turn – against entrepreneurial selves

In the wake of the first critical turn, there have been pleas for social entrepreneurship, ecopreneurship, cultural entrepreneurship and community entrepreneurship, to mention a few prefix versions. These often address the errors of conventional entrepreneurship and its effects, and even speak about suppressed groups (women, the young, immigrants, ex-criminals, the poor etc.) as having been previously excluded but now possible to make into entrepreneurs. Based on entrepreneurship as a futuristic discourse (Berglund & Johansson, 2007a), full of promises, alternative entrepreneurship thus seeks to secure future progression through the repositioning of entrepreneurial selves.

The entrepreneurial self

The EES course introduces literature on the “entrepreneurial self” to scrutinize what type of qualities that are to be cultivated in the creation of these new, “better” entrepreneurs. The aim is to let the students problematize the interpellation of a pluralism of entrepreneurial selves that was mobilized by the students themselves when they went through the first critical turn. That is, a neo-liberal fostering of self-regulation has not only thrived on the will of economic subjects to be such, where entrepreneurship equals “enterprising” and a carving out of the competitive class; neo-liberalism has also thrived on entrepreneurship as “freedom to” an individualist and flexible way of life, nevertheless, for an efficient management of life itself through “freedom” (Rose, 1999). This exemplifies how entrepreneurial freedoms come at the cost of an overall attempt to manage the immense capacity of the human to freely shape itself and its social relations. It is a management of freedom, via talk about freedom, that seeks bearing in knowledge production about life itself (Rose, 1996), and thus has abiding effects on our social existence (Read, 2009). Lemke (2001, p. 202) shows how “neo-liberalism encourages human beings to give their lives a specific entrepreneurial form”. In contrast to Schumpeter’s (1942) worries, the entrepreneurial logic thus feeds into everyday life, as the entrepreneur has come to provide “a general guideline for individual life management” (Bröckling, 2005, p. 15), and indirect management of employees at a distance (Pongratz & Voss, 2003). This entrepreneurial way of being has gained an increased foothold via an abundance of organizations that take alternative routes to solve social and environmental problems.

Alternative entrepreneurships are not clear in their contours, and emerge in different guises and with repositioned promises. By providing the students with concepts such as “discourse”, “biopolitics”, “governmentality”, “neo-liberalism” and “the entrepreneurial self”, the course aims to give them an analytical distance. The students are by extension asked to analyse how the positive connotations of alternative entrepreneurship, and the promises made by its proponents, often correlate with moral investments in the outbreak of entrepreneurial selves. They are exposed to the double meaning of “subject”, simultaneously subjugating yourself to and productively creating a subjectivity, to be able to focus on their collective subjectification during the practical project work with the social mission.

Social entrepreneurship

The exposure to neo-liberal economic crisis and the lack of state security are regarded by social entrepreneurship proponents as positive for the constitution of new “social” opportunities. While making a profit, creating wealth, or serving the desires of customers may be part of social entrepreneurship, these are only presented as a means to a social end and not as an end in itself (Hjorth, 2013). Even if social entrepreneurship takes different legal forms (for-/not-for-profit, NGO, public sector, hybrid organization), market-based skills and principles are applied and reinforced (Eikenberry & Kluver, 2004). Social entrepreneurship transfers the tenets of capitalist entrepreneurship to non-profit organizations, where it is seen as a way to create a more meaningful path to traditional corporatism (Dempsey & Sanders, 2010).

The often implicit baseline is that social entrepreneurs do not perceive a difference between making money and doing good. “Save the world and make money” is also the illustrative title of a Swedish book that encourages people to explore the social entrepreneurship route (Augustinsson & Brisvall, 2009), presenting social entrepreneurship as the only way to raise people out of poverty and despair and achieve social change (e.g. Bornstein & Davis, 2010; Yunus, 2007). Rather than maximizing profit, social entrepreneurs are expected to focus on creating social value and tackling evil problems, whereby their form of entrepreneurship takes on social and moral value. Social entrepreneurship is thus constructed as superior to conventional entrepreneurship, and the social entrepreneur becomes a more moral entrepreneurial hero who is vigilant in adapting to capitalistic disturbances. Social entrepreneurship thus fosters an entrepreneurial self who is inclined to believe that the only way to prosper in the world we inhabit is to subject others to socially entrepreneurial endeavours.

Through the first critical turn against entrepreneurship, “the social” has been re-established as a good arena for inventing innovative solutions when structures of the welfare state fall apart. Social entrepreneurship has thus come to include a transformation of those groups and individuals that are seen as a burden for the rest of society. There is, however, a need to paint a more nuanced picture of this turn to “the social”. Interrogating social entrepreneurship with the help of the second critical turn highlights how the individual, the social and the economic are linked in new ways through which neo-liberal self-regulation is reproduced. Interrogating the repositioning of entrepreneurship to “the social” requires an analysis that recognizes the shift from direct state interventions to a neo-liberal ideal of indirect governing, here via the responsibilized social entrepreneur. Social entrepreneurship is believed to demonstrate flexibility and more local responses to social problems, which goes hand in hand with an outsourcing of risk management. Through social entrepreneurship, freedom is transformed from the “freedom of the businessman to take risks” (Easterbrook, 1949) to the social entrepreneur’s freedom to address social and environmental risks (Berglund & Skoglund, 2016). Dempsey and Sanders (2010) show that social entrepreneurship celebrates a troubling account of work/life balance centred on self-sacrifice, underpaid and even unpaid labour. This privileges the commitment to social entrepreneurship endeavours by a renegotiated entrepreneurial self, at the expense of health, family and other aspects of social reproduction.

Green entrepreneurship

The concept of green entrepreneurship, or “ecopreneurship”, has recently emerged to exemplify and spread ecologically entrepreneurial ways of living (Pastakia, 1998). The concept introduces various practices depending on the specific environmental problem, or lack of sustainability, that is targeted. Ecopreneurship often merges ecological and social problems, with the ambition to create self-reliance and sustainable development. However, we do not yet know what is required of those who are to accomplish ecologically entrepreneurial ways of living. Some ecopreneurship scholars propose that the ecopreneur is a change agent who acts in the name of biospheric life, thereby suggesting that the ecopreneur is best qualified to vitalize biospheric life and produce socio-ecological fit (for a summary of different positions, see Skoglund, 2017).

In this section of the EES course, ecopreneurship literature is first introduced and contextualized with the help of Schumpeter’s accounts of entrepreneurship and anti-capitalistic predictions (Albrecht, 2002). The course then situates different types of ecopreneurship in relation to conventional green business ideas and market solutions to environmental problems, such as carbon offsets (Böhm & Dabhi, 2009; Böhm, Misoczky & Moog, 2012; Böhm, Murtola & Spoelstra, 2012). Extracts from a documentary by Adam Curtis are thereafter presented to provide an archival perspective on how ideas of green living have been implemented. These implementations are later compared with more contemporary forms of ecopreneurial endeavours, at the same time as the students are asked to explore how ecopreneurship still speaks about “life” with help of evolutionary accounts. The students are taught to recognize and problematize ecological systems theory and complex systems theory, with the emphasis on how these are reinforced within ecopreneurship literature. This leads up to a meta-perspective on the role ecopreneurship plays in contemporary forms of biopolitics (Reid, 2012, 2013). The students are encouraged to ask questions about the moral (and often financial) investments made in the ecopreneurial self. They are also encouraged to interrogate how ecopreneurship partakes in resilience-assembling, and to problematize political subjectivity, particularly in cases where the ecopreneur is asked to embed herself within a social-ecological system and adapt to the environment.

The theoretical framework of the EES course is mainly based on the second critical turn described above. The chosen literature is intended to make the students aware of their own willingness to criticize enterprising entrepreneurship, and thus subjectify to alternative entrepreneurship and a more moral investment in their entrepreneurial self. By providing a meta-perspective on their voluntary engagement in the outsourced social and green problems, the course finally problematizes the repositioning of entrepreneurial selves.

The course in entrepreneurship and the entrepreneurial self

The course in entrepreneurship and the entrepreneurial self (EES) was developed at Stockholm Business School, Stockholm University, in 2012. The aim of this course is for students to develop an understanding and knowledge of different forms of alternative entrepreneurships and of the entrepreneurial self (see Table 8.1 for the learning goals of the course).

EES consists of 7.5 credits and comprises one of the courses in a two-year masters programme in management studies, which is presented on the website as follows:

The EES course was taught for the first time in November 2012 and has been offered every autumn since then for the past three years. The course runs over a period of five weeks, with the focus on lectures, seminars and the course project during the first four weeks, since the last week is dedicated to the take-home exam. In the take-home exam, students use the theoretical perspectives applied on the course individually to reflect analytically upon the project pursued on the course, the guest lectures and other examples of alternative entrepreneurships provided within the course.

The course consists of a combination of lectures, seminars and group work and requires a significant portion of self-directed study. All teaching and learning activities are carried out in English since the language of instruction is English. EES is divided into a “theoretical” and a more “practical” path (see Figure 8.1).

While the theoretical path is thematized and strongly supported by lectures, guest lectures and seminars, the practical path is based on the entrepreneurial skills of the students to collectively organize a social engagement within a fictive company. We will now give some insight into (i) the introduction to the course, (ii) the theoretical path, (iii) the practical path and (iv) completion of the course.

Introduction to course

Students are introduced to the course in a letter of welcome in which they are briefly informed about the course site/study guide etc. In addition, they are asked to bring a picture of entrepreneurship to the first lecture. Five hours of lectures and a workshop are allocated for the introduction of the course, the outline of which is presented in the morning. This is followed by a collective exercise, where students are divided into groups of six to eight participants, and where they present their pictures to each other, agree upon five key words and create a collage of entrepreneurship (using paper, glue, coloured pencils, crayons, stickers etc.). The students are given one hour to complete the exercise and then another hour to present their results. Usually the key words create a mix between “conventional” and “alternative” entrepreneurship discourse (see Figure 8.2 from 2014’s class).

In the afternoon the students’ presentations are followed up with a lecture on discourse, which aims to open up for an understanding of entrepreneurship as a concept that it is possible to “define” in various ways. At the same time the students are provided with some space to reflect upon their own discourse and the assumptions they use for entrepreneurship.

At the end of the introduction day, the group project assignment is introduced and we have a Skype meeting with a manager from Prezi, the case company that sets the model for how to pursue their own group project, i.e. social mission. The students are at this point informed that they are to work in the same groups as during the morning session. Owing to the total number of students in the class, there has sometimes been a discussion about the relatively large project groups.

Theoretical path

The theoretical part of the course revolves around the three themes of: (1a/b) entrepreneurial self, (2) green entrepreneurship and (3) social entrepreneurship. While green and social entrepreneurship exemplify two contexts where alternative entrepreneurship has emerged, the entrepreneurial self is the theoretical perspective that is to be used by students to understand the emergence of alternative entrepreneurship. Green and social entrepreneurship are thus to be analysed by using concepts such as governmentality, neo-liberalism, biopolitics, the entrepreneurial self and entrepreneurial subjectivity, to engage analytically in a reflection on the effects of alternative entrepreneurship.

Each theme consists of a lecture (where key concepts are introduced and discussed), a guest lecture (to include different voices of social/green entrepreneurship) and a seminar to which students bring a prepared text that summarizes their reading (where students are engaged in analytical exercises). Students are strongly advised to read the literature in advance of lectures; this is particularly important in preparation for the lecture on the entrepreneurial self, where the teachers introduce the analytical concepts that will be used throughout the course. During the course the students are provided with questions to reflect upon entrepreneurship with the help of the second critical turn (see Table 8.2). The students are further encouraged to formulate their own questions to pose to the guest lecturers and at the seminars. The seminars take different forms in the three themes. Sometimes students present their writings/thoughts/questions in a study circle, at other times the student group (around 20 students in each seminar) are split up into smaller groups and given questions/tasks to complete collectively. We have experimented with these different seminar forms to spur all students to engage in the discussions and found that a mix between small groups (where students seem to talk more freely with each other) and a larger seminar group (where students can share their insights with each other) contribute to students’ critical reflections.

The course then introduces the second critical turn, with the help of which the students can now start to reflect on the enforced creativity, freedom and “doing good” promised by alternative entrepreneurship. For example, the students often react to the im/possibilities of reaching a state of satisfaction, and how that leads to new forms of self-management (life balance, mindfulness etc.). Some are concerned with the difficulties of reaching a state of satisfaction when “the entrepreneurial” is a moving target where individuals can always become “more” in some way (cf. Costea et al., 2012). The students thus become aware of how this may produce a work ethic of continued improvement, with the flip side of being subjected to a continuous struggle where we are encouraged to become incessantly better and where it may be difficult to reach satisfaction with who we presently are. Another example of “dark sides” discussed on the course is how the moral investment in social entrepreneurship goes hand in hand with a sacrificing subject (Dempsey & Sanders, 2010). This kind of entrepreneurial self puts the care of others ahead of the care of the self. The students also debate how they take on increased responsibilities, and take it upon themselves to solve former governmental problems. Some like to bear the outsourcing of risks, while others call for state security. This debate typically leads to further discussions about the effects of alternative entrepreneurship, and how it triggers new problems of inequality, injustice and social exclusion.

Practical path

The “shaping the entrepreneurial self of a company” project is a group assignment in which a social entrepreneurial endeavour is to be developed (see Table 8.3). The students are instructed to collectively create a social mission for a fictive company. To get their creative process started, in the introductory lecture a manager from Prezi presents how they work with their social missions. The students then shape a philanthropic project to be performed as if it had been realistically carried out. The students are expected to focus on how they can be both creative and authentic, since at the end of the course they are to present their social accomplishment using photographs, film clips, and interviews with the people they have helped. The students can also choose to do a role play, and theatrically tell the story of how they form an entrepreneurial self of the fictive company.

The purpose of the project is to gain insight into how entrepreneurship is a continuous practice that is underpinned by some sort of subjectification by the group members. The project also works as practical experience and a backdrop to the take-home exam and the more abstract discussions of entrepreneurial selves. Overall, the project and the activities that the students need to pursue in order to accomplish a social or green mission can teach them what forming an “alternative” entrepreneurial self actually entails. This pedagogical approach also facilitates a discussion about power relations and effects of their social mission, mainly before and after their creative process.

Completion of course

At the end of the course the students are given a take-home exam in which they reflect on how they have been activated through alternative entrepreneurship, and how this relieves the state from direct intervention. They have one week to work with this assignment, guided by three questions in their writing of five to six pages. The students are encouraged to get into a circle of writing–reading– thinking–rewriting and also to base their analysis on the parts of the seminar discussions that they find to be of relevance.

In their reflective essays we can witness an analytical engagement with neo-liberal management techniques and alternative entrepreneurships. Generally, the students know how to account for different contexts of entrepreneurship and they can distinguish between moral and financial investments in the entrepreneurial self. They can explain why a critique of entrepreneurship as enterprising has triggered the unfolding of alternatives. The students are also well aware of the problems that alternative entrepreneurship attempts to address (e.g. gender bias, exclusion, unemployment, social needs and environmental urgencies) and the promises that fail. They use key concepts from the course to analytically discuss the emergence of a plurality of entrepreneurial selves, visible in the examples provided on the course and in the meta-perspective on their group project.

Discussion

Entrepreneurship education often points to the benefits of “practical learning” to enhance innovation, commercialization and solutions to real problems. When entrepreneurship education was first introduced, it was also its value for the economy that was stressed (Berglund & Holmgren, 2013; Leffler, 2009). Both students and teachers were inserted in a market rationality as facilitators (Peters, 2001), whereby the activity and productivity of individuals became expressly linked to global competitiveness (Dahlstedt & Hertzberg, 2012). However, when entrepreneurship education gained terrain as a pedagogical approach that included other than economic missions, conventional capitalistic logics were deemphasized. This also meant that the cultivation of an active, responsible individual full of initiative was temporarily dethroned but quickly repositioned to new contexts. This revitalized the entrepreneurial self, who now hosts broader qualities than those ascribed to the conventional entrepreneurial self. The entrepreneurial self is a subject who wishes to change their own or even others’ worlds, fundamentally convinced about the freedom to bring about social change by taking on risks outsourced by the state.

While other studies have criticized how the conventional entrepreneurial self has been fostered via entrepreneurship education in neo-liberal societies (Ball & Olmedo, 2013; Bendix Petersen & O’Flynn, 2007; Bragg, 2007; Connell, 2013; Down, 2009; Komulainen, Korhonen & Räty, 2009), the EES course described in this chapter goes beyond such criticism by tracing the effects of that criticism. That is, the EES course applies a pedagogical approach that is based on a second critical turn in entrepreneurship studies. This means that analytic interest is paid not only to the emphasis on the economic sphere in neo-liberal societies, but also to how alternative entrepreneurship emerges as a way to govern us whereby an abundance of entrepreneurial selves unfolds. Thus entrepreneurial freedom does not escape neo-liberal governing techniques but is, rather, re-inserted at their centre. Students of alternative entrepreneurship are still governed through entrepreneurial freedom, but to accomplish an expansion of responsibility and self-reliance. This productive power invites us yet again to subjectify as active and responsible, but as initiators of forms of entrepreneurship that are said to do good, often in opposition to the market and its ethical defects. Consequently, the first critical turn against conventional entrepreneurship has produced alternative subject positions that flourish on criticism of the greedy, socially and environmentally irresponsible, to-be-retired conventional entrepreneurial self. This previous hero is to be dethroned by a supposedly better version of the entrepreneurial self, an upgraded hero of the enabling state.

Through a mix of lectures, guest lectures, seminars and a student-driven project, the course provides the students with both analytical distance and practical closeness to how neo-liberal management techniques work through alternative entrepreneurship. The course thereby opens up for an exploration of how advanced liberal management thrives on criticism, sometimes posed by civic society but taken over by social or green entrepreneurs. Hence, it is the transformation from (one) entrepreneurship to alternative forms of entrepreneurships and the effect this has on the entrepreneurial self that constitutes the terrain of investigation for the students. That is why the EES course introduces the history of liberal thought to the students, and asks them to reflect upon their own position within its more contemporary manifestations of productive power and “freedom to” (e.g. see Foucault, 1978/91).

Turning to our own pedagogical development as educators, this experimental course taught us several things. The first lesson we learned came when the students performed the practical social engagement project. While we wanted the students to critically reflect upon what kind of entrepreneurial selves they became, the students were (at least initially) much more focused on solving a specific problem in the most innovative way. Thus, at this stage of the course, the students were more prone to assimilate only the first critical turn. It appeared to be difficult for them to be both engaged in the project and to be able to interrogate and reflect upon its assumed goodness. The students were unable to question their social or green engagement and the “grand solution” to the problem they sought to solve. The tendency to defend their entrepreneurial endeavours, rather than to reflect upon them, was also a recurrent discussion during the final (examination and) conference where other students in class (often addressed as stakeholders) pointed to the potential dark sides of the presented project. The dark sides have thus often remained a blind spot for students when they have engaged in making up their (fictive) company, developed the entrepreneurial idea and enacted their social project. The tendency to become passionately engaged in developing an alternative is also discerned in social entrepreneurship (Berglund & Schwartz, 2013) and among those engaged in developing an entrepreneurial education in compulsory schooling (Holmgren, 2015).

The second lesson we learned is linked to the evaluation of the practical project. Many students found that the practical project was much harder work than they expected. What they found most difficult was organizing a group of six to eight students, raising awareness of social problems, feeling empathy and facing the vulnerability of the other in need (see Chapter 11). They considered a two-grade scale of pass or fail to be unrewarding, for which reason the initial scale was amended to pass, pass with merit or fail. However, when this new scale was launched in the second version of the course, the standard of the final presentations deteriorated drastically. This left us with unanswered questions on how to grade the practical project and how to “reward” the students for actually trying to process their selves through the social or green mission they pursued. There is a need to continue experimenting with the pedagogical design of the group project and its grading as well as its aim to make the students aware and reflective of their possible subjectification to “doing good”.

Lastly, during the years we have also learned which phases the students normally go through and at what point during the course. This has given us the ability to be more prepared to meet their needs. While we were much more nervous when the course was launched about how it would be received by the students, we now know that during the first week they look bewildered and have difficulty following the take on entrepreneurship provided on the course. During the third week they start to formulate questions inspired by the second critical turn, and during the fifth week they make impressive use of the concepts provided to develop an analytical stance towards entrepreneurship in their individual home exam. At the end of the course the students often comment on how their scepticism during the first week has transformed into satisfaction. They express surprise at the unexpected perspective of entrepreneurial selves, especially useful for their reflection on entrepreneurship studies as entailing more than practical “do it yourself” lessons. In the end, they have finally and conclusively been rewarded – with a more diverse understanding of entrepreneurship, especially in comparison to the usual fix given to economic subjects within business schools.

Conclusion

Entrepreneurship education has predominantly called on economic subjects to foster competitive, self-regulating and responsible citizens, i.e. conventional entrepreneurial selves. What we have shown is that criticism of such indoctrination, coming from various academic and public camps, has been appropriated with the effect that the identity of the entrepreneur is undergoing radical change. Historically speaking, entrepreneurship has always come hand in hand with a flexible invention of entrepreneurial subjectivities, and as many others before us have stated: neo-liberalism is a moving target. This requires a new educational agenda that problematizes “alternative entrepreneurship” and its effects. If universities are to introduce new forms of entrepreneurship, such as social, green or sustainable, we should, as teaching-oriented researchers, together with the students, at least try to interrogate the emergence of rejuvenated and upgraded entrepreneurial selves that secure the spread of these alternative forms so often taken for granted.

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