Foreword

Teaching entrepreneurship is walking a tightrope

Malin Tillmar

As entrepreneurship researchers and university teachers, we are walking a tightrope that is at the core of the contemporary social and economic dynamics. On the one hand, many of us who are interested in entrepreneurship want to believe in the possibility of social change (Calas, Smircich & Bourne, 2009), and are interested in what entrepreneurs do (Gartner, 1988) and in which contexts entrepreneurship in a broad sense is possible. We may want to further this knowledge and understanding of the “productive” (Baumol, 1990), in the broadest sense, sides of entrepreneurship to our students. As academics with emancipatory knowledge interests (cf. Rindova, Barry & Ketchen, 2009) or with interactive research ambitions (Svensson, Ellström & Brulin, 2007), we may even wish to do that through engaged scholarship (Van de Ven, 2007) with an impact on the surrounding society.

Since “entrepreneurship” is a concept with strong positive connotations in the common and political debate, we do, however, need to be wary. If we are academics with a strong basis in the academic values of reflexivity and criticality (Humboldtian values), it is vital to safeguard these values – so also when we talk about entrepreneurship. As researchers and teachers in entrepreneurship today, 2017, we risk unintentionally, or even unreflectively, becoming tools in a top-down implementation of a neo-liberal agenda which includes entrepreneurialism and individualism. Against our better judgement, we are at risk of standing in classroom after classroom worldwide and conveying the message that everyone can turn their life around and is fully responsible for their own destiny and success – as if structures and context didn’t matter. Yet we also know from entrepreneurship research that they do (Welter, 2011; Diaz, Brush, Gatewood & Welter, 2017).

It is, of course, possible to take the stance that entrepreneurship, including in the form of business ownership, is inherently good. It is also possible to take the stance that entrepreneurship – as a practice and as a concept – is inherently bad. As I see it, both of these stances compromise academic values. Personally, I am striving to understand and sometimes stimulate processes of social change, without enthusiastically encouraging people to start businesses if they may be better off not doing so. To take two examples, employees working in healthcare are not always less constrained when they start up a business than they are as employees (Sundin & Tillmar, 2010), and the issues faced by women entrepreneurs, for example in developing countries, are not necessarily resolved by starting businesses (Tillmar, 2016). These groups are nonetheless among those urged to start businesses by a multitude of entrepreneurship programmes. Immigrants are another of those groups that today receive “entrepreneurship training”. This may lead to success. It may not (cf. Blackburn & Ram, 2006). Within academia, a nuanced and theoretically informed approach to what entrepreneurship is, and can imply, is of vital importance.

In other words, we really need to walk the tightrope without falling off on either side. But how? And how can we as academics support each other to find this balance? That is where this book comes in. It problematizes the entrepreneurialism discourse, without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The contributions in the book provide inspiration and examples to help us make our entrepreneurship education more critical, avoiding what Hytti (this volume) calls the “McDonaldization” of education.

References

Baumol, W.J. (1990). Entrepreneurship: Productive, unproductive, and destructive. Journal of Political Economy, 98(5), Part 1, 893–921.

Blackburn, R. & Ram, M. (2006). Fix or fixation? The contributions and limitations of entrepreneurship and small firms to combating social exclusion. Entrepreneurship and Regional Development, 18(1), 73–89.

Calas, M.B., Smircich, L. & Bourne, K.A. (2009). Extending the boundaries: Reframing “entrepreneurship as social change” through feminist perspectives. Academy of Management Review, 34(3), 552–569.

Diaz, C., Brush, C., Gatewood, E. & Welter, F. (Eds) (2017). Women’s entrepreneurship in global and local contexts. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Gartner, W.B. (1988). Who is an entrepreneur? Is the wrong question. American Journal of Small Business, 12(4), 11–32.

Rindova, V., Barry, D. & Ketchen, D.J. (2009). Entrepreneuring as emancipation. Academy of Management Review, 34(3), 477–491.

Svensson, L., Ellström, P.E. & Brulin, G. (2007). Introduction – on interactive research. International Journal of Action Research, 3(3), 233–249.

Sundin, E. & Tillmar, M. (2010). The masculinization of the elderly care sector: Locallevel studies of public sector outsourcing. International Journal of Gender and Entrepreneurship, 2(1), 49–67.

Tillmar, M. (2016). Gendering commercial justice: experiences of selfemployed women in urban Tanzania. Journal of Enterprising Communities, 10(1), 101–122.

Van de Ven, A.H. (2007). Engaged scholarship: Creating knowledge for science and practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Welter, F. (2011). Contextualizing entrepreneurship—conceptual challenges and ways forward. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 35(1), 165–184.