Foreword

Critique, entrepreneurship, practice: a prolegomenon

Pascal Dey

Critique, as Rosa (2009) reminds us, is a constitutive element of human practice. Whenever everyday life demands a decision, evaluation or justification, human practice is exposed to critique. This is no different for entrepreneurship, since where different ways of doing entrepreneurship exist there is always the possibility that entrepreneurship is done wrong (Harris, Sapienza & Bowie, 2009), i.e. in ways that are incommensurate with the advancement of the common good (Horkheimer, 1982). This book, Revitalizing Entrepreneurship Education, makes critique the central motto of entrepreneurship education. While the individual chapters, each in their own unique way, express a disenchantment with the “free enterprise model”, which conceives of entrepreneurship exclusively in terms of economic finalities (Calás, Smircich & Bourne, 2009), they are worn by a general desire to move critique away from “gestures of pure negation” and towards changing entrepreneurship in the direction of greater justice, civic participation and societal emancipation (Horn, 2013). In this way, critique as it is employed in this book is never solely concerned with the nature and justification of good/bad or right/wrong entrepreneurial practice but with using education to liberate entrepreneurial practice from its ideological, political and economic enslavement. What is hence critically at stake is an understanding of critique as emancipation which uses education to intervene into common ways in which entrepreneurship is practised. Importantly, the book aims to challenge and transform not “only” the practice of entrepreneurship but also the very institution in which entrepreneurship is (mostly) taught: the contemporary business school. While business schools have variously been described as the place where knowledge and education is commodified, it appears legitimate to ask whether entrepreneurship education can amount to anything other than shallow “infotainment” associated with a (pro forma) qualification for the job market (Pfeffer & Fong, 2002). However, even if many business schools tend to subordinate knowledge and education to the principles of the market, this book by Karin Berglund and Karen Verduijn provides a perceptive analysis that alternative ways of teaching entrepreneurship do exist. Obviously enough, applying alternative approaches to entrepreneurship education might challenge, willingly or otherwise, business schools’ institutional habits and imperatives. Crucial to teaching entrepreneurship critically is thus a willingness to take risks and an intimidation against negative ramification that might ensue. In a truly entrepreneurial fashion, teaching entrepreneurship differently and with a critical prospect presupposes the ability to turn the self into “a work of art”. Such an aesthetic mode of self-formation is less about the cultivation of a new form of dandyism (Hadot, 1991) than about learning to live virtuously (Foucault, 1980), not by obeying to universal moral criteria but by destabilizing and creatively transgressing the way the business school wants us to act, thus redefining the realm of educational practice by our own rules.

References

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

Foucault, M. (1980). The history of sexuality, volume I. New York, NY: Vintage.

Hadot, P. (1991). Reflection of the notion of the “cultivation of the self”. In T. Armstrong (Ed.), Michel Foucault: Philosopher (pp. 225–232). New York, NY: Routledge.

Harris, J.D., Sapienza, H.J. & Bowie, N.E. (2009). Ethics and entrepreneurship. Journal of Business Venturing, 24, 407–418.

Horkheimer, M. (1982). Critical theory. New York, NY: Continuum.

Horn, D.M. (2013). Democratic governance and social entrepreneurship: Civic participation and the future of democracy. London: Routledge.

Pfeffer, J. & Fong, C.T. (2002). The end of business schools? Less success than meets the eye. Academy of Management Learning and Education, 1, 78–95.

Rosa, H. (2009). Einführung: Was ist Kritik? In R. Jaeggi & T. Wesche (Eds), Was ist Kritik? (pp. 7–20). Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.