6 Conceptual activism

Entrepreneurship education as a philosophical project

Christian Garmann Johnsen, Lena Olaison and Bent Meier Sørensen

Introduction

In recent years, entrepreneurs have increasingly turned to philosophy for solutions. The above statement about the value of philosophy emerged from what Dov Seidman, CEO of the ethics and compliance management firm LRN, perceives as a need to rethink business as an intertwined field in which “Credit, climate and consumption crises cannot be solved through specialized expertise alone” (Seidman, 2010). Seidman is not alone in this observation. Christine Nasserghodsi, director of innovation at GEMS Education, discovered while developing an entrepreneurship programme that quite a few of the entrepreneurs she met had studied philosophy. After interviewing them, Nasserghodsi concluded that, although the entrepreneurs who had studied philosophy were not “likely to reference Foucault in a meeting”, they nevertheless felt that their ability to use philosophical ideas when faced with challenges allowed them to “bring a unique set of skills to new businesses” (Nasserghodsi, 2012).

If entrepreneurs who have studied philosophy take advantage of their educational background, then we should think about how philosophy can be utilized in entrepreneurship education. Against this backdrop, we ask: how can philosophy become a productive force in the teaching of entrepreneurship in business schools? In this chapter, we discuss what philosophy might bring to entrepreneurship education by exploring our own practices in the classroom, which we call “conceptual activism”. We understand conceptual activism as a way of teaching that aims to utilize philosophical concepts in the classroom for the purpose of unlocking alternative viewpoints on phenomena that remain central to entrepreneurship, such as agency, organization creation, success and failure.

The method presented and exemplified in this chapter, which we call conceptual activism, invites students into the contextually embedded discourses and practices associated with entrepreneurship. In the first part of the chapter, we present the philosophical foundations of our approach and discuss how our method allows us to engage with entrepreneurship in business education. In our work or, at least, as a guiding idea in our practice of teaching, we seek to deploy philosophical concepts in order to sensitize students to their own experiences and to discourses on entrepreneurship. This guiding idea is based on a particular understanding of philosophy, one often regarded as standing in contrast to the default interpretation of the role of philosophy in the social sciences. Philosophy has had a long history of being an “under labourer” (Spoelstra, 2007) in the social sciences, but we believe that it should be assigned a more active role in entrepreneurship education. Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari (1994), we see one aspect of our role as scholars as creating concepts that enable us to understand entrepreneurship in new and different ways. Moreover, we argue that such concept creation can be deployed in entrepreneurship education. On this basis, we develop a pedagogical approach that can both challenge and contribute to the teaching of entrepreneurship.

To support our claim, we share two examples from our own teaching experience in the second part of the chapter. These examples illustrate how it is possible to philosophically engage with dominant narratives, discourses, cultural expressions and visual images of entrepreneurship in the classroom. In this regard, we show how we can use philosophical concepts to challenge our own conceptions of entrepreneurial practices as well as those of our students. The first example uses art to problematize entrepreneurship and organization. We use a juxtaposition of two paintings of Saint Paul’s conversion by Caravaggio to discuss how certain practices of creating organization can be rendered visible “with” the students rather than “to” the student. The second example focuses more directly on entrepreneurial practices, especially the issue of what constitutes success and failure. With the help of Julia Kristeva’s (1982) concept of “the abject”, we analyse how our view of entrepreneurial failure has shifted from being repressed to being included. Moreover, we look at what kinds of failure we can talk about and what kinds of failure remain repressed. We also examine how such philosophically informed analyses may support students and teachers in the creation of new conceptualizations of entrepreneurial failure in the classroom. In the concluding discussion, we propose that although the main role of philosophy in entrepreneurship education may be critique, philosophy can also play a role that lies closer to practice. Philosophy may spark the students’ abilities to reflect upon their own entrepreneurial practices, and we argue that it may help develop such practices in the classroom and beyond.

Conceptual activism

We begin our discussion by reflecting on ourselves as teachers. What philosophical questions could we pose about the very institution of teaching of which we are part? In other words, how can we problematize pedagogy in our own teaching? Clearly, Deleuze, who studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, had his share of self-absorbed teachers. Deleuze suggests that we do not gain much from people who instruct us to replicate them. Instead, he believes that learning occurs when we do something together. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze writes that:

Here, Deleuze outlines his basic view of pedagogy. For Deleuze, learning does not occur when we mechanically reproduce what others have already done – learning is not an act of repetition without change. As Deleuze remarks, when we study the history of philosophy, we tend to admire philosophers’ achievements, accomplishments and concepts. However, if we simply repeat their words, thoughts and ideas, then we basically do what they do, as our efforts consist of emulating their procedures and confirming their insights. Deleuze elaborates that a different approach entails using the concepts developed by other thinkers for new purposes by trying “to send them in other directions, even if the distance covered is not astronomical but relatively small” (1995, p. xv). For Deleuze, learning is not a passive process of receiving transmitted information that the student registers, incorporates and acknowledges. On the contrary, learning is an active process in which the student engages in activities together with his or her teacher in a larger group of peers, who are all learners. In this way, the students and the teachers take part in a collaborate effort wherein the fundamental pedagogical principle is not to judge “go” or “no go” but to “go with us” (Deleuze & Guattari 1988, p. 177). It is important to emphasize that Deleuze’s philosophy of concept creation involves a specific pedagogy. Gane talks about the “pedagogy of the concept” (2009, p. 86) and defines concepts as “experimental tools” (2009, p. 86) that allow us to gain new perspectives on the world.

This particular pedagogy is concerned with proactively partaking in activities that allow us to learn philosophy by utilizing it in concrete contexts. According to Deleuze, the act of “doing philosophy” consists of creating concepts in response to problems. In this regard, we believe that philosophy can offer imaginative approaches to conceptualizing problems and solutions, as philosophy, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is “the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts” (1994, p. 2). A new concept gives us a prism from which we can gain a new perspective on the world. Therefore, philosophy is an activity that consists of pragmatic engagement with concepts in order to “enable more useful descriptions of the world” (Patton 2003, p. 58). Although Deleuze and Guattari stress that concepts are created, “doing philosophy” does not necessarily require us to invent novel concepts from scratch. On the contrary, if we look at Deleuze’s own work, we can see that his concepts often stem from other thinkers. For example, Deleuze’s concept of “multiplicity” originates from Riemann’s differential mathematics, while his concept of “simulacrum” emerges from of his reading of Plato. As such, the creation of a concept may involve development of an established concept, transmutation of a concept from one context into another or the revision of the understanding of a well-known concept. As Gane elaborates, Deleuze’s project of creating concepts opens up the “possibility of reinventing or reworking older concepts so that they are lifted from their historical settings and are pushed in directions that pose us problems today” (2009, p. 95).

In this chapter, we investigate how philosophical concepts can be useful for engaging students in entrepreneurship. Deleuze’s insistence on the importance of creating concepts that allow us to think and act differently in the world applies equally to the entrepreneurship domain. As Hjorth et al. argue, “new concepts of entrepreneurship enable us to think differently and practice the world differently” (2008, p. 82). Based upon our reading of Deleuze, we propose “conceptual activism” as a method for advancing critical entrepreneurship education. Within critical entrepreneurship studies, there has been a persistent call to question the assumptions of entrepreneurship theory and practice (Tedmanson, Verduijn, Essers & Gartner, 2012; Verduijn, Dey, Tedmanson & Essers, 2014). Conceptual activism is a “problematisation” technique (Alvesson & Sandberg, 2011) but our goal is not simply to criticize underlying assumptions of current entrepreneurship research and practice. Rather, conceptual activism involves the proactive creation of new concepts that allow us to understand entrepreneurship in new and different ways.

As the word “critical” has become de rigueur in the social sciences, let us clarify its meaning in relation to our conceptual activism approach. We do not criticize simply in order to disclose false presuppositions. We use critique to demonstrate how dominant understandings of entrepreneurship overlook or neglect crucial or relevant insights (Olaison & Sørensen, 2014). Through the use of conceptual activism as a teaching strategy, we invite students to explore what entrepreneurship might become rather than accepting it as a phenomenon that is a given with established content that can be empirically “covered” and theoretically portrayed. Our concepts should not “recognize” what “everybody knows” (Deleuze, 1995), or confirm our prior suspicions and “common-sense” ideas (Spoelstra, 2007). On the contrary, concepts need to become the tool with which teachers and students explore alternative ways of conceiving entrepreneurship together. Ideally, a concept should allow us to be surprised, as it makes us sensitive to how we encounter those phenomena that perplex us. A concept is a form of “para-sense” because it challenges common sense (Spoelstra, 2007). In what follows, we give two examples of how we have used conceptual activism to explore entrepreneurship, one focusing on two paintings of Saint Paul’s conversion by Caravaggio and the other on entrepreneurial failure.

Philosophizing about art and entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship teaching often revolves around finding appropriate business cases that either exemplify stories of success, or present students with challenges or problems to solve. Such cases tend to be derived from contemporary ventures that engage in commercial practices with the aim of creating new products, services or manufacturing processes. Clearly, much can be gained from studying such cases of success or failure. At the same time, it is important to recognize that business cases are not the only way to learn about entrepreneurship. Many other sources may offer inspiration (for a discussion, see Beyes, Parker & Steyaert, 2016; Hjorth & Johannisson, 2007). In this regard, we come face to face with the common-sense assumption that to learn about business one must study business. Is this assumption worth challenging? Could we teach entrepreneurship in different ways? In other words, can we imagine entrepreneurship education being based upon alternative examples?

Let us begin with the widely accepted definition of entrepreneurship as the “creation of organization” (Gartner, 1988: 57; see also Hjorth et al., 2015; Katz & Gartner, 1988). We pose a seemingly simple question: what is organization? In order to address this question, we draw on the teaching of art and explore how artwork itself contains organization (Sørensen, 2010, 2014). It is important to recognize that neither art nor organization are neutral. Throughout the course of history, art has been deployed as a means of exercising and confirming given societal distributions of power. As such, art is relevant for teaching entrepreneurship critically, as such regimes of power are often negated in great art. Thus, great art inevitably transcends given distinctions and shows forces at work that we normally cannot see. In explicit reference to Paul Klee’s artworks, Deleuze and Guattari argue that: “The visual material must capture nonvisible forces. Render visible, Klee said; not render or reproduce the visible” (1988, p. 342). With this in mind, we recall that entrepreneurship involves inventing new ways of seeing and acting by relating to currently nonvisible forces. At its best, art is a collective encounter that can generate a radically different experience in the recipient. You do not “teach” art or, at least, you should not. Instead, you should say “come with us” into a work of art.

Caravaggio offers a good place for educators engaged in art and entrepreneurship to start, as his paintings contain an almost infinite amount of “nonvisible forces”. Consider the two Caravaggio paintings above. They allegedly depict the same event – Saint Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. However, they construct two profoundly different versions of the same event. Moreover, the two versions express radically different ideas of organization creation. In fact, this may explain why the Catholic Church, which had commissioned the piece, rejected the version from the year 1600 but accepted the version from 1601. In the dire straits of the Counter-Reformation, the Church sought new ways to capture the souls (and the work) of modern citizens in seventeenth-century Europe. The 1600 version seems chaotic and retains the sense of shock experienced on the road to Damascus, when the learned, Roman citizen (hitherto known as Saul) fell off his horse and was lying on the ground, lost, blind and bewildered. Although Christ tries to rescue the fallen man in the painting, the soldier in the middle uses his spear to prevent this from happening, keeping calm in the high-alert situation. The accepted 1601 version, on the other hand, depicts the event in a very different manner. This latter painting became one of the hallmarks of world art, and parts of its masterfulness lies in the fact that it both depicts something central about the event – the change of heart and mind – while also bringing the event back to the well-known organization of the mother church.

With these two versions of the paintings in mind, we return to the question: what assumptions are involved when we say “organization” and when we define entrepreneurship as the creation of organization? Which versions are being promoted and which are left out? The Church could only accept the version of the painting that represented the Church’s ideal of organization. If we turn the masterpiece on its head and juxtapose it with another classic visual expression – Henry Mintzberg’s (1983) model, the Six Basic Parts of the Organization, from his book Structure in Fives – this becomes even clearer.

From this perspective, Paul is not a bewildered man on a horse headed towards Damascus. Saint Paul is, to use Mintzberg’s expression, the “strategic Apex” of the new Christian Church. In short, Saint Paul is the entrepreneur insofar as he is the creator of organization. At the bottom of the painting, we now find the poor peasant and the horse. In Mintzberg’s terms, they comprise the “operating core”, which is illuminated by the divine light of Christ. Christ remains in the frame, but is now depersonalized and without a body. Nevertheless, Caravaggio renders the force of this master visible. The appropriate organization and its inherent class distinctions are now in place, and the mission of the convert is now clearly to confirm the practice of the one, undivided Church. The message becomes: “Get up, go into the city, and see that the believers affirm their allegiance to the Church and its strategic apex who, in the absence of Paul, is the Pope in Rome”. The second version consecrates and sacralizes the organization of the Church. In this case, entrepreneurship is not disruptive but conservatory.

The initial idea of juxtaposing Caravaggio’s second version of The Conversion of Saint Paul (1601) with Henry Mintzberg’s (1983) model of the Six Basic Parts of the Organization emerged as Sørensen completed his PhD dissertation in 2004. However, more than six years passed before this juxtaposition was published (Sørensen, 2010). Between the completion of the PhD and the publication of the 2010 paper, the juxtaposition was presented to numerous students in the master’s programme in business administration and philosophy at CBS as well as to colleagues. The purpose of presenting this juxtaposition to the students was not simply to make them reproduce the teacher’s analysis – that is, to teach them to “do as I do” – thereby confirming what the teacher already knew about art and organization. Instead, it was meant to provide a point of departure for a mutual discussion around art and organization. Thus, the juxtaposition was displayed with the intention that the teacher and the student could engage in a productive dialogue about the relationship between Caravaggio, Mintzberg, aesthetics, art, entrepreneurship and other topics that might spring to the participants’ minds. In this way, the teacher invited the students to “do with me” – to visit the world of art and explore its relationship with organization. In turn, the classroom became a space for discussion and a space in which different opinions could be heard. The result was a productive dialogue that allowed for new insights to come to light. This was also acknowledged in the published paper (see Sørensen, 2010, p. 323).

One might assume that it would be easy for observers to articulate what Caravaggio is expressing on his canvases. However, in our experience, this is not the case. Indeed, some find it unsettling to be exposed to a piece of figurative art. Arguably, the modern viewer is more prone to see the shapes and contours of a Picasso or the entrepreneurial qualities of a Warhol than to contemplate a Caravaggio, whose paintings appear mystical, enigmatic and alien. However, this is part of the experience. After Paul was back on his horse and had become an apostle, he confessed to the Corinthians that “the visual is puzzling, and not only because ancient glass was less clear than today’s transparent technology”, because what we confront in art is an “ἴ” an “enigma” – a riddle (Sørensen, 2013, p. 45). In this light, it is not surprising that students typically remain silent when they are asked about how they conceive the first version of The Conversion of Saint Paul. For most contemporary spectators, the figures displayed in Caravaggio’s paintings do not seem to make much sense, and we have a hard time sensing them.

As suggested by Agamben (2007), the pedagogical strategy that may be used here is to profane the sacred – that is, return to use that which has been elevated to a transcendent sphere. In other words, Caravaggio’s paintings must be used in a new way. Many students initially experience Caravaggio’s paintings as representing a sacred table – an ancient piece of high art that should not be touched. The silence that befalls them is therefore the same silence that befalls people in a church, at a cemetery or at the start of a game. However, it is important to intervene in this silence by asking apparently mundane questions, such as “What is the little angel doing in the upper-right corner?” or “Why does the soldier hold a spear in his hand?” Such questions can help in deciphering the paintings, such that we return “to use what the sacred had separated and petrified” (Agamben, 2007, p. 74). Through the mist of highbrow art history and bourgeois pretentiousness, the characters may stand forth. The narrative unfolds for the students: a man has fallen off his horse, but why? Has he been struck by a seizure, torn by violence or hit by panic? The significance of the event is signalled by the presence of Christ. We must then ask: “what holds Christ back?”. “Well,” some might remark, “the soldier’s spear.” The conversation continues: “Why would Christ be afraid of a little spear?” “Fair point”, some might think, while another might remark, “he had recently been pierced in the side at the cross”. More comments often follow. Herein lies the learning. Teacher and student begin to do something together – to use the painting to engage in a mutual discussion and move the piece of art to a new use, including a new reading of Mintzberg (1983).

We suddenly ascertain that the students actually know a lot about analysing Christian art, the very art that at first might appear opaque to them. They are seldom encouraged to exercise these skills. When we juxtapose the two versions of The Conversion of Saint Paul, students often discover that the spear is the defining feature of the first version, as it holds all human, natural and cosmic forces in check. The placement of Caravaggio’s second version of The Conversion of Saint Paul (1601) alongside Henry Mintzberg’s (1983) model of the Six Basic Parts of the Organization also allows us to return Mintzberg’s celebrated model to use. We can ask: “Does the “ideology”, as expressed in the aura around the model, really signal the sacred status of the model and provide it with a halo?”. This juxtaposition has sparked various reactions among students. Yet, contrary to what one might expect, the greatest impact on the students is not caused by the comparison of the two paintings by Caravaggio. Rather, what unsettles the class is turning the second version on its head. Such a profane act is not easily embraced. However, if the students accept this move, they see that Mintzberg’s model does not necessarily collide with the piece of art in the juxtaposition – the two coalesce. At this stage, the paintings often become “clearer” to the students, and they are able to voice their experiences and contest them. However, as Caravaggio’s paintings gain clarity, Mintzberg’s Six Basic Parts of the Organization develop a monstrous, enigmatic and alien appearance. The students start to wonder: “why does the model shine? Why does it look like a body? Where is its missing head?”. These questions and experiences all pertain to the question of entrepreneurship and organization. Discussions of such questions might make students of entrepreneurship sensitive to different versions of creating organization by showing them that representations of organization are always socially, culturally and historically embedded.

The abject failure of entrepreneurship

The previous example shows how art can be used to question the assumptions of entrepreneurship education. We can also demonstrate how philosophical concepts can be utilized to problematize and transform current practices or discourses. To do so, we use the concept of the abject to discuss entrepreneurial failure (see Olaison & Sørensen, 2014). Participants in education are increasingly required to cultivate an entrepreneurial self in order to make themselves employable (Berglund, 2013). Traditionally, entrepreneurship research and education have been premised on the assumption that entrepreneurship is a winner’s game. Although approximately 90 per cent of all entrepreneurs experience failure in financial terms (Stevens & Burley, 1997), the phenomenon of entrepreneurial failure has been largely overlooked, perhaps because failure is treated as a kind of taboo (McGrath, 1999). Gradually, this aversion to failure has been moderated, such that failure is now seen as an integral part of entrepreneurship. In fact, when entrepreneurs give a speech or an interview today, they will invariably mention their failures in some form. Questions useful for addressing entrepreneurial failure in the classroom include: “What do entrepreneurs talk about when they talk about failure? What do they leave out?”. Together with students, we can analyse our understanding of entrepreneurial failure, the outcomes of failure and the elements that are left out of this process. To facilitate the discussion, we use Kristeva’s (1982) concept of the “abject”, which describes the processes of incorporation and repression.

For Kristeva, the repressed is something that is unmentionable but is still an integral part of our thoughts. The philosophical concept of the abject can be used as a “tool” for unlocking discourses on entrepreneurship, thereby broadening students’ understanding of entrepreneurship and sensitizing them to their own practices. According to Kristeva (1982), the abject is constructed in a delimitation of the subject. Thus, the abject is imbued with a threat of violence that “lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated” (Kristeva 1982, p. 1). The concept of the abject draws attention to what which is simultaneously incorporated and repressed within a phenomenon. Thus, the abject highlights how the repressed is incorporated into a sanitized version, which, in turn, represses other aspects or keeps certain versions hidden. This is relevant for entrepreneurship discourse and practice because we can use this concept to elucidate what is incorporated and repressed in conceptions of entrepreneurship. The objective is not to make students experts in Kristeva’s philosophical thinking, but rather to help them learn to use abjection as a tool for analysing phenomena and critically reflecting on their own practices and experiences.

Entrepreneurship is widely viewed as an engine for economic growth. Students often hear that our society needs more entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or Richard Branson. As a starting point for discussion, we can ask: How do we describe entrepreneurs and their failures? They often have many stories to share. Students of entrepreneurship are often introduced to Drucker, who suggests that it is not the economy that fails, but rather individuals who fail owing to their “greed, stupidity, thoughtless bandwagon-climbing, or incompetence” (1985, p. 46). In our experience, many students find this view shocking, especially as they identify themselves as entrepreneurs and hold different views on failure. Typically, students hold the view that failure is necessary for entrepreneurship because failure is a step to success. For this reason, students commonly state that failure is now out in the open and considered an integral part of the entrepreneurial process. Against this backdrop, we can use the concept of the abject to reflect on what we mean when we talk about entrepreneurial failure. We can ask: what kinds of failures are being sanitized and what kinds are repressed within our conception of entrepreneurship? For this discussion, we can utilize quotes collected from the Facebook group entitled “Famous Entrepreneur Quotes”:

Students often recognize themselves in these quotes. Moreover, using the concept of the abject, it is not difficult for them to see that the quotes follow the same storyline: great entrepreneurs initially felt that no one believed in them, and they faced a series of failures that eventually led to success (Johnsen & Sørensen, 2017). This analysis can be supported by policy documents, such as the European Commission’s report on “Business Failure and Starting Afresh”, which states that “failed entrepreneurs learn from their mistakes and are more successful at the next attempt” (Reichenbach & Herrero Rada, 2005). When analysing the prevalent discourse on entrepreneurial failure, it quickly becomes apparent that failure is typically articulated as a “lifelong learning process” (European Commission, 2012), making failure “a potential for improvement” (Gosh, in Nobel 2011). When we discuss these quotes, personal stories and more formal documentation with students, we usually arrive at the conclusion that underlying this view is an assumption that there is a right kind of failure – failure that we can learn from – which serves as a stepping stone towards success. Using the concept of the abject, we can start to discuss the idea that, if there is “good failure”, there must also be “bad failure”. We can then ask students about what might constitute “bad failure”. Some students may propose that bad failure involves not taking responsibility for one’s own mistakes, especially in financial terms, and letting someone else “take the hit”. This may provide an opportunity to return to Drucker’s account of entrepreneurial failure from the 1980s, with which students often initially disagree. For example, echoing Drucker’s view, Gosh (in Nobel, 2011) differentiates between venture failures and personal failures. Gosh asserts that venture failure is a “fiasco” that can be forgiven, while a personal failure implies moral degradation, such as when an entrepreneur is a fraud. In Reilly’s (2012) words, when done right:

With the help of Kristeva’s concept of the abject, we can help students see how failure is repressed, as it cannot be considered a reflection of the subject’s essence and the character of the entrepreneur. Thus, what makes an entrepreneur successful is his or her ability to cultivate an “unemotional relationship with failure” (Reilly, 2012). In this regard, failure is sanitized and compartmentalized. It is rendered into something that exists independent of the entrepreneur with the exception of the learning experience. Nevertheless, when faced with concrete examples of entrepreneurs, retaining such a clean-cut distinction is difficult because we do not know whether the entrepreneur is honest or dishonest. In order to illustrate this difficulty to students, we can use the example of Stein Bagger, a well-known entrepreneurial swindler in Denmark who suddenly disappeared after a trip to Dubai. On 6 December 2008, Bagger walked into the Central Division of the Los Angeles Police Department in downtown Los Angeles. He was wearing jeans and a casual jacket, and carrying backpack. He walked up to the counter, where the following occurred:

Bagger’s arrest in Los Angeles appeared to be the end of the line for the Danish IT star, whose company, IT Factory, had won Ernst & Young’s national Entrepreneur of the Year Award just nine days earlier. Bagger had not attended the awards ceremony, as he and his wife were in Dubai on a luxurious vacation. In Dubai, Bagger left a restaurant where he was dining with his wife and several companions. He would never return to the restaurant or to his wife. Instead, Bagger withdrew US$5,000 from an ATM, procured a car, drove across the desert to Abu Dhabi and flew to New York. When he arrived in New York, he borrowed a friend’s car and drove 4,000 kilometres across the United States to Los Angeles, where he eventually turned himself in to the police. Meanwhile, Ernst & Young Denmark regretted awarding the entrepreneur prize to Bagger’s IT Factory and it refused to award the prize to any other company in 2008. Bagger was subsequently convicted of fraud in excess of DKK200 million and received a prison term of seven years. The money has never been recovered.

The media typically presents the Bagger case as a spectacular event. Although this event had tremendous economic and social consequences for everyone involved in IT Factory, the focus is almost always on “the story of Stein”: his troubled family background, his persuasive manner, the fascinating worldspanning getaway and the epic ending. Clearly, Stein Bagger is an “empty signifier” – a man who is all too susceptible to being engulfed by stronger forces. One such force is Ernst & Young, which, as one of the Big Five accounting firms, confirms the title of the “entrepreneur” through its annual awards. On Ernst & Young’s website, one finds a list of award winners throughout the years. For the year 2008, it says “No winner”. This, of course, is a fabrication on the part of Ernst & Young, as there was a winner in 2008. Ernst & Young played a central part in elevating Bagger and turning his apparent success into a mystical, transcendent event, a signature of the sublime. However, Bagger turned out to be criminal. Ernst & Young’s webpage bears witness to the fact that the failed entrepreneur is now an abject whose name cannot be mentioned without degrading the legacy of other winners. In the encounter between Stein Bagger and Ernst & Young, we can grasp the abject – that which cannot be included or mentioned. Ernst & Young cannot accept the fact that it had lifted up the very same abject whom they now place “beyond the scope of the possible” or beyond what exists. However, the fact that there was a winner and that the winner later confessed to being an embezzler can teach us something about failure in entrepreneurship.

The Stein Bagger example shows how the discourse of entrepreneurship involves two versions of failure: good failure and bad failure. While the former is associated with heroic struggle and learning from one’s mistakes in attempts to become successful, the second is associated with fraud and criminal activity. Although these two versions are often contrasted, they are not as different from each other as one might think. Both versions of failure are, to use Kristeva’s terminology, “sublime” and “spectacular”. As such, both versions of failure offer normative accounts of how to behave or how not to behave, and they are often expressed through clichés, which are invoked so often that they become virtually meaningless. The use of such cases in entrepreneurship education might serve as a point of departure for discussing how we tend to portray and think about failure. In other words, teachers and students can discuss what is left out of “good failure” and “bad failure”. This is not only a critical exercise that aims to disclose what is left out but also a creative endeavour that allows us to imagine different versions of entrepreneurial failure. In this discussion, we should not instruct students to “do or think as we do” but rather invite them to take part in a discussion of how failure in entrepreneurship is predominately represented in the media and in scientific discourse.

Based on such an analysis of the discourse and practice of entrepreneurial failure, we then have an opportunity to invite students to reflect on how they talk about entrepreneurship and failure. With the help of philosophical concepts as analytical tools, we have found that students often not only become invested in the cases that are presented to them in class, but they also welcome the opportunity to examine their own experiences in new ways in the classroom, where they can co-create new accounts and concepts of, for example, failure. Some may propose that when we talk about failure, we mostly do so in an optimistic and positive fashion, referring to such ideas as resilience, recovery, redemption, personal growth and lessons learned, all of which we feel compelled to communicate to others. Others may highlight the fact that, despite the extremely personal and often risky experience of an entrepreneurial failure, we often present it as being devoid of emotional aspects. This may encourage others to explore the affective states involved in failure, including fear of moving forward, despair, and anger at those who betrayed us or failed to warn us. Such exploration may lead to considerations of the consequences of failure for others and the necessity of being sensitive to all who are affected by entrepreneurial failures. The creation of a new understanding of entrepreneurial failure as including its effects on others, rather than as an individual learning experience, may lead to almost shocking revelations for students who, similar to many entrepreneurs, receive start-up funding from family and friends rather than from banks. The development of concepts of entrepreneurial failure together with students in the classroom might also lead us to reflect upon questions related to equality, the distribution of wealth and environmental sustainability. It is in this arena that philosophy shows its potential. Our experience with addressing these issues in the classroom has shown us that the students are concerned about these issues. They normally demonstrate an acute interest in questions related to entrepreneurial failure that go beyond common sense and ready-made solutions.

Concluding discussion

In recent years, the focus on entrepreneurship as a complex phenomenon has increased (Fayolle, Landstrom, Gartner & Berglund, 2016). This complexity emerges because entrepreneurship is always socially, culturally and historically embedded. To account for these aspects, scholars have suggested that entrepreneurship must be studied and taught from a cross-disciplinary perspective that includes history, philosophy and anthropology (Minniti & Bygrave, 2001; Gartner, 2013; Hjorth, 2011; Hjorth & Steyaert, 2006). Hjorth and Johannisson argue that interdisciplinary approaches are not only desirable but necessary in entrepreneurship education because conventional curricula are often overloaded with abstract economic models. They maintain that entrepreneurship educators together with students “need to be sensitive to local/temporal specificities” and “cultivate an openness before the event of sense, the power of becoming, the possibilities of creation” (Hjorth & Johannisson, 2007, p. 50).

In this chapter, we have explored what philosophy can offer entrepreneurship education. In line with Hjorth and Johannisson, we believe that “[t]hinking with management concepts will keep [entrepreneurship] out of reach” (2007, p. 50). In response, we have proposed that philosophy consists of creating concepts that allow us to explore different viewpoints. In other words, concept creation intervenes in our usual manner of thinking about the world. In research and education alike, we should play with concepts and experiment with what they enable us to do. Philosophy is not simply concerned with “the way things are” – it is also entails a “concern for how they may become” (Massumi, 2010, p. 13). To understand what the world may become, we need to experiment with what we can do. Deleuze learns from Spinoza that “[w]e do not know what a body can do” (1988, p. 17). According to Deleuze, the point is that the body is not a pre-given entity with fixed capabilities. Quite the contrary – the body contains unexplored potential from which we can gain knowledge only by experimenting with it can do. The notion of “the body” is, of course, itself a concept and, in Deleuze’s account, a very dynamic one – even the earth is a body (although “without organs”; see Deleuze & Guattari, 1988). We can paraphrase Deleuze, stating that “we do not know what the concept can do”. Thus, a concept is not something given in advance of an encounter of certain bodies, such as an encounter between a concept and a social practice of entrepreneurship. Instead, Deleuze believes that we need to experiment with what a concept can become and what it might allow us to think. This is the task of the philosopher – to explore what a concept might become in conjunction with the problem that it explores. On this basis, we believe that philosophy has much to offer entrepreneurship education.

In order to elaborate on our perspective, we proposed a philosophical approach that we call conceptual activism and examined how stretching concepts allows us to challenge conventional assumptions about entrepreneurship. We acknowledge that philosophizing about entrepreneurship might be demanding for some students, especially those who are new to the discipline. In addition, we realize that the relation between philosophy and entrepreneurial practices may seem abstract. Nevertheless, in our own teaching of entrepreneurship, we have discovered that even the most abstract philosophical concepts can be a productive force. When practised in the form of conceptual activism, philosophy applies concepts as experimental tools (Gane, 2009, p. 86). Therefore, the relationship between practice and theory is not passive – it is a creative process. Deleuze describes this activity as “relays” that open up new pathways and new understandings: “Practice is a set of relays from one theoretical point to another, and theory is a relay from one practice to another” (Deleuze, in Bouchard, 1977, p. 206). Learning, in turn, is an ensemble of relays. We used two examples to demonstrate how such relays might work and how we can use conceptual activism to rethink entrepreneurial practices. In so doing, we also create new concepts and understandings of entrepreneurship.

In our first case, we used art as a relay between philosophy and organization. In this context, art serves as a relay for thinking philosophically about organization (what is organization?) and entrepreneurially about organization (how can we rethink organization?). The case we presented has been used on several occasions in the master’s programme in business administration and philosophy at Copenhagen Business School, where entrepreneurship is one of the practical contexts that students are required to analyse philosophically. Although we have not yet used this case with more traditional business-oriented students, we have used art in several other teaching situations. If used appropriately, art can be a great asset in teaching in general and, in particular, in critically oriented teaching (Sliwa, Sørensen & Cairns, 2015). Every human being, including students and researchers, has or can be motivated to have an opinion about a work of art, while an interest in philosophy or entrepreneurship cannot be taken for granted. Moreover, with great art a student does not need knowledge of art history or a generalized education, as great art relates directly to one’s own life and community and addresses how life is lived in the world today. Indeed, the world is a given in a great piece of art not as a representation of the world as it appears at the time of the artwork’s creation but as a certain experience that opens up to a world yet to come. Of course, art is about learning, an insight that was only recently lost. In this way, we believe that art can function as a relay between philosophy and entrepreneurial practices for business school students.

While students who are trained in philosophy can use conceptual activism as a tool for connecting philosophical concepts with business phenomena, such as entrepreneurship, the challenge for students who lack a background in philosophy and who are enrolled in programmes primarily focused on business is somewhat different. In our second example, our point of departure was a teaching situation in which few students were familiar with philosophy. In such situations, conceptual activism can be used as a tool that allows students to reflect on and experiment with their own entrepreneurial practices, and to examine the phenomena associated with entrepreneurial failure. In other words, philosophy can help students become sensitive to their own experiences in practical business activities. For this purpose, the philosophical concept becomes a relay between entrepreneurial practices. When illustrated with a case of entrepreneurial failure, students can make use of the philosophical concept of the abject to create relays between their own experiences with new business ventures. The concept then becomes a tool for understanding practice, for analysing what is taken for granted within their own understandings of the world and for reflecting on what is excluded from conventional conceptions of entrepreneurship. On this basis, students can explore the possibility of creating new practices and using (new) concepts in order to facilitate change in practice.

In our experience, modern students are taught to think and draw conclusions quickly. Quick thinking, gut feelings, intuition and “just do it” seem to be the pedagogical messages regarding what is required in order to succeed in business. Slow, reflective thinking is viewed as a waste of valuable time. Therefore, students often question the value of philosophy and remain sceptical about the utility of engaging in conceptual reflections. To address this concern, it is important to emphasize how concepts can become tools and to highlight the practical value of concepts. As we have argued, philosophical concepts are experimental tools that can create relays between practices. Deleuze pushes this line of thinking even further, arguing that concepts and practices are inherently connected, as the activity of creating concepts is a practice itself. For this reason, he insists that “theory does not express, translate, or serve to apply practice: it is practice” (Bouchard, 1977, p. 208). Undoubtedly, engaging in the creation of concepts as a practical endeavour is a challenging task. However, if the concept is practice and practice involves a concern for concepts, then we need to prepare our students for this task, as this is where an encounter may take place. In line with Deleuze, we see the teacher’s challenge as being the person who says, “Engage in the philosophy of entrepreneurship with me”. In line with Hjorth, we believe that philosophy and conceptual activism could become a useful approach “for thinking and practising entrepreneurship education” (2011, p. 60). Conceptual activism allows the classroom to be turned into a site where students can work with concepts and seek encounters. This is a collective project of “doing with me” and of co-creation, where encounters of becoming perplexed are merged with radical experimentation with philosophical concepts.

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank the Velux Foundation, Denmark, and the Bridge Program at Linnaeus University, Sweden, for supporting our research. As well, we would like to thank Tina Pedersen, who has provided indispensable language editing support.

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