Epilogue

Critical entrepreneurship education: a form of resistance to McEducation?

Ulla Hytti

Introduction

Universities are increasingly expected to strengthen their role in society (Jarvis, 2013). This also suggests a transition towards the “entrepreneurial university” (Etzkowitz, 2014; Foss & Gibson, 2015) and a reorientation of university strategies and policies to promoting entrepreneurship and societal impact (Siegel & Wright, 2015). One tenet in this development is increasing the supply of entrepreneurship education and training modules campus-wide, and making entrepreneurship topics mandatory or at least highly recommended to all university students irrespective of their discipline. This strong wind of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurialism into the universities is not without critics (also see Chapter 1 of this volume). The resisting voices are asking if the move towards the entrepreneurial university will erase any attempts to safeguard the traditional values and threaten the academic ethos of the Humboldtian university (Philpott, Dooley, O’Reilly & Lupton, 2011).

The advocates of the entrepreneurial university on the other hand are affirmative that the transition is inevitable and base their opinion on several arguments. First, youth unemployment is alarmingly high in several EU members states (Eurofound, 2015). This combined with the fact that educational attainment levels of the population have improved significantly over the last 30 years in the EU (Eurostat, 2016) is contributing towards the understanding that self-employment and entrepreneurship are also real alternatives for university graduates. This is also reflected in the fairly positive attitudes of young people towards entrepreneurship as a career option in many countries (Eurofound, 2015).

Second, the careers are also envisioned to be in change (Arthur, 2008; Rodrigues & Guest, 2010). On one hand the changes in organizations are suggested to provoke the “boundaryless career”, where individuals move between firms and in and out of self-employment (DeFillippi & Arthur, 1994), and build up a “career” portfolio that includes different forms of paid, unpaid and voluntary work, and non-work (Clinton, Totterdell & Wood, 2006). On the other hand, recent analyses suggest the boundaries are not actually dissolving but rather there is a growing complexity and more subjective perspective on career boundaries (Rodrigues & Guest, 2010). Either way, it is suggested that universities need to equip students with new kinds of “employability skills” and “entrepreneurial skills” in order to manage their careers in the changing landscape (Sewell & Dacre Pool, 2010).

Third, new technologies in the form of digitalization and artificial intelligence, for example, are enabling new kinds of entrepreneurial opportunities (Grégoire & Shepherd, 2012) where the educated youth graduating from universities may have a particular advantage in making use of their knowledge in the entrepreneurial arena. Finally, many countries that have had a relatively strong role for the state in the society are trying to cut government spending. Thus, there is an increasing demand that social entrepreneurship and innovation are needed to combat social problems and address social challenges (Lawrence, Phillips & Tracy, 2012), in which the universities and university education have a role to play.

So are the critical voices towards entrepreneurship in the universities oblivious to or in denial from these emerging trends in their surroundings and societies? Are they embracing divergent worldviews coupled with the different sets of beliefs about the future where we are educating and preparing our youth? Or, where can we trace the source and location of resistance towards entrepreneurship?

McEducation – students as consumers for entrepreneurship (education)

I argue that the academics are not resisting the entry of entrepreneurship into the university per se but they are resisting the ways it is introduced and the ways entrepreneurship is understood. This book is not about criticizing and stopping entrepreneurship but about enacting it with more concerns for the context, aiming at reflexivity, and understanding the bigger picture. The resistance is targeted at the narrow interpretation of entrepreneurship, and at the implementation of entrepreneurship as a managerial, top-down project (Philpott et al., 2011; Kolhinen, 2015), as well as at understanding university as a place of educational consumption and students as consumers. This is discussed also through the metaphor of the McDonaldization of higher education (Ritzer, 1998), that I find insightful for thinking about entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education in universities.

“Employability” is introduced as a performance measure for universities, and possibly one of the main drivers for strengthening the entrepreneurship agenda (Berglund, 2013). The students as consumers have the right to education that guarantees their employability, jobs and careers in thriving industries (Ritzer, 1998), irrespective of any changes in the career landscape. Thus, university students not only in business schools but also in all other disciplines have the right to entrepreneurship education that transforms their arts or social sciences degrees into better “currency” from the perspective of employers. And if entrepreneurship is underlined as a career option, the responsibility for the employment is not with the university or the employers but with the individuals themselves.

Following this idea that every student has the “right” to entrepreneurship education (and an obligation to become entrepreneurial) in the university creates a massive demand for these educational services. With the current aspiration to respond to the need, the university responds by offering entrepreneurship courses campus-wide. They do not typically value academic achievement and theoretical abilities for entrepreneurship but emphasize practical and social competences and skills (Komulainen, Naskali, Korhonen & Keskitalo-Foley, 2014). Thus, there is a firm belief that experiential methods – learning from experience – will lead to better learning outcomes than other “more traditional” methods (Kozlinska, 2016), and practice is a more efficient vehicle for learning than theory. This is particularly demonstrated by the primacy of learning through/for over learning about approaches (Lackéus & Williams-Middleton, 2015). And indeed, students (consumers) are often satisfied with these “hands-on” courses, which has been taken as a signal of their usefulness. Yet, this may also signal that other courses are not intellectually comfortable (see Chapters 5 and 7 of this volume) or they may not be familiar with the alternatives (Parker & Jary, 1995; Chapters 9 and 10 of this volume).

These university entrepreneurship courses are typically run as venture creation programmes that represent standardized practically oriented courses ran in a similar fashion across the globe adopted from e.g. Junior Achievement models (n.d.). Through these courses the university fosters an approach to entrepreneurship education that shares a strong focus on profit-oriented start-ups and new venture creation, and fosters a consensus where “the core of entrepreneurship is related to the process of opportunities, new venture creation, growth, risk and acquisition and allocation of resources” (Kyrö, 2015, p. 610). Previously, business planning was the key content and the process to be learned (Honig, 2004) but now business plans have given way to business model generation (Osterwalder & Pigneur, 2010) or lean start-up models (Blank, 2013) as key content in entrepreneurship education, supported by practices of drafting canvases, pitching exercises and competitions (Brown, 2017). Hence, the conclusion from this is that higher education has become less of a human emancipation tool and more of a capital reproduction mechanism (Da Costa & Silva Saraiva, 2012).

Sometimes the demand from the consumers – the students – is so high that mass customization and use of technology is needed to meet the demand. Courses are run as online courses and make use of existing online resources. This is also helpful in meeting the students’ expectations of education to be nearby and operating around the clock and saving money in comparison to the other forms of education. Thus, following Ritzer’s (1998) ideas of McDonaldization, entrepreneurship education can be seen analogous to the fast-food restaurant as a highly cost-efficient machine for dispensing hamburgers and similar highly standardized foods.

While the venture creation programmes may not fully live up to the fast-food restaurant analogy in terms of being particularly cost effective since typically they will necessitate time resources from faculty, their reliance on standardized content and models embedded in the business model and lean canvas alleviates some of these problems. Since in terms of their content and methods they are so alike, the analogy may still be applicable.

In this McEducation version of entrepreneurship education the university takes a one-size-fits-all approach by claiming that once entrepreneurship courses and services are offered campus-wide and are open to all, they are available to all. Yet, this assumption has been questioned (Komulainen, Korhonen & Räty, 2009). Inclusion cannot be achieved simply by increasing numbers, and thus inclusion does not in itself bring greater equality (Delanty, 2003). The strong new venture creation focus, often combined with a technology or science bias, means that in reality the entrepreneurship becomes an elitist and narrow approach and the vast majority of students for example in humanities and social sciences become excluded from them. This one-size fits all model is also oblivious to the questions of gender, class or ethnicity (Berglund, Lindgren & Packendorff, 2017). Importantly, all axiological debates in entrepreneurship education are silenced, marked by the lack of “why” questions (Kyrö, 2015).

Where to from here? Bringing back the why!

I advocate that the success of the entrepreneurship agenda is strongly dependent on whether or not the university relies on its core Humboldtian values of criticality and reflexivity in introducing entrepreneurship into the university. In this sense my take on entrepreneurship education will not emphasize the dualism or the choice between the traditional academic and entrepreneurial values. Rather, I wish to join Fayolle (2013) and Kyrö (2015) among others in their call for more reflexive approaches and reflexivity as a necessary condition in furthering entrepreneurship education. In this book the reader can see how reflexive approaches are enacted in the classroom. The McDonaldization of education is not a guarantee of success for embedding entrepreneurship at the university, on the contrary, it has the risk of becoming a functionalist pervasive ideology that may be taken to mean anything to anyone, and it easily and often becomes a contested concept (an analogy developed based on ideas presented of “leaderism” in Alvesson and Spicer (2012).

Entrepreneurship education in universities will develop by bringing back the axiological debate (do we want to? should we? and how should we do it?) (Kyrö, 2015) and focusing on the why question, and continuously investigating what is happening, what kind of ideas we are offering either consciously or accidentally, how our approaches are inviting some and excluding others. How our students are accepting, applying and transforming entrepreneurship and what are the outcomes and consequences of these actions? We should question the one-size-fits all approach and reflect on different learning approaches and entrepreneurship education practices we could and should introduce for teaching and learning of entrepreneurship, which the contributors in this book seek to do.

Despite the popularity of the new venture creation approaches, it is necessary to remind ourselves that university (entrepreneurship) education should not be equalled to “pleasing customers, but about giving them the intellectual resources to challenge establish ways of doing things – however uncomfortable that may be for them and others” (Parker & Jary, 1995, p. 333). We must be sensitive to the polyphony within the universities (Kolhinen, 2015; Chapter 1 of this volume) and not to reproduce unreflexively normative ideas of entrepreneurship (Chapter 7), but allow the different voices (Chapter 9) and also use the different disciplines (Chapter 4) to develop their own approaches (such as in Chapter 6). Universities should facilitate active sense making both for faculty and students in order create room for developing their (and our) own understanding of – and also questioning – the content and meaning for entrepreneurship in the different disciplines. Following the contributors and colleagues in this book we should continue to invite our students to explore if they identify with various entrepreneurial identities and how they make sense of entrepreneurship and their entrepreneurial abilities and futures from their different social positions (such as gender, discipline, family wealth).

Thus, it is here where I believe that this volume will be an important resource to the extent that hopefully it will transition into becoming the “mainstream entrepreneurship education” or at least contribute to informing the “uncritical entrepreneurship education”. To elaborate on the McEducation analogy, entrepreneurship need not to be consumed as fast-food between real meals (“real disciplines”) but it could become one of the ingredients together with the other disciplines that are applied to create delicious meals. But it is equally important to cultivate an understanding that it may be possible to cook a nice meal without this one ingredient!

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