Entrepreneurship Education at the Crossroads: Challenging Taken-for-Granted Assumptions and Opening New Perspectives

Abstract

This work presents a synthesis of a debate regarding taken-for-granted assumptions and challenges in entrepreneurship education, matured after a developmental workshop organized to increase the research salience of the field. From the five contributions selected, three challenges emerge. The first is recognizing that participants’ representations about entrepreneurship play a crucial role in defining goals and impact of entrepreneurship education; second, integrating new perspectives of conceiving entrepreneurship into the current models of teaching entrepreneurship; and, lastly, facilitating the integration of entrepreneurship knowledge into practice. These challenges opened up to a conception of entrepreneurship education as a dynamic concept reflecting personal values, societal changes, and cultural differences. As a result, learning places of entrepreneurship education promotes exploration and not adaptation to existing schemes, where personal models for practicing entrepreneurship have room to emerge. Defining knowledge priorities, instead of targeting knowledge exhaustiveness, becomes of greatest importance to make entrepreneurship education‘s impact more relevant.

Problematising philosophical assumptions in EE's Invisible College

“…We do not need to go too far in EE to hear colleagues articulating some cold creeping in. Concerns being expressed range from a lack of legitimacy and a lack of criticality in research to a taken-for-grantedness, and an exclusionary, environmentally and socially unsustainable potential in practice (Fayolle, 2013;Fayolle et al, 2016;Berglund and Verduijn, 2018;Hytti, 2018;Loi et al, 2021). If these are the troubles and complaints observed at the surface level, Midgley would ask us to think about the hidden system of ideas which underlies what we can see, that is, what problems there might be with the "philosophical plumbing".…”

“…Such research goals align with ambitions for more inclusive, transformational, environmentally and socially sustainable EE (Hytti, 2018; Ratten and Jones, 2018; Neergard et al. , 2020; Loi et al , 2021); indeed, it is difficult to envision how changes at the surface level and the practice level are likely or possible without attending to the assumptions which underpin them in research. Without paying attention to the philosophical plumbing (Midgley, 1992), it is more likely to imagine a situation where we continue to notice the creeping cold, but we do not attend to the hidden system of ideas that keeps things the way they are.…”

“…Entrepreneurship education (EE) is said to be at a crossroads (Loi et al , 2021). Policy makers, educators and individuals have been persuaded of its value and courses and programmes have proliferated exponentially; yet EE itself, as an academic field, is said to have limited legitimacy (Loi et al , 2021; Fayolle et al. , 2016).…”

“…Entrepreneurship education (EE) is said to be at a crossroads (Loi et al, 2021). Policy makers, educators and individuals have been persuaded of its value and courses and programmes have proliferated exponentially; yet EE itself, as an academic field, is said to have limited legitimacy (Loi et al, 2021;Fayolle et al, 2016). Indeed, EE may even be "a victim" of its broad and rapid success if its assumptions and intentions are not debated, and therefore these assumptions sound more like power and ideology (Loi et al, 2021, p. 9).…”

“…, 2016). Indeed, EE may even be “a victim” of its broad and rapid success if its assumptions and intentions are not debated, and therefore these assumptions sound more like power and ideology (Loi et al , 2021, p. 9). Questions over the relevance, coherence, appropriateness and social usefulness of EE have been asked for some time (Fayolle, 2013), with a lack of criticality and unquestioning reproduction of taken-for-granted practice and assumptions limiting its legitimacy (Berglund and Verduijn, 2018).…”