Shaping and negotiating entrepreneurial selves in academic entrepreneurship education

Abstract

Entrepreneurship education appears to be a way to extend market orientation in academic education into pedagogical arrangements and students’ self-understanding. This we find in a case study of a startup entrepreneurship course designed and promoted by the international Junior Achievement -network and organised co-operatively by four Finnish higher education institutions. We examine how the course practices do not only develop students’ business skills but also aim to shape their entrepreneurial mind-sets and behaviour, simultaneously promoting practical and vocational approach to academic education. We are interested in how students internalise these practices and, specifically, how they challenge and resist the expectations targeted to them. Our analysis of the course materials and students’ reflections represents entrepreneurship education as a governing technology, which draws on market logic in attempting to make students employable, autonomous and proactive entrepreneurial subjects. Students seem to have internalised the favoured subjectivity, but they also subtly break the expectations when they are given a chance. Applying market logic in the pedagogical practices of academic education tends to dismiss and ignore the value of abstract theoretical cultivation and redefines the roles of a teacher and a student.