Extended Abstract

Purpose of the Study

Entrepreneurship education (EE) has
been growing at an extraordinary rate over the recent decades (Katz 2003) with
an increasing supply of entrepreneurship courses in universities across all
faculties (Kuratko and Morris 2018; Sarasvathy and Venkataraman 2011; Solomon
2007). Spreading entrepreneurship across the university campus has become ‘a
new ideal’, in that it is taken for granted and self-evidently expected to add
value to the mainstream university education.

However, perhaps EE is
becoming so broadly defined that it can be taken to mean anything to anyone, a
kind of pervasive ideology (Hytti 2018) that is colonizing other disciplines
(West et al. 2009) without much to offer in return. Thus, in this paper we ask
how do educators give meaning, enact and legitimize entrepreneurship education
across the university? Through this question we problematize the expansion of EE
by investigating what is it that the educators themselves see valuable, beneficial in it and what
do they do in practice when implementing EE; whether and what way different
faculties really see to need it, and what is unique about it. Theoretically we use
the institutional logics framework (Thornton et al. 2012) as a framework to
understand how educators give meanings, enact EE and make it understandable how
educational initiatives such as EE are legitimized.

Methods

The study is based on an inductive,
thematic analysis (Gioia et al. 2012; Braun and Clarke 2006) of 14
semi-structured interviews with educators from faculties of business,
engineering and IT, language and social sciences, medicine, and life and health
sciences at one British university. Among multiple stakeholders involved in the
EE design, delivery, and research, the empirical focus of the study is on an
educator as the most competent actor responsible for bringing about changes in
the curriculum and making the legitimacy judgments (Lawrence et al. 2011;
Suddaby et al. 2017).

Results

The study participants understood
the meaning of entrepreneurship education broadly through the prisms of
culture, generic skills and idea generation skills development, aligning an
individual with their lifestyle, and true core needs, bringing value to what
one does (rather than understanding entrepreneurship education to be targeting
at venture creation). Some of the educators struggled how to classify their
practices, and others were slightly confused with the concepts of enterprise
and entrepreneurship. These terms are developed by the Quality Assurance
Authority in the UK to bring together a broader conceptualisation of
entrepreneurship education – enterprise – as developing entrepreneurial skills
and attitudes that can be applied in a wide variety of contexts and a narrow
conceptualisation of entrepreneurship education – entrepreneurship – as
applying these skills and attitudes in the context of venture creation.

In order to find the
deeper logic that connects entrepreneurship education with what educators are
seeking to accomplish by engaging with it, we explored their motivations for
the engagement. The most widespread or popular discourse in the ‘Why engage?’
conversations was by far the employability trend forming a collective motive
for engaging or identifying oneself as part of entrepreneurship education
offering in the university. Additionally, the intrinsic goal of some business
educators was to make students believe in themselves and empower towards
entrepreneurship and innovation. Many educators had practical experience in the
business world and they were motivated to engage in entrepreneurship education
in order to share their knowledge and experiences. These educators with a salient
practitioner identity also emphasized reward and enjoyment as personally
relevant reasons and beliefs for choosing to engage into entrepreneurship
education.

To understand how giving
meaning to entrepreneurship education translates into its enactment, we zoomed
into teaching practices of educators. Enactment covered learning outcomes
targeted that were paired with definitional and motivational stances of the
educators, methods employed that were paired with how educators thought
entrepreneurship education should be delivered, as well as barriers or
resistances educators face. We find congruence between the meanings educators
from different faculties make around entrepreneurship education and their
day-to-day practices. These practices tend to be based on practical experience,
rather than to be theory-driven. However, the definitional confusions faced earlier
in the meaning-giving were not present. [U1] For example, one of the
salient targeted outcomes was the development of diverse ‘soft’ skills such as
idea generation, creativity and team working. Alongside critical thinking,
developing self-awareness, and reflection, they can be labelled as
‘transferable skills’ across different contexts and specialty areas, and
directly linked to employability. However, these skills overlapped to a greater
extent with those that were already being developed in non-business faculties,
for instance, in such courses as industrial design and engineering or
leadership for health management. Nevertheless, the non-business educators
still mostly agreed that their practices belonged or can be classified under entrepreneurship
education. That said, they were somewhat cautious about the ways this education
should be organized and delivered in emphasizing the need to find
inter-disciplinary synergies for the content and method integration. Most
notably, several educators regardless of their background viewed theory as less
important than practice (in teaching entrepreneurship), yet finding a conceptual
basis as necessary. While most of the educators leaned towards using various
experiential teaching methods in their practice, non-business educators tended
to use unique faculty-specific methods such as visualisation, concept
generation, model making and prototype development. The business faculty, in
turn, used unstructured problem-solving, collaborating with industry to push
students outside classrooms to work on real-life problems, and referred to
using latest learning technologies by actively using games and simulations.

Conclusions

From
our study it is clear that entrepreneurship education has a variety of meanings
and enactments across different educators and different faculties. Following
Katz (2008) discussion on the maturity of a field this would indicate in his
view that entrepreneurship education is not yet a mature field as there is not
yet agreement between identity, meaning, and pedagogy. One crucial aspect that
differs between our study and Katz’s (2008) is that he focused on the USA and
on entrepreneurship in business schools where there appears to be agreement
that entrepreneurship education equals new venture creation. In the UK context,
entrepreneurship education has been promoted as including this narrow view of
entrepreneurship education as venture creation, but as also including a broader
concept of enterprise education. Enterprise education is defined as the process
of equipping students with an enhanced capacity to generate ideas and the
skills to make them happen in whatever is the relevant context. This broader
“enterprise education” is particularly conducive to multiple meanings and thus
enabling the spread of EE across very different educational contexts – from
medicine to languages. Furthermore, we believe that the agreement between
identity, meaning and pedagogy that Katz (2008) says indicates maturity may not
be possible for EE, which is being implemented across many different contexts.
It fills different perceived gaps in different faculties and merges with the
different field logics that dominate in these faculties. Thus, it is not
surprising that EE is interpreted and enacted in multiple and slightly
different ways.

However, a
commonality that runs throughout most educators’ interpretations and enactments
of EE is seeing it as a means for increasing student employability. We see the
role of institutional logics as key here in providing this common basis for EE.
Higher education has seen a shift towards a market-based logic where a crucial
role for universities is producing students who embody human capital, which
will be useful for a knowledge-based economy (Mampaey & Huisman, 2016). Thus,
legitimacy of higher education as a whole in terms of teaching outcomes has
been premised on producing employable graduates (Tomlinson 2012). This provides
entrepreneurship education with legitimacy as it is seen by most educators as
helping to build students’ employability. Yet, although there is a common
thread of employability, because the meaning of entrepreneurship education can
be broadly interpreted, it allows for a diversity of meanings and approaches to
enacting EE, which seems to help EE achieve legitimacy as educators can fit it
to their context.