Et flertydigt entreprenørskabsbegreb i professionsuddannelser: Mellem åbenlys og skjult meningsskabelse

From pragmatism as philosophy of science, this dissertation combines an entrepreneurship and educational perspective. I study the way students becoming teachers, social educators and health professionals (professional bachelor programmes) make meaning through entrepreneurial projects (typology) as transactions within co-constitutive educational settings. The context is a Danish first-cycle higher educational institution, UCL University College. I have detailed, rich ethnographic data (e.g. observation, video/audio, interviews, written and visual materials) from 10 cases of students realising ideas as part of these courses: Learning material design and entrepreneurship; Social innovation and entrepreneurship; Innovation across health professions. One case of three students (Occupational Therapy) is not part of a course, thus, considered extra-curricular. They collaborate with e.g. a hospital ward, a FabLab and a Student Incubator. The dissertation considers entrepreneurship as action-based as known from effectuation (e.g. Sarasvathy, 2008) and the everyday understanding, entrepreneuring, seeing the entrepreneurial phenomena as a social changing force (e.g. Hjort & Steyaert, 2004) fuelled by, and fuilling, both dark and bright sides of society (e.g. Berglund & Johansson, 2012). I investigate eight subdynamics emanating from data in this light as constitutive of a dynamic entrepreneurship concept:

1. Making meaning as we-group <-> Making meaning as I-person
2. Making meaning as application <-> Making meaning existentially
3. Making meaning as profession <–> Making meaning through market economy semantics
4. Making meaning as protagonists <–> Making meaning as antagonists
5. The point/purpose of teaching <–> The point/purpose of the students
6. New <–> Old
7. Right <–> Wrong
8. Exit from course <–> Extra-curricular step

The analysis is divided in three parts. In part one, I analyse, the dynamics 1-4 as part of a research question concerning how, why and with what consequences the students realise ideas as values-realizing dynamics (Subject-Object). In part two, I analyse, the dynamics 5-8 in light of how the educational settings are co-constitutive for student actions (Theory-Practice). In part three, I analyse in a more meta-discursive, synthesising, way how, why and with what consequences insights from part one and two are established and are establishing themselves within the existing social and cultural educational order through the meaning of educational purposes, coined by Biesta (e.g. 2014), as qualification, socialisation and subjectification.

A review of the historical roots of entrepreneurship, and my analysis, point at an ambiguous concept. I analyse, that ambiguity emerges e.g. because entrepreneurial meaning is attributed by people who realise different values as part of interactions. Values-realizing, as defined by Hodges (e.g. 2009), is heterarchical. For example, altruistic value is influenced by market values that influence the subjectification of students. We see that values can cause friction and frustration as they place themselves as underwriting demands upon the relationships between educators, external people and students. Students experience this as opposing factors e.g. as a more personal academic curiosity about whether an idea actually can enact help for people while being pulled against the value of earning money or the experience that one can create in a liberated sense but at the same time being constraint by technology. The analysis shows, that neither the reasoning of market economics, technology or an official narrative about the entrepreneur as a free liberated individual take this into account. Thus, I argue, that this can call for a pedagogy that embraces values-realizing as an underwriting system in a democratic societal perspective.

The students are discursively influenced by the intentions of meaning-making actors. This subjectivating force is also seen in the students own project-ideas as a changing force as an echo of Dewey’s tools of tool. Symbolic language e.g. promote values (two types of overarching verbs: assist people and correct behaviour), hereby creating subjectivity in relation to children, refugees, pupils, other students and citizens, as a more hidden purpose. The educational settings are co-constitutive for situations. Speech acts co-determine direction as truth and affordances for the students. Thus, these speech acts are influenced by position, authority, power and teachers’ preferences for particular theories and educational causal thinking nourishing views of errors, wright and wrong. This affects the grounds for how students experience the space for their own words and actions (the direction of fit as coined by Searle (1976)). At this point, the analysis shows why some students experience desire working on their own idea and why others feel like they are locked in a box. Desire, is, however, intertwined with students’ own considerations of values such as own time, leisure and already ongoing education (aspects of affordable loss/the plunge decision as framed by e.g. Sarasvathy). Both change factors (students’ projects), educational purposes and students’ personal career plans are mixed together.

I contribute with knowledge of underlying value-realizing processes, ambiguities and critical discussions that follow the educational typology through entrepreneurship (about existing research-gap, see for example Nabi et al. (2017)). However, this typology is not an isolated clean typology. The analysis shows a significant interplay with various content (teaching about) and an active experimenting teaching form in the classrooms (teaching for). For example, I analyse, that students experience both meaning and loss of meaning. We see the loss of meaning when content becomes unclear and must be decoded as new discourses such as, the pitch, public innovation, Business Model Canvas. At this point, the analysis draws on a more critical understanding of entrepreneurship education (CEE) and shows that qualification is influenced by more implicit educational purposes of socialisation and subjectification e.g. the entrepreneurial self as coined by Bröchling (2016). This multi-dimensionality can be addressed in future research. Overall, the dissertation covers yet another gap: The concept of entrepreneurship as embedded in a professional welfare-education.