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Book Review: Revitalizing Entrepreneurship Education. Adopting a Critical Approach in the Cassroom

Authors:
first section, Ethics in Research, opens with an ac-
count of the Liability of Foreignness,which affects
PhD students and early-career academics who are
unfamiliar with the rules of research and publica-
tion, and do not have the experience of their more
senior colleagues to inform their decisions. The
authors describe the liabilities of newness,”“re-
source dependence,and outsidernessthat face
new entrants to the Academy, and while these ex-
periences will be well-recognized by those who are
currently navigating the world of academia for the first
time, they also offer a useful reminder of similar ex -
periences to th ose who are more established. The
section goes on to discuss some ethical hazards of
academic research, including a detailed account of
how to deal with data and written work in an ethical
way, questions about submitting similar papers to
different journals at the same time, and slicing and
dicingdata to get as many papers as possible out of
one data set. The issues covered in this chapter are
important and the advice offered is clear and prac-
tical, such as the originality matrixin Chapter 5,
which can be used by academics to identify whether
multiple papers are suitably distinct to be considered
original.
Much of the second section, Ethics in Teaching,
deals with relatively new challenges facing teach-
ing staff in higher education, and these discussions
will be equally useful to experienced academics
and early-career academics. The authors reflect on
problems such as the risk of a race to the bottomin
student workload and assessment as academics
attempt to respond to declining student satisfaction,
and the increasing availability of university-style
content online, often free to access, which threatens
to undermine the perceived value of a traditional
university degree. In both instances the advice given
is collegiate, encouraging discussion among col-
leagues to identify collaborative ways to navigate
our changing environment. The chapter entitled
Teaching Versus Preachingis particularly timely
and will be of great interest to those involved in
teaching Business Ethics, where the risk of preach-
ingrather than teachingis great. The discussion
is a valuable reminder of our positions of power in
the classroom and of the respect we owe to our
students.
The final section, Ethics in Professional Life, ad-
dresses a range of other ethical issues that academics
may encounter throughout their careers, from un-
reliable job offers to the inevitable conflicts of in-
terest that arise from holding leadership roles in
professional organizations. This section engages
with behaviors that are often taken for granted, but
are in fact worthy of critical consideration. For ex-
ample, Chapter 23 deals with the importance of
showing up(to events, meetings, and confer-
ences), and explains why it is important to attend
events one has agreed to attend. This is compli-
mented, however, by an acknowledgment of the
limitations to academicstime and ability to serve
in Chapter 25, Managing University Service Work,
which provides helpful guidelines on how to de-
termine which service tasks to accept and how to
politely decline tasks when appropriate. The section
closes with chapters about when, how, and why we
should pursue extracurricularengagements, such
as media engagement and consultancy work.
I have recommended The Ethical Professor to my
fellow early-career academics, and it is a book we
will keep coming back to as we progress through our
careers. It is well-designed for the classroom, and the
discussion questions at the end of each chapter make
it easy to use in the teaching of any PhD-related
courses or induction sessions for new members of
staff. The tone of the book and the frequent reference
to the authorsand contributorsfirst-hand experi-
ences create the sense that the reader is being given
friendly advice from a senior colleague who is keen
to help (although this should not deter more senior
members of staff who will find as much, if not more,
to gain from this advice). Another great strength of
the book is that despite being about the dilemmas
that academics face, it regularly reminds the reader
of some of the joys of academia. This, as much as the
acknowledgment of the challenges, will be wel-
comed by those starting and continuing their aca-
demic careers.
Revitalizing Entrepreneurship Education. Adopt-
ing a Critical Approach in the Classroom, by Karin
Berglund & Karen Verduijn (Eds.). Routledge: Lon-
don and New York. £115, ISBN: 9781138213791.
Reviewed by MichałZawadzki, J¨
onkoping Uni-
versity, J¨
onkoping International Business School,
Sweden (michal.zawadzki@ju.se).
This book covers critical entrepreneurship educa-
tion as an emancipatory space that gives the possi-
bility to reinvent entrepreneurship by uprooting
it from the neoliberal agenda. Too often, scholars
reduce contemporary entrepreneurship education
to the questions How to make a business?or
How to become an entrepreneur?without leaving
space for learning responsibility for social matters.
2019 643Book & Resource Reviews
Exclusively linking entrepreneurship education to
the issues of employability or money generates a
false conviction that we should assess knowledge in
terms of market success or failure. Many exclude
critical distance from their reflection about the re-
lationship between the market and knowledge, thus
presenting education as a tool to achieve taken-for-
granted aims connected with employability. When
based on instrumental rationality, knowledge be-
comes an object of individual inquiry instead of
collective embodied experience; that is, teachers
become only performative workers who ought to
spread useful information about technical compe-
tencies. In this situation, Revitalizing Entrepreneur-
ship Education: Adopting a Critical Approach in the
Classroom poses important questions. Namely, how
can we restore responsibility for social concerns and
the Others in entrepreneurship education, and thus,
increase the quality of entrepreneurship action in
society?
This edited collection explores critical entrepre-
neurship education as a shift from entrepreneurship
as a money-making venture to entrepreneurship as
responsibility for the Others; from teaching how to
play the rules of the business game to critical un-
derstanding how the rules can be played with. In-
stead of socializing students into the roles of
being their own producers, marketers, and sellers
and instead of treating teachers as performative
workerswe should maintain critical reflection to
recognize entrepreneurship as a collective effort
with social consequences. We may reach this goal by
way of creative modes of curriculum redesign based
on didactic innovations and artistic provocations.
In this sense, the book reveals the importance of dif-
ferentiating entrepreneurship education by imple-
menting critical pedagogy and critical management
education in the classroom, which may then help
to normalize critical entrepreneurship learning and
emancipate students along with teachers.
Revitalizing Entrepreneurship Education explores
the gap in the literature regarding the successful
connection between deconstruction and recon-
struction of entrepreneurship education. Exploring
this gap raises critical questions about taken-for-
granted and hidden assumptions about entrepre-
neurship. However, the same critical reflection
should not discourage students from taking re-
sponsibility for specific actions. The learning envi-
ronment should be deliberative and focused on
criticalreflection about societal issuesconnected with
entrepreneurshiplike social exclusion or environ-
mental pollutionbut it should also offer students
practical tools. Hence, this book provides examples of
connecting skeptical, yet hopeful approaches toward
entrepreneurship education and practice.
The books contributions indicate that entrepre-
neurship is not a single university course, but rather
a logic of contemporary life. Therefore, the main
ethical task of critical entrepreneurship education is
to deconstruct the enterprising selfas a product of
naturalized neoliberalism, which is deeply rooted in
the mainstream conventional understanding of en-
trepreneurship. Enterprise culture stems from the
assumption of autonomous and economically ra-
tional individuals, ready for constant reinvention of
their competitive entrepreneurial competencies to
perform value-neutral money-making. When resist-
ing instrumental rationality and neoliberalism in
entrepreneurial education, teachers may introduce
students to the literature of critical entrepreneurship
studies to show the possibility to critically engage in
the world. We should introduce and analyze con-
cepts such as power, neoliberalism, entrepreneurial
self, or governmentality in participatory discussions
and collective art performances that offer students
space for resistance.
As the reviewed book reveals, to reorient entre-
preneurship education, students should receive
opportunities to learn for the sake of learning, when
knowledge and creativity become the main source of
curiosity and passion, without expectations of pro-
ductivity. We should treat problem-solving not as the
goal, but as the method of teaching and learning.
Finally, we teachers must develop critical reflection
about assumptions of the knowledge we teach, and
then, discuss these assumptions with our colleagues
and students. The ability to see through the power of
neoliberal performativity that affects our work arms
us with the potential to reconstruct the ways of
teaching toward more critical pedagogical strategies.
Revitalizing Entrepreneurship Education has 11
chapters. In their Foreword, Martin Tillmar, Pascal
Dey, and Denise Fletcher present critical entrepre-
neurship education as an emancipatory field that
allows distancing oneself from the neoliberal as-
sumptions of entrepreneurship. In the Introduction,
Karin Berglund and Karen Verduijn analyze the
main assumptions of critical entrepreneurship edu-
cation by reflecting on the possibility of connecting
deconstruction and reconstruction strategies. In
Chapter 1, Education or Exploitation? Reflecting
on the Entrepreneurial University and the Role of
the Entrepreneurship Educator,Richard Tunstall
through empirical vignettes testifies to the possibility
of reconstructing the entrepreneurial university
644 DecemberAcademy of Management Learning & Education
without reducing the discourse of change into an ar-
tificial opposition of evil entrepreneurial capitalism
and real academic freedom. Tunstalls linking of
entrepreneurship with social change and civic
attitudesas an outcome of learning sheds new light
on entrepreneurship education and the role of the
contemporary university.
In Chapter 2, Entrepreneurship in Societal Change:
Students as Reflecting Entrepreneurs?,Jessica
Lindbergh and Birgitta Schwartz analyze their ex-
periences of teaching a university course about so-
cial entrepreneurship. Their story gives us not only
the possibility of seeing concrete ideas of critical
entrepreneurial education in action, but also of
deepening our understanding of the studentsdiffi-
culties when connecting reflection on entrepre-
neurship knowledge with the critical reconstruction
of entrepreneurial practice. In Chapter 3, The Re-
flexivity Grid: Exploring Conscientization in Entre-
preneurship Education,Leona Achtenhagen and
Bengt Johannisson reflect on Freirean conscientiza-
tionas a means to enhance critical reflection on en-
trepreneurship by presenting alternative pedagogical
approaches: conscientization through emancipation
and articulation. In Chapter 4, From Entrepreneur-
ship to Entrepreneuring: Transforming Healthcare Edu-
cation,Hanna Jansson, Madelen Lek, and Cormac
McGrath utilize Bourdieus concept of habitusto
analyze the difficulties connected with introduc-
ing critical entrepreneurship values into healthcare
education and medical practice.
In Chapter 5, A Space on the Side of the Road:
Creating a Space for a Critical Approach to Entre-
preneurship,Pam Seanor shares her reflection on
her personal experience of the critical approach to
entrepreneurship in the classroom by focusing on
understanding the resistance from students and
other colleagues toward her approach. In Chapter 6,
Conceptual Activism: Entrepreneurship Education
as a Philosophical Project,Christian Garmann
Johnsen, Lena Olaison, and Bent Meier Sørensen
introduce conceptual activismas a tool for prob-
lematizing the opportunity to invite students not
only to rethink their approach to entrepreneurship,
but also actively create alternative concepts.
In Chapter 7, Bringing Gender In: The Promise of
Critical Feminist Pedagogy,Sally Jones reflects on
the discourse of gendered entrepreneurship that
shows how she creates a space in the classroom for
challenging the taken-for-granted assumptions of
efficient entrepreneurial masculinity.In Chapter
8, Entrepreneurship and the Entrepreneurial Self:
Creating Alternatives Through Entrepreneurship
Education?,Annika Skoglund and Karin Berglund
meticulously discuss their critical entrepreneurship
course based on the deconstruction of entrepre-
neurship as enterprisingand denaturalization of
entrepreneurial self through the reconstruction of
alternative types of practice. In Chapter 9, Between
Critique and Affirmation: An Interventionist Ap-
proach to Entrepreneurship Education,Bernhard
Resch, Patrizia Hoyer, and Chris Steyaert analyze the
interventionist approach to entrepreneurship edu-
cation connected with engaging students in creative
group performances, which may allow joining the
critical and affirmative strategy to uproot neolib-
eralism in entrepreneurship education.
In Chapter 10, Moving Entrepreneurship,Karen
Verduijn reflects on her university course based on
the ontology of becomingand a processual ap-
proach, in which students prepare films and develop
their critical sensitivity toward the assumptions of
entrepreneurship as an active intervention in the
world. In Chapter 11, On Vulnerability and Pos-
sibility in Critical Entrepreneurship Education:
Mutual Learning Between Students and Teachers,
Anna Wettermark, Andr´
eK
˚
arfors, Oskar Lif, Alice
Wickstr¨
om, Sofie Wiessner, and Karin Berglund
analyze the vulnerabilities of teachers and students
in entrepreneurship education by emphasizing stu-
dentsvoice in struggling against neoliberal shame
and guilt, thus creating a deliberative space for de-
veloping competencies of caring capitalism.The
same chapter includes interesting reflections by
students who partook in the course on critical en-
trepreneurship. In the afterword, Ulla Hytti relates
the different chapters of the book and elaborates on
critical entrepreneurship education as an emanci-
patory field, allowing us to resist mainstream neo-
liberal entrepreneurial education that transforms
students into unreflective consumers involved in the
simulation of McEducation.
Two contributions from Revitalizing Entrepre-
neurship Education require special mention. First is
Richard Tunstalls contribution for his eye-opening
effort to juxtapose the prevailing neoliberal type of
entrepreneurship with the mainstream instrumental
model of university reforms. That is, entrepreneur-
ship increasingly becomes the taken-for-granted
ideology of higher education policy-makers, who
very often reduce the understanding of university to
the notion of a profitable enterprise obliged to produce
employable students and undergo quantitative audits
and ranking games. However, Tunstall does not my-
thologize the traditional model of the university against
the false entrepreneurial model. The cornerstone of
2019 645Book & Resource Reviews
defending the university from neoliberal weaknesses
is the deconstruction and reconstruction of entre-
preneurship education. These actions may be pos-
sible by giving students a space for critical resistance
to neoliberalism, albeit with an affirmative attitude
toward finding new, more collegial, and democratic
modes of entrepreneurship.
Second, special mention goes to the contribution
by Anna Wettermark, Andr´
eK
˚
arfors, Oskar Lif, Alice
Wickstr¨
om, Sofie Wiessner, and Karin Berglund.
Their text shows how important it is to learn more
about anti-neoliberal mutual learning of entrepre-
neurship between students and teachers that happens
in classrooms. The hyperindividualism of profit-
oriented entrepreneurial selves increases the level of
shame and guilt over potential failure. Instead, Wet-
termark and colleagues foreground how collaborative
learning may offer the right resistance strategy to
become a reflexive decision-maker. Hence, socially
conscious entrepreneurshipbased on compassion-
ate capitalismenables a reduction in the exclusion
of those who do not play the neoliberal games, which
in turn pushes them to the margins of the mainstream
entrepreneurial discourse. Moreover, the ethical ap-
proach to the Other and learning from her is a way to
deconstruct the entrepreneurial self and disengage
from playing the capitalistic games. Thus, discussing
moral dilemmas of entrepreneurship with students
and giving them the right to question the authority
of teachers may create an emancipatory space of dis-
obedience toward neoliberal principles.
Revitalizing Entrepreneurship Education is a
valuable book founded on careful reflection about
critical entrepreneurship education with specific ex-
amples of reflexive approaches enacted in the class-
rooms; that is, resisting the hidden agenda of
neoliberalism through increasing responsibility for
the Others by focusing on the affirmation of new en-
trepreneurship strategies presents us with a chance
for effective performance in harmony with ethical
vulnerability. One of the basic implications of this
book is that, when denaturalizing entrepreneurship,
we should strive to find a balance between the de-
construction and reconstruction of entrepreneurship
education; that is, between the reflexive critique of
entrepreneurial self and the development of practice-
oriented alternative ways of socially relevant actions.
Moreover, the book reveals that much work remains
to be done to resist the mainstream approach of
treating universities and business schools as places of
entrepreneurial, market-driven consumption. Until
universities become tools for human emancipation,
currently obscured by the false conviction of direct
relationship between education and the job market,
the reproduction of forgetting the Others in entrepre-
neurship practice will continue.
This book allows us to draw the following agenda for
academic teachers and higher education policy-makers:
We should differentiate critical entrepreneurship
education as an emancipatory field of uprooting
entrepreneurship from ethically false, neoliberal
values, which narrow the education to a mecha-
nism of capital reproduction;
We should develop an ethical dimension of en-
trepreneurship as crucial for the reflexive prac-
tice, which allows us to better understand the
accompanying moral dilemmas and engage in so-
cially relevant actions;
We should introduce collaborative learning in
courses on entrepreneurshipalong with innovative
didactic methods based on art performance, which
will allow us to shift from entrepreneurial selves
toward responsibility for Others;
We should support the humanistic models of
university reforms, based on the Humboldtian
model of higher education, with a strong focus on
the social relevance of teaching and research,
which will allow us to develop civic attitudes in
the classroom instead of reproducing market-
oriented consumerism.
To summarize, I propose at least one way to build
upon Revitalizing Entrepreneurship Education. If
we want our society to be built upon critically ori-
ented citizens, ready to take responsibility for the
Othersin contrast to profit-oriented ignorants, fo-
cused on fulfilling egoistic demandsteaching and
learning responsibility through entrepreneurship
practice, collective ethical action, and engagement in
solving social problems needs to be the key part of the
new, humanistic model of business education and of
university for the common good. The sooner we re-
vise entrepreneurial model of education, the better
for the quality of democracy.
American Indian Business Principles & Practices,
by Deanna M. Kennedy, Charles F. Harrington,
Amy Klemm Verbos, Daniel Stewart, Joseph Scott
Gladstone, and Gavin Clarkson, 2017.
Reviewed by K. M. Gambrell, Gonzaga University,
Spokane WA (gambrell@gonzaga.edu).
Ethnic minorities in the United States remain un-
derrepresented in a number of occupations and
higher positions (Yelamarthi & Mawasha, 2008). This
646 DecemberAcademy of Management Learning & Education
... Thus, IS researchers could leverage the task-technology fit theory (Goodhue & Thompson, 1995) Bell & Bell (2020) show that researchers could leverage educational learning theories and philosophies like behaviorism/cognitivism, constructivism, Schön's theory of reflection-in-action (Schön, 2017), Mezirow's theory of transformative learning (Mezirow, 1997), and Kolb's theory of experiential learning (Kolb, 1984) to better understand how business games could deliver the best experiential entrepreneurship education, to help in answering the aforementioned research questions. As sustainability remains a global concern of growing importance in management education , future research could also investigate the effect of business games in helping with the integration of sustainable development practices in entrepreneurship education, which is a necessary step towards the revitalization of entrepreneurial education to adopt a socially responsible approach rather than a solely profit-oriented one (Zawadzki, 2019). Table 1 summarizes the research questions raised and the rationale supporting the need for research to answer the questions. ...
Article
Full-text available
In response to ongoing philosophical and pedagogical debates in university-based entrepreneurship education (EE) research, this study offers a cross-disciplinary perspective of how hospitality management students experience a high-stakes, experiential entrepreneurship project. We present vignettes of dialogues, experiences, and interactions among “student-manager” members of a small group engaged in developing and implementing a real-world, fine dining pop-up restaurant. By triangulating our analysis of classroom observation data, social network maps, and student artifacts, we chronicle four vignettes of how students experience learning during ideation, design, launch, and evaluation modules. Theory–practice gaps, coping humor in load–overload states, and complex affective–cognitive interactions emerge as salient elements of high-stakes experiential EE. We discuss implications for learners and educators and put forward recommendations to inform and improve the design of cross-disciplinary models of experiential EE.
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