On entrepreneurship, in a different voice? Finnish entrepreneurship education and pupils’ critical narratives of the entrepreneur

Abstract

This study set out to explore the narratives of entrepreneurship that 15–16-year-old pupils in their last grade of comprehensive school produced in the Finnish annual writing competition Good Enterprise! We focused on narratives that can be categorized as tragedies, satires, comedies, and crime stories (N = 219). In these stories, the pupils challenge the political ideal of the risk-taking entrepreneur by arguing for sustainable development and social justice as bases for entrepreneurship. On the one hand, the critical representations of entrepreneurs arise from the Protestant work ethic, and thus the values constructed in these stories are close to stories that can be characterized as romances of the modest entrepreneur where the motive for entrepreneurship was not the accumulation of material wealth. On the other hand, these critical stories represent “entrepreneur and consumer pathologies,” and hence make a mockery of the core neoliberal values of autonomy, competition, and choice.

Keywords:

• entrepreneurship education
• comprehensive school
• pupils’ critical narratives of entrepreneurship

Notes

1. The pupils are 15 or 16 years old in the ninth grade of comprehensive school. Our information on the participating pupils is limited to their school, grade, and gender.