Rethinking and reconceptualising entrepreneurship education a legacy from Alistair Anderson

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to extend the theoretical foundations of entrepreneurship education by integrating several of the most relevant lessons from Anderson’s contribution into current conceptualizations. We identify three main dimensions of Anderson’s work useful for our purpose: conceptualization of entrepreneurship; network and social capital as mechanisms to explain entrepreneurship as a socially embedded phenomenon; and epistemological and methodological reflection. These dimensions enrich the debate on the strategic dimensions targeting, connecting and reflecting suggested to advance the field of entrepreneurship education. We highlight important implications that help us reflect on the value of entrepreneurship education by emphasizing the role of the social dimension in teaching entrepreneurship, the importance of understanding entrepreneurship as a complex phenomenon to identify goals and more specifically tailor pedagogy, and the need to question methods of inquiry as the field evolves and expands its area of investigation.

KEYWORDS:

• Alistair Anderson’s legacy
• entrepreneurship
• entrepreneurship education
• targeting
• connecting
• reflecting strategies in entrepreneurship education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The following sentence from Dodd et al. (Drakopoulou Dodd, Anderson, and Jack 2021, 10) exemplifies the importance of considering multiple perspectives in entrepreneurship: ‘There are as many entrepreneurs as there are dances, and far more interesting dances than the elite’s choreographed pirouettes.’

2. We searched for contributions by Anderson A.R. in both Web of Science and Scopus. We combined the results from each database and we obtained a list of 155 articles that is available upon request. While Table 1 lists the contributions we used to support our effort to reconceptualize the value of entrepreneurship education, Table 2 lists contributions to the development of other entrepreneurship-specific topics. To highlight the most relevant papers for both Tables 1 and 2, we used Google Scholar citations to avoid any differences due to the merging of contributions indexed in Web of Science and Scopus.

3. See EntreComp: the European Entrepreneurship Competence Framework: https://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=738&langId=en&pubId=8201&furtherPubs=yes (Last access in August 2021).