Ethnographic Evaluation of Entrepreneurship Education in Higher Education; a methodological conceptualisation
Abstract
Ethnography is a research method that seeks to gain a detailed understanding of how informants see their world and how they understand the problems that they confront in everyday life. As such it is an ideal method to both study the practices that entrepreneurship educators engage in and the discursive and cognitive shifts that learners go through as they seek a more entrepreneurial understanding. The paper suggests that the flexibility and rigorous nature of ethnography provides an appropriate tool for evaluating entrepreneurship teaching in educational institutions. Entrepreneurship is a practice that has always been of significance to economic development and is increasingly playing an important part in many aspects of 21st century life. While the discourses that surround entrepreneurship have been widely contested they have nevertheless seduced many nation states into searching for new ways to encourage and sustain economic growth. These discourses are evident in policies that use rhetoric about creating more entrepreneurs through explicitly encouraging entrepreneurial behaviour by teaching entrepreneurship to students at all levels of education. The introduction of entrepreneurship education into Higher Education discourses can be traced throughout the western world over the last two decades. Whether talking about starting businesses, often the focus for American universities, or encouraging enterprising behavior, the terms used in the UK and some parts of Europe, entrepreneurship education has, using models from cognitive psychology and social cognition theories from education gradually become established as a discipline in Higher Education. As educational anthropologists we are interested in exploring the parameters of this new discipline. We propose that the nature of this discipline lends itself to ethnography as a method for discussions about how enterprising behaviour is nurtured, supported and evolves into entrepreneurial practices through socially constructed communities. A close look at the practices of entrepreneurship educators in a Danish Higher Education institute stimulated an analysis of what these teachers do and say they are doing in the entrepreneurship classroom.
Keywords
Entrepreneurship, Teaching, Methodology, Ethnography, Evaluation
1. Introduction
Entrepreneurship is a practice that has always been of significance to economic development and is increasingly playing an important part in many aspects of 21st century life. At the grass-roots level some of the most common statements made about being an entrepreneur include being able to start a business, to be one’s own boss, to work with something that you are passionate about and to earn money at the same time. At another level discourses of entrepreneurship have seduced many nation states searching for new ways to encourage and sustain economic growth. These discourses are evident in policies across Europe and the western world where entrepreneurship is heralded as a public ‘good’. Policies are crafted around a rhetoric about providing incentives for growing entrepreneurs and encouraging entrepreneurial behaviour. These in turn have increasingly influenced our education systems. In the past two decades entrepreneurship education has taken hold in Higher Education institutions particularly in Europe (Cope, 2005). Following from Cope’s (2005) argument we agree that the discourses that surround entrepreneurship education have been very different depending upon the group articulating them. The position of Entrepreneurship education, initially situated in the business faculty, has moved into the ‘wet’ sciences, science and technology and has spread to arts and humanities to a greater or lesser degree. This raises a number of questions about the content and aims of entrepreneurship education. What is being offered in the different units across the university? What are the goals of entrepreneurship education? What should be taught? How should it be taught? How do Higher Education institutions justify courses that encourage new business ventures alongside traditional forms of courses that qualify students for employability in established sectors? Answering these questions requires much more space than is available in this paper. Our focus here is on one particular school of thought in Entrepreneurship education and on assessment of entrepreneurship education - the methods used to measure what works and what does not. In order to do this we suggest that ethnographic evaluation provides the opportunity to understand the multiple layers of the discipline.
This paper explores the use of ethnographic evaluation in Entrepreneurship education. As such it is primarily a methods paper focusing on the benefits that ethnography can bring to entrepreneurship education, especially around understanding which pedagogies are effective in teaching students to think like entrepreneurs. For our part, as educational anthropologists, ethnography is a research method that seeks to gain a detailed understanding of how informants see their world and how they understand the problems of everyday life that they confront (Zaharlick 1992). As such we believe it is an ideal method to both study the practices that entrepreneurship educators engage in and to examine the discursive and cognitive shifts that learners go through as they seek a more entrepreneurial understanding.
While most ethnographers support the idea that ethnography is one of the very few research techniques that allow a researcher to first hand share a set of problems that informants have and to have a direct sense of how those informants make sense of their worlds, there are often a number of questions that those outside of ethnography have about its validity and reliability. Michael Herzfeld (1997), for instance, has put forth the notion of cultural intimacy as one way to talk about the way that longer-term involvement in a community can produce an interesting form of validity even though the number of subjects an ethnographer works with are small. For Herzfeld, “cultural intimacy” are ideas that are central to a nation’s identity but that might be a bit embarrassing to share with outsiders and so tend to remain very private Herzfeld 1997: 3). While Herzfeld is specifically speaking about nationhood, this principle is useful with other aspects of culture. People share intimate knowledge that binds them together and ethnography is one of the few ways to get at this kind of knowledge. It is this kind of knowledge that we suggest is an important part of the production of a community of practice around entrepreneurship.
In order to illustrate how we see ethnography being a benefit to entrepreneurship education, we reflect here on some of the data we have gathered through conversations with and observations of teachers of entrepreneurship in a Danish Higher Education institute. There were two main themes of conversation. One arose from discussions about how individuals shape their everyday practices and create new meaning. The second focused on how individual enterprising behaviour is nurtured, supported and how this in turn evolves into socially constructed entrepreneurial practices. We found the Danish model of entrepreneurship to be a very interesting one, and its conception allows for the focus on pedagogical goals for entrepreneurship education. In this model the teachers focus on entrepreneurship as an everyday practice, which in turn means nurturing enterprising behavior. These interlinked foci of the definition of entrepreneurship combined with the focus on education being grounded in an individual’s life, lends itself to ethnography which is about the way in which individuals ‘make sense of the world’. Ethnography is therefore useful as a means to evaluate the effectiveness of the pedagogy and what is going on in the student teacher interaction.
2. Macro structural framing of discourses of entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship is one of those terms that has become, to use the words of the British anthropologist, Victor Turner (1967, 1969), a multi-vocal symbol. It is used by policy makers, in different nation-states, who have different agendas that they seek to advance. At the policy level, entrepreneurship is generally code for motivating economic growth through neoliberal economic policies. According to Ilana Gershon (2011), one of the interesting things about neoliberal ideology is there is no concept of scale. Social actors are all of the same weight and size whether they are individuals or companies or nation-states. In this way individuals, small companies and major corporations can all contribute to their nation’s economic growth through free market activity supported by deregulation.
Of course in different nation-states, this process is imagined differently. In many former welfare-states, they are seeking to “marketize” many of their social institutions such as education and healthcare. The United States has already deregulated so much of its activity, pushing its economic agenda in different parts of the world and seeking always to find new markets in untapped social arenas. China and some other Asian nations are practicing some interesting forms of state capitalism where the state helps discipline workers for the neoliberal agendas of domestic and international companies (Ong 2006).
When we start to look at the academic fields of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education we begin to see some different definitions of entrepreneurship. Primarily a widespread and general definition that many groups share about entrepreneurship is that it is about starting a business. The idea of entrepreneurs starting a business could be compatible with state level policy makers’ focus on the neoliberal free market, but it is also possible that this could be seen as something quite different. Small businesses could be seen as a way of escaping the larger corporate world. Much contemporary entrepreneurship espouses more communitarian values even when building a profitable business. One increasingly popular area with young entrepreneurs is social entrepreneurship where doing business and doing good are brought together in creative synthesis. We will return to that later.
While many scholars agree that starting a business can be a core definition of entrepreneurship, it is often the whole focus of academics in the US. The US focus tends to be very much about producing and marketing a product as well as maximizing profit, which make entrepreneurs more compatible with corporate capitalists. Certainly during the dot.com boom and its aftermath, people in the tech sector see entrepreneurship as starting a company, coming up with a new product, making a lot of money, and selling to a major company like Google, Microsoft or Intel. However in the UK the focus tends to be more about creating an enterprise and encouraging enterprising behavior and has therefore a broader focus. In parts of Scandinavia, for example, the focus is even broader. Here entrepreneurship is often defined as being about creating value and value is not limited to the economic. Value is defined in other arenas outside of the economic for example the social, bio-medical, cultural and environmental. In Denmark in particular, the definitions of entrepreneurship are often linked to ideas about encouraging and developing entrepreneurial mind-set. In one Danish Higher Education institution entrepreneurship education is furthermore about creating value and finding potential for creating such value in everyday practices. It is in this context that social entrepreneurship might have the increasing support for instance.
This, more socially ambitious and less profit focused definition of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education, has more in common with the values of many younger entrepreneurs and craft businesses. Many young social entrepreneurs think a lot about the ways entrepreneurship can add value to people’s lives, protect the environment, etc. Likewise many craft producers are concerned with quality of life and quality of their products. Since the rise of industrial capitalism craft production has been an important alternative that for many serves as a less alienated alternative to capitalist production and consumption (Morris 2010, Muthesius 2010). Furthermore in all craft production there has been an emphasis on quality rather than profit. Quality of product as craft producers see themselves as artisans is a key value. But craft producers also care about the quality of their own work life and value the process as much as the product. When we think of craft we might think of artisans in the early twentieth century who might be associated with the art nouveau or the art deco movements. But there is a current wave of craft production and it is global and is sometimes referred to as DIY or craft production but will share the same values as those of the early 20th century (Luvaas 2012). These values do not have to conflict with making money, but they usually do affect the horizons of profit because profit is not the only motive in the business and sometimes they are not the most important motive. We currently see producers of clothing, furniture, jewelry and other things on etsy.com. In addition, there is a big wave of coffee, wine, beer craft production, as well as restaurants and food trucks. While some of these consumer industries have long been bound to craft, like local restaurants and wine, we are seeing a proliferation of these businesses with an emphasis on quality of production and quality of consumption. While these forms of entrepreneurship are about creating businesses, profit is not their top priority. They have other forms of value they hope to contribute to the world (Blenker et al. 2012)
In the US where the general media and policy focus is very much on business creation, marketing and profit, there are still whole communities, like the Craft Beer community, that have a completely different set of values. In that community, they are wedded to the idea of creating a product that is original and of high quality. Craft brewers see themselves as artisans. The product they create is labor intensive and does not benefit much from economies of scale. Therefore profit is not their primary concern but the value they see as adding is “quality of life.” As a result there is a good deal of sharing in the craft beer community. Certainly there is still business competition but the culture is more humane and beer companies see members of other companies as colleagues and friends. Their solution to competitive or intellectual property issues is often forging collaboration (Smagalski 2013). This attitude tends to exist in a number of so called “craft industries” in the US and might even be seen as part of a growing sub-culture of people searching for more than economic value by finding other values that provide meaning and quality in their patterns of consumption. It is interesting that while the craft beer movement is part of that craft movement contributing other forms of value to the world, for the big two global beer producers they are seen as a threat and something to wipe out. While on the one hand this could be seen as just a normal capitalist business practice of competition and competing with the other no matter what form it comes in. On the other hand these craft values are a real threat to a system of mass production which values quantity, and reduced cost per unit, over quality.