Educating young people in “collective entrepreneurship”: challenges and tensions at the heart of cooperatives for the initiation of collective entrepreneurship in Quebec

Abstract

This article focuses on the Coopératives d’initiation à l’entrepreneuriat collectif (CIEC), youth service cooperatives in Quebec that aim at educating young people in cooperative entrepreneurship. Basing ourselves on a qualitative design involving non-participant observation and semi-structured interviews with CIEC coordinators, we explore the conceptions of cooperative entrepreneurship promoted by the coordinators and the experiential learning outcomes that they aim for. The results suggest that the multiple objectives embraced by the CIEC project (giving young people a first working ex-perience, fostering in them an entrepreneurship mindset, introducing them to cooperatives, and educating them about the social and solidarity economy) run the risk of diluting the project’s learning impacts.