Governing the entrepreneurial mindset: Business students’ constructions of entrepreneurial subjectivity

Abstract

Promoting entrepreneurship education to develop the entrepreneurial competences and mindsets of citizens has become an important mission on the supranational educational policy agenda. This endeavour constructs the ideal of a self-guided entrepreneurial subject who is active, adaptable and capable of tolerating uncertainty. Using the theorizations of governmentality, we attempt to discover in this study how entrepreneurial subjectivity is being constructed and negotiated among university-level business students. The data consist of the writing assignments of a group of students (N = 24) enrolled in entrepreneurship studies in a Finnish university. The findings illustrate how entrepreneurial discourse, as a culturally appropriate manner to express oneself as a self-disciplined and self-governed subject, is adopted by students and reproduced in the practices of entrepreneurship education. We suggest that among educators the aim to educate entrepreneurial subjects should be recognised as a political, moral and, hence, negotiable objective, rather than as a value-neutral or imperative goal.