The Post–World War II Risk Paradigm and Its (Dis)Connections With Entrepreneurship Education

• In Event: 28.022 - How the Sciences of Curriculum Became Reasonable: Their Emergence in Postwar Years and Its (Dis)Continuity

Abstract

In the past few decades, entrepreneurship has increasingly become a buzzword, making it possible to frame “problems” as lack of entrepreneurial skills and to propose “solutions” in terms of entrepreneurship education and training. Much scholarship in the English language concerned with the proliferation of the discourse of entrepreneurship since the 1980s tends to put an emphasis on “(neoliberal) globalization” as the origin and the cause of this proliferation. The roles of “actors” like powerful national governments (e.g., the governments of Thatcher and Reagan), international development organizations (e.g., the World Bank, IMF), or the alliances of social groups (e.g., elites, neo-conservatives, the middle class) have been highlighted to explain the origin and the rise of the enterprise culture and entrepreneurship education (e.g., DeJaeghere, 2017; Harvey, 2007; Peters, 2001).

Informed by cultural politics of knowledge, this paper is concerned more with the relations between fields of knowledge and the conditions of intelligibility of the pedagogical discourse of entrepreneurship, than with the roles of particular “actors” or “agents” of (neoliberal) globalization. It focuses on how the (re/dis)assemblies of epistemological assumptions pertaining to risk management, cybernetics, and behavioral sciences in the post-World War II years have operated on/through entrepreneurship education. Drawing on the scholarship in political geography and security studies (e.g., Amoore, 2013; Amoore & De Goede, 2008; Anderson, 2010; Aradau & van Munster, 2008), it explores how the paradigmatic modes of thinking about and acting on future have (dis/re)connected with other elements and relations, thus continuously rendering entrepreneurship education as a plausible space for the government and enactment of emergent and uncertain futures and for taming and securing the futures of each and all. The intra-actions of epistemological principles will be examined with a focus on modes of thinking about individual or collective responsibility, “spreading risks” or “embracing risks”, and probabilistic or possibilistic approaches towards future.

This paper bears upon the theoretical-methodological approach of “apparatus” to conceptualize entrepreneurship education as the coming togetherness of heterogeneous and historically-contingent principles, processes, and relations constantly (re/dis)connected and (re/dis)assembled to (re)constitute identifiable terrains of thought, feeling, and action (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Foucault, 2007; Li, 2007; Ong & Collier, 2005). I first explore research on entrepreneurship in the US in the 1950s and 1960s; that is, the period when entrepreneurship research was anchored in (although still marginal to) psychology, (historical) sociology, and social anthropology. This exploration will focus on The Achieving Society (McClelland, 1961), a highly influential work in behavioral science that examined the relations between the personality of the individuals attracted to entrepreneurial roles and differences in economic development. I then trace the (re/dis)assemblies of epistemological principles by looking at The Lean Startup approach (Ries, 2008), a contemporary methodology in entrepreneurship practice and learning which considers itself an “entrepreneurial renaissance” (p. 7).

Author

• Mariam Sedighi, University of Wisconsin - Madison