Conceptual activism: Entrepreneurship education as a philosophical project

CG Johnsen, L Olaison… - Revitalizing …, 2018 - api.taylorfrancis.com
Revitalizing Entrepreneurship Education, 2018api.taylorfrancis.com
In recent years, entrepreneurs have increasingly turned to philosophy for solutions. The
above statement about the value of philosophy emerged from what Dov Seidman, CEO of
the ethics and compliance management firm LRN, perceives as a need to rethink business
as an intertwined field in which “Credit, climate and consumption crises cannot be solved
through specialized expertise alone”(Seidman, 2010). Seidman is not alone in this
observation. Christine Nasserghodsi, director of innovation at GEMS Education, discovered …
In recent years, entrepreneurs have increasingly turned to philosophy for solutions. The above statement about the value of philosophy emerged from what Dov Seidman, CEO of the ethics and compliance management firm LRN, perceives as a need to rethink business as an intertwined field in which “Credit, climate and consumption crises cannot be solved through specialized expertise alone”(Seidman, 2010). Seidman is not alone in this observation. Christine Nasserghodsi, director of innovation at GEMS Education, discovered while developing an entrepreneurship programme that quite a few of the entrepreneurs she met had studied philosophy. After interviewing them, Nasserghodsi concluded that, although the entrepreneurs who had studied philosophy were not “likely to reference Foucault in a meeting”, they nevertheless felt that their ability to use philosophical ideas when faced with challenges allowed them to “bring a unique set of skills to new businesses”(Nasserghodsi, 2012). If entrepreneurs who have studied philosophy take advantage of their educational background, then we should think about how philosophy can be utilized in entrepreneurship education. Against this backdrop, we ask: how can philosophy become a productive force in the teaching of entrepreneurship in business schools? In this chapter, we discuss what philosophy might bring to entrepreneurship education by exploring our own practices in the classroom, which we call “conceptual activism”. We understand conceptual activism as a way of teaching that aims to utilize philosophical concepts in the classroom for the purpose of unlocking alternative viewpoints on phenomena that remain central to entrepreneurship, such as agency, organization creation, success and failure. The method presented and exemplified in this chapter, which we call conceptual activism, invites students into the contextually embedded discourses and practices associated with entrepreneurship. In the first part of the chapter, we present the philosophical foundations of our approach and discuss how our method allows us to engage with entrepreneurship in business education. In our
api.taylorfrancis.com
以上显示的是最相近的搜索结果。 查看全部搜索结果