Browsing by Author "Kibler, Ewald, Prof., Aalto University, Department of Management Studies, Finland"
Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
- Results Per Page
- Sort Options
- Developing and Evaluating Entrepreneurship Education - Three case studies on Entrepreneurial Development Coaching in Teacher Training, the Impact of Entrepreneurship Education Projects, and Experiential Entrepreneurship Education in Basic and Higher Education
School of Business | Doctoral dissertation (article-based)(2023) Gustafsson-Pesonen, AnneThe aim of this dissertation is to provide perspectives on developing and evaluating entrepreneurship education based on the results of three case studies. The first case study deals with Entrepreneurial Development Coaching (EDC) and asks how EDC affects teachers' thinking and action regarding entrepreneurship. The second study reviews Entrepreneurship Education projects and their impact. The third study generates perspectives on the developmental evaluation of experiential learning concepts in primary school together with higher education, focusing on how to develop sixth-grade students' entrepreneurial mindset and the effects thereof on entrepreneurial attitudes and long-term entrepreneurial behaviour which increase self-employability in the context of entrepreneurship. The main research question underlying my dissertation is: "How to use evaluation to develop Entrepreneurship Education through the education path and strengthen its impact on attitudes, working life and entrepreneurship?" I have identified a research gap, around the development of the evaluation of entrepreneurship education. Society is changing, how we develop teachers' capabilities to support entrepreneurship in schools with the means of entrepreneurship education, what should be done at different school levels in order to improve students' entrepreneurship skills. I approach the research problem in this dissertation from the theoretical perspective of entrepreneurship evaluation, in terms of entrepreneurial pedagogy and how it implements entrepreneurial pathways, supports career planning, and develops specific mindsets, skills, attitudes, and types of behaviour. Furthermore, I explore pedagogical nudging points when discussing entrepreneurship education. I contribute to the relevance of how to evaluate and develop entrepreneurship education in relation both to entrepreneurial pedagogy and its methods, as well as to recommendations from the European Union. In addition, I explore recent debates on experiential entrepreneurship education and pedagogical nudging to widen understandings of the role played by experiential entrepreneurship education in the education system, as well as discussions on entrepreneurial mindsets, skills, attitudes, and types of behaviour. I have compiled this dissertation from three independent case studies, scholarly articles, all of which revolve around the developing and evaluating of entrepreneurship education. - Empowerment and Emancipation in Entrepreneurship: - Towards a 'Change - Creator' Perspective
School of Business | Doctoral dissertation (article-based)(2023) Haataja, VeraEntrepreneurship has been argued to play a significant role in driving change and profoundly impacts society. It is widely recognised as a catalyst for human development as well as fostering empowerment and emancipation, particularly among marginalised and oppressed individuals. The research stream examining entrepreneurship's transformative potential expresses ambitious goals that go beyond wealth creation, thereby generating important contributions to entrepreneurship research and broadening our understanding of entrepreneurship's change potential. However, more nuanced understandings of empowerment and emancipation in the entrepreneurial context are needed. This dissertation applies a sociologically-informed lens to create a theoretical foundation for entrepreneurial change creation, as well as for emancipatory entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial empowerment. In this way the research at hand develops a better understanding of entrepreneurship's potential to create change, in particular how entrepreneurial activity can be empowering and emancipatory. Building on the reciprocal relationship between agency and structure, this dissertation presents how entrepreneurs as transformative agents enact the structure that functions as a source of both resources as well as constraints. To create change entrepreneurs need to challenge oppressive constraints; and this calls for a critical understanding of relevant structures in society that enable entrepreneurs to engage in emancipatory and empowering action. The three essays in this dissertation each provide a different angle on entrepreneurship as change creation. The first essay lays the foundation for further research by providing a conceptual account of empowerment and emancipation in the entrepreneurship context this work explores their distinctions and shows through an illustrative example how they apply in an entrepreneurial context. The second essay empirically investigates the empowerment of late-career women entrepreneurs who face disempowering discourses of age, gender, and entrepreneurialism. Here, interviewees' narratives reveal empowered women who acknowledge society's expectations. The third essay reminds us that entrepreneurship must neither always be emancipatory nor always culminate in positive change within society but, instead, can generate further constraints, for example in form of ecological or social harm. Therefore, it is paramount that entrepreneurs engage in responsible action, and this essay develops a theoretical understanding of entrepreneurial responsibility by conceptualising it as an ethical dualism. Change requires more than the pursuit of mundane activities. To be change creators entrepreneurs must command a revolutionary spirit, disrupting the status quo not merely for the sake of creating novel models for revenue generation, but for achieving meaningful change that improves people's lives and contributes to more equal and just societies. This, then, is the fulcrum of entrepreneurial empowerment and emancipatory entrepreneurship. - The situated meaning of entrepreneurial engagement
School of Business | Doctoral dissertation (article-based)(2023) Ginting-Szczesny, Bernadetta AloinaThis dissertation seeks to develop a contextualised understanding of entrepreneurship by exploring the situated meaning of entrepreneurial engagement. Defined as the subjective meaning attached to entrepreneurial engagement that is actively constructed based on on-going lived experiences of, and within, contexts, examining the situated meaning of entrepreneurial engagement leaves aside 'universal' theories when exploring a novel or poorly understood phenomenon and instead develops understanding from the bottom-up. I put forward three theoretical approaches that support the goal of situating meanings of entrepreneurial engagement in different contexts: entrepreneurial imagination, identity, and emotion. In addition, creative approaches designed to uncover situated meaning and its construction in context are also presented. Paper 1 explores how individuals in a centrally planned economy respond to strict government regulations on private entrepreneurial activities through imagining. The study examines the prospective entrepreneurial engagement of university students in North Korea and generates a novel framework that identifies and elaborates various types of narratives for envisioning entrepreneurial engagement. In this way we demonstrate how entrepreneurial engagement can still be considered possible and desirable despite the constraints that presumably pertain within a centrally planned economy. Paper 2 examines how impoverished women entrepreneurs negotiate, reproduce, and/or challenge local sociocultural norms surrounding gender and entrepreneurship through identity construction. The study examines the self-narratives and identity construction of self-employed women in poor patriarchal communities in Indonesia, showing how gendered expectations can be both enabling and constraining in local contexts. We thereby challenge the assumption that entrepreneurship presents impoverished women with the most promising employment opportunity. Paper 3 introduces a novel research method for uncovering the emotional experiences of entrepreneurs through visualising. The paper introduces colour and the colour timeline approach as tools with which to reveal the hidden or silenced voices of entrepreneurs. This paper advances the literature's methodological toolbox by creatively advancing contextualised entrepreneurship research. Altogether, by examining the situated meaning of entrepreneurial engagement through entrepreneurial imagination, identity, and emotion, this dissertation offers theoretical and methodological pathways for developing context-sensitive understandings of entrepreneurship. In doing so, this dissertation contributes to the development of entrepreneurship as a rich, diverse, and inclusive field of study.